Half empty

A two hour seminar yesterday has left me pretty tired. I hope that I will be able to lecture at some point in the future, though I don't know how people manage it day in, day out. I enjoy it a great deal but it knackers me out no end. It's also great to have an audience who wants to work on the topic I'm talking about and has lots of interested questions.

I have lots of things I'd planned to talk about but I've got one paragraph in and am flailing about listlessly on the keyboard. It's been a good week and with just three days left in the department I think that I will be finished off concentration-wise by then. I'll have a couple of days break before diving back into Beijing life though I can't see a proper break being imminent. The Spring Festival has been and gone so I think that the next holiday probably comes some time around August. Deep intake of breath! Having been on the go, non-stop every day for this long is beginning to take its toll.

All being well I'm off to Tsujiki fish market tomorrow - the biggest fish market in the world and the source of the best sushi, though everything kicks off at 5.30 am, which may be a bit of a struggle.

Nope, a failed post I'm afraid but I currently can't even bring myself to delete it, so I'll simply link to a couple of interesting articles which have come up over the last couple of weeks:

Robots teaching themselves to walk, from the BBC, and a very nice explanation from Scott Aaronson on the Shor algorthm, for factoring large numbers on a quantum computer - a subject I studied and enjoyed a great deal as an undergrad.