and on that note...

I leave in a couple of hours on my Shanghai adventure. I have almost no plans for the next two weeks which is perfect in my book - I like to travel with a blank slate in front of me. I will arrive in Shanghai tomorrow afternoon and am staying with a friend of a friend somewhere in the city and then who knows. I'll spend a while finding where is likely to have the best weather conditions for the eclipse on the 22nd and try and make my way there by train, bus or boat, depending on where it turns out to be.

I have a lightly packed bag, weighed down mostly with camera bits and pieces, and books. To this I need get hold of a guide to Shanghai as I've never spent more than a couple of days there and would like to spend some time getting lost in the city.

Current thoughts are of possibly heading in the directions of Huang Shan, Nanjing, Qingdao or back to Chengdu, depending on timing and trains, but I think I'm going to leave that until the moment I'm at the station and really have to decide.

Anyway, from what I understand, most useful internet means of communication are blocked these days, but I'll do my best to get online when I have a chance and update you with my latest traveladventures....

The Beijing of Possibilities - A review

I met Jonathan Tel back in Beijing around three years ago when he came to research his latest book. He contacted me as an expat to discuss some of my views on life in the city and we met for a meal in a Hunan restaurant on the North side of Haouhai lake.We spent a few enjoyable hours talking string theory, writing, travel and food (in a past incarnation Jonathan had been heading the way of the theoretical physicist).

Shortly after this I read Freud's Alphabet, Jonathan's second novel, which I now realise never received the full review it deserved. It's a dream-like look at the last days of Freud's life and the playful language alters as Freud's state becomes ever more influenced by the cocktail of cancer and morphine. The book, split into 26 alphabetically ordered vistas is well worth a read, both for the word play and for the slightly Joycian stream of unconsciousness which takes you through the book via a series of chaotic passages in one inevitable direction.

But that's not what this review is about. I was lucky enough to get a copy of The Beijing of Possibilities a few weeks ago and the fact that it has taken me such a long time to write this is a sorry reflection of life over the last few months.

-----

Beijing is a land of unfinished stories. Every time you leave the flat you will see some loose thread of a scene which has a mystery behind it: the man wandering around in his pyjamas, the sullen girl at the bus-stop with empty eyes, the tattooed businessmen arguing at the table next to you, the Beijing goths in the I love kitty car. Everything has a back-story, but you are always left wandering.

When I met Jonathan back in Houhai he was researching the iceberg beneath the water that filled in the rest of these tales.The Beijing of possibilities is a book of short stories about the depth of Beijing life, mixed helplessly between ancient and modern, these are the windows into the split second pieces of action you see every day on the streets of any big city, but in Beijing more than any you know that the truth is much more interesting than what your imagination can muster.

The stories combine these events with ancient Chinese folktales to give a real sense of the Beijing which people who don't know the city well have real trouble understanding - the metropolis simply has too many layers of history, culture, pain and change to get a real idea of the diversity and complexity of life there, from the migrant workers to the modern couple living their dreams in a small Haidian apartment, from the factory worker to the opera librettist, Jonathan has captured the strange mix of brilliant colour with smudges of black and white without which it is impossible to think of Beijing.

In addition to the stories themselves, there is a more subtle play. Milan Kundera likes to put himself firmly in the middle of his stories, and sometimes you don't know on what level the narrator is with you as novel and commentary intertwine. Jonathan Tel pulls the opposite trick and sits in the shadows of his book making the pen seem to move without an author, and I have to say that I enjoyed this a lot. It influences the book only subtly but adds to it Jonathan's own style and character.

This book of short stories can be found at Amazon UK and Amazon US and I'd highly recommend it for anyone wants to see behind the door into the Beijing of possibilites.

See also the review at Timeout Beijing, where this was book of the month not long ago.

Rapa Das Bestas - hairdressers sans frontieres*

In a country where bullfighting is still commonplace, I really didn't know what to expect when I received a text from a friend saying: "Tomorrow is 'rapa das bestas' in Sabucedo - very spectacular fights between humans and horses"!

Indeed it turned out that the Rapa das Bestas was probably the last thing I would have thought of and it turned out to be a fascinating day.

In Sabucedo, the horses, though owned by the villagers, are free to live in the woods on the hill during the year. However, with my limited equine knowledge, I wasn't aware of the hairdressing needs of such beasts. Every year the villagers round up the horses, drive them into a corral, and cut their hair.

Surprisingly, semi-wild horses don't stand still when you come at them with a pair of shears, and so the event is an incredible competition of horse versus hairdresser. Luckily, it turns out that the hairdressers in Sabucedo are about the manliest bunch of men and women I've ever seen, and getting into a ring with 200 horses, kicking and brawling, and running after them until you have them under control enough to wield a pair of horsehair clippers is all in a day's work.

The event actually goes on for four days and draws such a crowd that there is a whole festival built around it, with camping over the weekend, music, and pulperias selling fantastic octopus all over the place.

We only went for the haircutting though, missing out the massive hangover that I presume 90% of the people there seemed to be suffering from (the other 10 percent still being heavily under the influence). We got into the seating around the corral a little before midday, and soon enough the 200 animals where herded into the arena. 200 animals in a space that size was presumably quite a culture shock for animals which are used to roaming freely and so there was a lot of angry neighing, biting of neighbours, kicking and the occasional reared brawl. This was about the most inhumane part of the ordeal, but it seemed that apart from the odd nibble, none of them was really hurt, save for the feelings of a few alpha males.

First was the children's turn and the kids, I guess as young as 10 or so, ran around, getting hold of the fowls, as the adults tried to keep the larger horses at bay. The fowls, though small, are extremely tough and gave the kids a run for their money, but it seems that with one on the ears, and one on the tail, they could usually keep them under control enough to steer them out of the corral and to their own, personal salon.

Once the foals had all been safely taken out, the main event began. Three main groups of men and women would walk around the arena, sizing the horses up, and on choosing one to go for, one member of the team would take a run up and jump on the horse, holding onto the mane. Unsurprisingly the horses would not have any of this and would attempt to race through the crowd, with the rider on its back.

By this time there was usually another man holding on at the back to the tail, trying to keep the horse from throwing the rider off. After some powerful coercion, and attempting to get the horse into a free space, the rider would leap off again, holding onto the head off the horse, with one arm over one eye, and gripping at the bottom of the jaw, while another man would be the other side, with his arm over the other eye, grabbing the other side of the jaw.

This generally seemed to calm the horses down enough that with three people holding on, they would stand still and the hair cutting would commence, with a couple of men with big pairs of scissors snipping away at the tail hair, the mane and the fringe, getting the style more in line with this years equine fashion.

Quite frequently the horses really didn't want any of this game and the teams would have to wrestle the horses to the ground in order to calm them down, three or four men lying on the horse to keep it from jumping up and trampling those around.

Amazingly, with 200 horses, nobody was seriously hurt and only one man got the tail end of a kick, limping off briefly but coming back a few minutes later. Although the horses would occasionally kick each other it seemed that the shouting from the men and women really was enough to get them out of the way when they needed it, and stop them from kicking the people in the ring. It was truly a remarkable sight.

After a couple of hours and perhaps half the horses shawn, the groups called it a day and the horses were led back out of the corral.

It was truly a spectacular event, and if you want man versus animal without the bloodshed of a bullfight, I would highly recommend checking this out.

(* The title of this post is in reference to a Mitchel and Webb sketch, and not of my own making)

Empty sets

The lack of updates recently is due to being sucked slowly into an application black hole. I have a lot to get done in the next couple of weeks before going to China, including a whole lot of admin which has kept me up until 2 tonight (at least I found myself a nice new cafe in which to scribble) and a couple of projects which really deserve to be finished before people disappear for the summer. They're looking promising but still have a little way to go to completion.

I may come back here every now and then to vent stress, but don't expect too much from me over the next couple of weeks that fits into the categories of coherent or meaningful. I'll attempt to write when I'm back in England for a day, just before heading East on the 14th of July.

Until later, over and out.

La noche de San Juan

It's been a hugely busy week and I'm pretty exhausted. Somehow my weekend routine helps at these times as it gets my body clock back in order. I'm in the cafe having just gone through my Spanish and Chinese practice and I'm about to dive back into the book I've been studying for the last couple of weeks on mirror symmetry, which I'd like to speak about at some point soon. It's an excellent book, both for your mind and your body, weighing, as it does, about the same as small child.

I've also had a former collaborator out here for the week which has been enjoyable. He gave a talk on his current work on ABJM and we've chatted through a few ideas for future collaborations, though we admit that we're both too busy with current projects to start anything new - I count this as a good state to be in.

On top of this I've had a couple of great couchsurfers - a brother and sister from Israel who were extremely friendly and talkative but understanding when I had to sit down and get on with work.

One night this week though I headed out to see one of Spain's most famous festivals, La Noche de San Juan. In Galicia on this night, celebrating the summer solstice, fires are lit around the city, Sardines are barbecued, and people come out to party. The big event of the night however is when the partygoers jump over the fires, three times (or more depending on who you speak to) to ward off the evil spirits for the next year. The lighting of fires really does seem to bring people back to a very primeval state and something is triggered in the brains of those around which can be seen in the eyes of the jumpers.

Not being superstitious, but certainly not wanting to miss out on the fun I got my three jumps in, and the buzz of jumping over a large fire in front of a big crowd was certainly worth the risk of a roasting. There seemed to be few casualties other than a couple of twisted ankles from landing on bits of wood, and the evening was generally a lot of fun.

Anyway, here are a few photos...

I hear there may be some photos of me mid-leap so I'll see if I can get hold of them

...now back to the book!

Summer solstice astrophotography

What should really have been one of the worst nights for star-gazing happened this year to be both a moonless and cloudless night here in Galicia. So, I got a few people interested and we all headed up Pico Sacro a little after midnight to go see the stars. Pico Sacro is a hill around 20 minutes outside of Santiago, and deep enough into the countryside to have little light pollution. Indeed half way up the hill you are surrounded by trees and there are a few fine spots to stop at the side of the road and marvel at the night sky.

Indeed it was just as I'd hoped and the swathe of the milky way was very clear. Unfortunately my knowledge of the positions of nebulae is pretty poor and so I wasn't quite sure where the biggies were sitting in the plane of the galaxy. Andromeda was not visible from where we were but looking at my photos after I see that the Lagoon nebula was sticking out very clearly and the Triffid nebula and Eagle nebula would have been easy to spot had I known quite where. Still, this is a learning experience and next time I'll have a much better idea. It's amazing the detail you can pick up with a truly bog standard digital SLR.

Unfortunately it was a pretty windy night (and I haven't yet got hold of the tripod I'm going to be using in China) and so I had to turn the exposure time down to around 20-30 seconds and the ISO up to 1600 to get these shots, which means that they were rather noisy. I've reduced the noise which of course has reduced the clarity a little, but it's still pretty clear what's going on. On the first picture I've annotated a few objects (the nebulae are all just to the left of the names, the Lagoon nebula being the clearest). As usual, click for larger:

If the weather continues like this, I may go again next weekend and by then I should have a Manfrotto to my name which will help with the stability issues.

The nebula I looked up afterwards using Stellarium.

Solar photography, for starters

As I have mentioned before and will probably mention many times before the event, I'll be heading to Shanghai in a few weeks to go and see the solar eclipse with the longest duration of totality this century. I'll be in and around Shanghai for a couple of weeks, and have my eyes set on a few locations for the event itself, though that depends in large part on the weather.

Of course I hope not only to see the event, but also to get some good photos of it, and that requires some preparation on my part. A couple of weeks back I ordered a high grade A4 solar filter sheet and have just had a chance to cut out a part of it to make a trial filter box for my camera. I've made a simple setup with cardboard for now and plan on making something more solid for when I make the trip East. The current setup goes over the end of my 70-300mm lens which I've used on numerous occasions now for solar system photography, with moderate success.

Sadly although we are finally coming out of the period of minimum solar activity, with the first sunspots for many months (ok, there are some subtleties to that statement), right now the surface looks pretty featureless and so there's not much to search for with the new piece of kit. Still as a first try it's looking pretty good and I'll be keeping an eye on the sunspot activity over the next few weeks.

Click to view much larger versions, where some uneven features can be seen at the edges of the solar disk:

gastronomic treats

Things have been slow here on the blog front for the last few weeks. It seems that my life is currently filled with either work or cooking and eating, which to me seems like no bad combination. I've had a series of fantastic couchsurfers over the last few weeks, from all around the world, and together we've been cooking up some amazing treats.

A trained cook from Taiwan spent a few days here and created one of the best Chinese meals I've had since leaving Beijing. A troupe of Japapenese friends came round for a night and used my takoyaki pan to great effect, adding to that a few sumptuous plates of okonmiyaki, and over the last couple of weeks I've had a South African friend stay, who not only provides me with cryptic crossword clues which keep me puzzled for hours, but happens also to be an excellent chef. Today as I returned home from lunch I was greeted with the smells of fresh fish and nori as plate after plate of sushi arrived on the lunch table. He had also dived into my kimchi jar (in need of refilling next weekend I feel) and had gone to town on an array of exotic nigiri and makizushi. Over the weekend I had also made my first batch of pickled ginger (thinly sliced ginger boiled for a few minutes in half vinager half water with a touch of salt and sugar) which was the right accompaniment to the tuna and salmon purchased earlier in the morning by my gaggle of current residents.

Anyway, this was the result today, kimchi with tuna nigiri, an unusual combination but a good one:

tuna and salmon makizushi with avocado and pickled ginger

and this was the paella I made yesterday, before the monk fish and fresh langoustine were added. I'd forgotten how good the smell of peppers are when you are charring them!

Lunar halo over Santiago de Compostela

I went for a walk on Wednesday night and sat in the park for a few hours after a heavy but very enjoyable meal. Though the moon wasn't yet full, as it rose I was witness to a phenomenon I've wanted to see for a long time. Though I've seen perhaps a dozen solar halos this year, this is the first lunar halo I've ever seen. Sadly taking it at 3 in the morning from my lounge didn't give a great shot, but it's pretty conclusively there...

Google Squared

A really quick post but I wanted to point towards Google Squared, which seems to have some idealogical overlap with Wolfram Alpha though for the average internet user is probably infinitely more useful.

Have a look at the google research blog for information about why you should care.

In the same week that Google announces Google Wave, this is impressive stuff!

Chinese Taboo

I rarely talk politics on this blog, I rarely talk negatively about China, and certainly while I was there there were several subjects which I would never bring up online.

The lack of politics on the blog is simply because that's not what I set out to write about when I started out on my travel adventures. The infrequency of negative posts on China was because I was usually having such an amazing experience that there weren't many negative things to write about and in general whenever something bad happened it was usually so ludicrously over the top that I could easily put a positive or at least amusing spin on it.

I would of course from time to time break these habits and write about politics and my less enjoyable adventures. However, the idea of writing about the various subjects which are taboo in China was simply something which would never have crossed my mind. The possible repercussions were not worth considering, even though the likelihood of the authorities caring about a small expat blog were marginal to nill.

I was told before leaving for China that there were a few things you should never talk about with Chinese people. The top four were Taiwan, Tibet, Falungong and Tiananmen. Well, it turns out that the Chinese love to talk about Taiwan and Tibet, although the response is always so unequivocal that starting a genuine debate is hard. Besides, the number of 'facts' that they may have to hand on the subject so far outweighs my knowledge of what I believe to be a subtle truth, that I never got terribly far in such debates.

In my two years in China I only had two conversations about Tiananmen and these were with people that I trusted. I didn't talk about it to stir up dissent, but simply to try and find out from people I respected what their thoughts on the subject were. Even though it would almost certainly do no harm, I'm not going to write about how these conversations went. Even outside of China I feel somewhat censored because as long as I have links with the country there are things that I'd rather not discuss online.

Spending two years in China I, and many blogging expats I know, became wary of straying onto uncertain political ground. I experienced this first hand when a book and film club I started up were shut down within three weeks. What appeared to be conspiracy theories at the time seem all too clearly to be hard truths many months later.

I would talk occasionally about the dreaded 'Net Nanny' who would regularly shut down various parts of the web for those in China, typically the BBC, wikipedia, blogspot, wordpress and CNN (Twitter has been blocked as of recently and the timing is no coincidence).

Anyway, the last link ties in with the motivation for writing this post. While many of us blogging in China would stay away from the taboo, a few others were always courageous enough to face the front line and discuss difficult issues, none more so than Richard at the Peking Duck and today, as the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen square massacre comes up, he writes a short article linking to a very powerful piece on the subject of what happened in those dark days in 1989. The Peking Duck is generally a place where you will find a huge spectrum of opinion, dogma, hostility, understanding and finger wagging with a good dose of common sense thrown in liberally (from the good combination of Richard's insightful writing and his many commenters), but it almost always provides something thought provoking. The article he links to in the Guardian is exactly that, and helps to add a few more ideas to the strange melting pot of half truths that we have to piece together to understand one of China's most important and terrifying moments.

soaking up the sun

I've just arrived home from the library, a little after midnight, walking back in shorts, tea-shirt and flip-flops, feeling wonderfully comfortable. We've been having a fantastic few days of weather here, occasionally tipping the scales a little over 30 degree.

This weekend was the first (almost entirely) non work weekend in quite a while, as an old friend came to visit. Having not seen each other for several years there was plenty of catching up to do over some excellent Galician food and a few local brews.

Saturday we attempted to go to the beach in A Coruna, just fifty minutes by train north of here, but the final couple of kilometers saw us drawn into the sea fog and the temperature dropped by 15 degrees, leaving us shivering in the rather strange twilight zone. With no beach to be seen we found our way to a Japanese restaurant and indulged for lunch, before going to the Museo de Bellas Artes, housing a fine collection of Spanish paintings chronicalling some of the best work of the last 500 years. A nice, well set-out museum and definitely worth checking out if you're in the area.

After a typical Spanish night (something that I can rarely manage), terminating as the sun rose on Sunday morning with venus glinting in the dark blue sky, Sunday was spent lazing around in a park, attempting to defrost after the previous days meteorological surprise. I managed a little reading of the papers I'm currently trying to read through but it was slow and ultimately rather unproductive.

I have around 1000 pages of papers left on my desk at home, of the 3000 or so I had a few months ago. The routine of going to the library at night seems to be working nicely and the simple act of getting away from the computer makes a big difference to my non-programming productiveness. The students in the library on the other hand seem to have different ideas and those sitting around me with laptops are constantly plugged into facebook, their attention spans limited to around 2 minutes before another input of stimuli are needed to get the neurons going again.

Anyway, travel adventures are on hold for now as my passport is in England, awaiting the Chinese visa I'll need to go and see the eclipse in July. For the mean time life revolves around Santiago and while the sunshine lasts, I'm happy to continue this way for a few more weeks.

Santiago Feria and Pulpo Gallego

Another busy week comes to an end. After two set-backs when the battery in my laptop ran out of juice twice, I've managed a full 24 hour run through of the latest code and this allows me to get onto the next stage of a current project.

This week the fair has come to Santiago and the big-wheel in the central park, the Alameda, can be seen from everywhere in the city. After a goodbye dinner with some Korean friends we headed there on Thursday evening and took a stroll around the park with the hoardes of fair-goers, the smell of freshly fried churros and candy-floss mixing with the petrol smells from the engines driving the rides and the sounds of screaming kids. From the top of the big wheel you get a stunning view of the Cathedral, although the wheel spins at a startling speed, giving little time to enjoy the view.

The dynamism at the fair also gave a good chance to try out some rather tricky shots of people in the rather unevenly lit situation. This one of a good friend, and fellow photography enthusiast came as an unusual but rather pleasing shot:

After this the group went off to see a concert (one of many this week) given by one of Spain's top female pop singers. I might have gone had it not been for the fact that I simply can't stand Spanish popular music. Other Spanish music I can enjoy a great deal, but the pop which is played constantly on the radios in the cafes I frequent drives me crazy - the melodramatic female voices and lyrics grating on me like fingernails down a blackboard. So, I ducked out early and headed home.

Friday saw another first when my US couchsurfer suggested we try and get hold of an octopus to cook, Galician style. An hour of boiling the beast later and we had a reasonable rendition of the most popular dish in this region of Spain, together with pimientos de Padrón and a revuelto of asparagus and mushrooms. Together with guests from Columbia, South Africa, Russia, and another American, we ended up with a pretty successful meal though I now realise how subtle the timing of octopus is.

Today I've spent back in the cafe working on code, but have a fantastic meal promised tonight by a Taiwanese couchsurfer who is here with his Japanese friend. Having taken a two year cooking course, this should be quite a meal, and together with the Latvian and Swede due to arrive here some time tonight, it looks like being another thoroughly international evening.

Anyway, this leaves me with some more time to continue these code wars, so I should get on....

Atmospheric optics and astrophotography links of the day

I'm under mountains of coding these days and the highs and lows that this brings my life seem to change from day to day. Luckily today was an overall positive one, meaning that the number of bugs removed appears to be greater than the number of bugs 'implemented'. The current problem is getting a little tiresome though and it's getting to the point that I've spent much more of the last few weeks doing programing than feeling like I was doing physics. Still, it comes with the territory and I enjoy it overall.

While I'm mulling over why my the 1s and 0s are not sitting comfortably in my current code I thought I'd put up a couple of quick links here from eye-catching sources of the last couple of days.

First and foremost is Toomanytribbles who caught a great solar halo display over Athens. This can be seen on the atmospheric optics photo of the day site today. Toomanytribbles sent the pictures to me to identify first, and I'm pleased that my answers agreed with those of Les, the real expert, over at Atoptics. You can find the full explanation over on the OPOD link above.

The pictures here show the circumscribed arc with a parhelic circle, the fainter white circle at the top of the second picture.

While I'm about it I should advertise a couple of her other photos. Toomanytribbles has been posting a photo a day in a project, simply named 365 - a photo a day for a year. These can be seen in her photostream and on her blog. I've seen her photos change incredibly over the last couple of years and the work she is producing now is simply outstanding. A lot of her work involves very short degree of freedom and creative bokeh and she has been taking advantage of these techniques over the last few days in photos with her new toy. Sometimes the simplest objects make for the most stunning photos. Click on the photos to see more.

In addition to these great photos I thought I'd post up a video which I first saw at the Bad Astronomer's blog. A simply spellbinding still-photo animation of the emergence of the milky way onto the desert sky. This is not to be missed.

Galactic Center of Milky Way Rises over Texas Star Party from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Weekend exodus

It's been an enjoyable but busy week. I've spent many hours every day deep in messy coding with Mathematica working on a few different projects in parallel - this is parallel processing of the inefficient variety. Still, they seem to be getting there and I'll be running code on multiple machines over the weekend.

As I was walking home today I was struck, as I always am on a Friday, by the strange weekend exodus from Santiago. The city has a population of around 100,000, around 20 percent of whom are students. I would guess that at least 95% of the students here are from nearby towns and villages and still have strong connections to their homes. On a Thursday night and Friday throughout the day, lines of students can be seen, making their way to the train and bus stations to go home to their parent's houses in the country. I can't help but feel strange when I see this; the idea of university and independence are simply so far removed here from such ideas in England. At university in England the independence that university affords is one of the great benefits, and weekends that can be spent with newfound friends are a large part of this side of life. The idea of going home every weekend to spend time with your family so that your parents can cook and clean for you (frequently, so I hear, supplying several days' food for the students when they come back on Sunday night), is a strange one and I can't help but feel that such a continuous dependency on parents causes students to be less 'worldly' in a rather abstract sense, than their counterparts in other countries where home ties are loosened at a younger age. Note that this is not to equate the number of drunken weekends with maturity, but simply that such strong ties to home (as opposed to family) were rather alien to me at that age.

I write this simply because whenever I see the students heading home with their small suitcases, I can't help but feel a certain sadness. Students should be out, getting away from home, seeing the world and experiencing the highs and lows of life alone, making and breaking friendships and making the mistakes which we all make which turn us from children into adults.

Living in different cultures is not only about observing the differences in lifestyles and values, but trying to understand them so I'd be interested to know the opinion of anyone who takes part in this weekend exodus.

Herschel and Planck on the up and up

I'm absolutely snowed under with coding at the moment, but I'll be keeping an eye on the launch of Planck and Herschel this afternoon. Take a look at the brief overview from Asymptotia and Backreaction as to why this is one of the most important launches of all time.

It seems the launch can be watched from here.

The Green flashes in Spain are taken mainly from a plane

Today I spent a couple of hours walking around Barcelona before taking the flight back to Santiago this afternoon. I didn't have a chance to take any photos whilst there but I took a couple on the flight from Santiago as the sun was setting. With a thin layer of clouds and an otherwise clear sky there was a fantastic series of green flashes as the sun disappeared. Turning around awkwardly in my seat, I tried to rest against the side of the plane to get a good picture. Somehow there has been a funny trick of the light, I presume an artifact of reflections in the double pane, but a couple of the photos came out nicely with a green flash. I think this is probably the best of them and is the best, if strangest, green flash photo I've yet taken:

Barcelona on the fly

 All is well here in Barcelona where I've spent the last couple of days at a meeting between the Spanish heavy ion and AdS/CFT communities. It's been an intense two days where the talks have been excellent and I've had a good chance to speak to people from all around Spain about various pieces of work. In particular it has been good to catch up with some current collaborators from Madrid with whom a project is currently ongoing.

I'll have a couple of hours of sightseeing tomorrow before taking the plane back to Santiago where I'll have a pile of projects to be getting on with. This weekend looks like a full working weekend so you may not hear much from me for a few days...we'll see...

Past improved - on getting there in Spanish

In September 2007 whilst still in Beijing I penned the fateful words:

I've just started learning Spanish while keeping up with the Chinese and I so look forward to the day that I can sit in a restaurant in Santiago de Compostela and talk with those around me naturally. I'm smiling now thinking of the first time I will be able to open up a Marquez and read the words in their untouched form.

In reality my attempts to learn Spanish while in China quickly sank without trace and I only started when I arrived here.

So, yesterday, I found myself in the main bookstore in the centre of Santiago, looking for some Hemmingway or Steinbeck that I had already read, translated into Spanish. I couldn't quite decide what to go for when "Cien años de soledad" caught my eye. I laughed to myself, wondering how much longer it would be until I was allowed to open the pages of such a book, but with nobody watching I took it off the shelf and started reading the first sentence...and the second, and the third. There was something rather confusing. I had expected code, something for which I would need a key which would only be bestowed on me when I 'knew' Spanish. In fact it was written in a language which I could follow, if not fluently, then certainly with a respectable comprehension. I decided to go for it and ditched the idea of buying my favourite American authors in their bastardised form. I went straight to a cafe, placed myself in the sun and dived in.

An hour, and some thirty pages later I put it down, tired, but happy. There are many words that I don't understand, but I have plenty to build an almost complete picture of what is happening. I'm also not reading it with a dictionary because I believe what you save in comprehension you lose in fluency and I'm understanding enough that picking up the dictionary several times every page will make the whole process more painful than it should be. I'm quickly learning that there are a few unknown words which recurr frequently and these can be looked up after the fact.

Today I plugged away for another hour and I'm enjoying it a great deal. It's going to take me a few weeks at this rate given that I only have time to read at the weekends (I usually read before sleeping but Marquez in Spanish requires my complete attention) but this has already given me a good confidence boost (which as a trend I find is usually followed by a big kick in the linguistic privates).

In addition to the Marquez, I've spent this evening with a couple of Spaniards who are friends of my current Portuguese couchsurfer. During our dinner we discussed string theory, the anthropic principle, our respective views on God and religion (I discover post facto that they are Jehovah's witnesses, though they absolutely didn't fit my stereotype), evolution and intelligent design, not to mention a brief foray into the unusual world of composting toilets, almost entirely in Spanish. This isn't to say that it was a perfectly fluent conversation but I'd like to think that they didn't leave more confused about the world due to my linguistic inabilities, but rather that they discovered a side of things which perhaps they hadn't considered before.

Anyway, so, this is where I am after learning Spanish for a year and a half. In the last year I've probably averaged about a lesson every three weeks as I'm usually too busy to organise or go to a class, but the amount of time I'm spending speaking Spanish has gone up considerably. I have a long, long way to go to get comfortable, and in particular I find that speaking in Spanish around my colleagues, with whom I've been speaking solely English for the time I've been here, is proving harder than I'd like.

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Tomorrow I'm off to Barcelona for a meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday and will be back online in Santiago some time on Thursday. Until then...

From Wolfram himself on Wolfram Alpha

A ten minute excerpt from the web demo a couple of days ago. Stephen Wolfram shows some examples of the soon to be released Wolfram Alpha.

As a random addition: I'm now taking an RSS feed of Lifehacker which has passed through Yahoo Pipes and removes a lot of the posts that I'm uninterested in. Can easily be altered to suit your own tastes. My personal feed is a little different from the one posted here. This just takes some trivial tinkering.