Sunday, April 30, 2006

A few links for today.

Bhutan has always held a certain fascination for me. I've been reading bits and pieces on it over the years and have mixed sentiments on whether the pros of seeing it would outweigh the cons of being an external pollutant. This link from the BBC today has some interesting little tidbits of info and a few nice photos.

Another wonderful post from Sara at firesinthehole keeps this blog up there as one of my favourites in terms of pure, rich prose. She's a poet amongst other things but I hope that one day she may write a novel. I would plagiarise horribly and horribly plagiarise her style if it wouldn't come over as awkward if I wrote it.

As you will have seen from some of the photos of the China tour, my mother was painting along the way. She's now put some of her paintings online, I may be biased but I really love these ones and I think that they give a better impression of the atmosphere than many of the photos ever can.

The plotline to this new S.L.Jackson film is cleverly hidden in the cryptic title. I hope to see this on the return journey from Munich to Beijing in August. I presume they spent too much money on scream sound effects to afford a less confusing title.

Lastly some physics, and why not? Professor Tim Hollowood from Swansea University has some notes online entitled 'cut-offs and the continuum limit: A Wilsonian approach to field theory'. I read this as a PhD student and found it one of the most elucidating approaches to renormalisation I've ever come across. Worth a read for anyone who's having trouble getting rid of those pesky infinities. This approach is not about performing loop integrals but about what the Wilsonian approach and renormalisation group really mean.



28 degrees so I'm not going to stand being stuck indoors much longer.

4 comments:

Sara said...

Hi Jonathan. Thank you very much for the compliment. I'm truly flattered. And I just came over to check on things in Beijing. Hope you're having a good day of it.

Unknown said...

Hi Sara,

All's good here with a lazy holiday week to enjoy the brief days when it's not bitterly cold or roastingly hot.

Always a pleasure to stop by and read your musings. Hope NYC continues to treat you well.

All the best,

J

Benjamin said...

Nice watercolours. Very Chinese in style, I'd say.

Unknown said...

Hi Ben,

Yes, a Chinese friend of mine who looked at them was amazed that some of them weren't painted specifically in a Chinese stlye. I guess in some ways it goes to show how unique the combinations of colour and shape are out here.

All the best, J