And on...

I'm packed, insomuch as one can be for a cheap airline flight when moving from one country to another. (In addition to the 280 kilos sitting in Santiago ready for pickup tomorrow) I have my 20 kilos of possessions ready to go on the bus with me to Gatwick tomorrow and then on to a new life in Munich where I'll be based for the next two years. A new city, a new culture, a new language and much more awaits. I've had some time to think over the last few weeks of traveling about where my future might take me and the next two years will give me the opportunity to see what options are available for the longer term. I'll keep you posted.

The last ten days in the UK have flown by and I seem to have spent a lot of time somewhere between the kitchen and the gym, when I wasn't visiting friends in London for New Year. It's been a lot of fun to cook for the family again and I hope to be able to keep the cooking up in Munich, with a much wider set of possibilities available in the shops than I had at my disposal in Santiago.

The stroke of midnight this year was spent on a hill in Dulwich overlooking the skyscape of London and the fireworks from the distant vantage point, though without the noise, were somehow more moving with the scale than they had been last year from a freezing Vauxhall bridge with hundreds of thousands of other revelers.

I'd spent a couple of days before this seeing exhibitions in London including a great Eadweard Muybridge exhibition at the Tate Britain and Cezanne at the Courtauld. I'd also taken a trip specially to Portabello road to visit Books for Cooks, only to find it shut for the holidays. There's a Chinese recipe book apparently only available from this shop which I'd like to get my hands on.

Anyway, for the first post of 2011 I'll leave you with one from the penultimate day of 2010 from Somerset House together with iceskaters on the rink:

Lunar halo over Oxford

I just came back from a long, tiring but very enjoyable day visiting the University of Southampton where I did my PhD. I went down there to give a talk and spent a long time chatting with the students and postdoc, and my former boss about a miscellany of ideas and possible resolutions to current problems. It was a positive visit and people seemed enthused by the talk.

It was also a good chance to catch up with an old friend that I see far too infrequently these days, so we went for a curry and chatted in one of our old haunts, while freshers drank themselves into a stupor around us.

I got back home to Oxford after taking four trains around midnight and saw, as I got into the drive, a halo around the moon. I got the tripod out and went into the back garden and took a few shots. The halo itself was delicate but lovely, made all the better by Jupiter, just to the bottom left of the moon. Uranus, just above Jupiter couldn't be seen with the flare from the moon.

While we're on the subject of atmospheric optics and ice halos I'll post up a photo I took from the airport in Vienna on Monday evening as the sun was setting and the plate crystals in the split cirrus clouds reflected and refracted the light toward me:

Tomorrow I head back to London to check on my visa situation, and then on to the wedding either tomorrow night or Friday early morning. In the mean time there are calculations building up which will be tackled in transit.

fifty bits to make you wonder - by helen sotiriadis

I will update the last couple of days of hectic travels, but first I really wanted to put up an advert for a new book, out today, which any fan of photography should get their hands on. I've advertised the work of Toomanytribbles (aka Helen Sotiriadis) on numerous occasions, not just because she's a friend but because I think that her work is really spectacular. We met in China after she found my blog and quizzed me about life in Beijing and it was a pleasure to see her photography go from good to outstanding in a short space of time, helped on by the inspirational architecture and sights around the city.

She's just created a book of some 50 of her best works which can be previewed here.

:: fifty bits to make you wonder :: by helen sotiriadis | Make Your Own Book

anyway, if you want your own copy of this lovely work, go here and order one...or several. Mine is in the post.

------------------

So, onto more mundane matters...

I caught up with a couple of hours of sleep today after a tiring night. I flew from Vienna to Gatwick and got into London some time after midnight, making way towards Oxford Street where I'd booked myself into a hostel in order to get up as early as possible to the Chinese visa agency (a great company if you haven't got time to go to the embassy yourself) I've been using for the last few years. Normally I stay with friends in London but the timing just wasn't going to work on this occasion. I realised yesterday that I wasn't going to have time to get the passport to the agency and back before I leave for Spain again and so I had to hand it in in person this morning. The snorer in the room in the hostel however scuppered any chances of a good night's sleep and though I drifted off some time around 5 am, getting up before 7 wasn't easy.

Anyway, though tired, it worked out ok so far. I made it to the  agency, handed everything over, confirmed all forms and photos and made my way back to Oxford where I've spent today drifting between sleep and work.

Tomorrow morning I'm out of the house before 7am on the way down to Southampton where I'll be speaking with the students of my PhD supervisor about my recent work and theirs and meeting up with old friends in the evening, before racing back to Oxford once more late at night. Then Thursday to London to pick up the visa and Friday to the wedding of one of my best friends. In between all this I'm trying to keep the momentum going on a new calculation which we want to add to a new paper, to come out in the not too distant future.

So, in summary, the normal chaos, and in a few days my penultimate stay in Santiago will begin which I'm looking forward to very much.

Back to Spain

Update: Safely back in Santiago after a very long night with an hour sleep split between the coach, the airport departure lounge and the airplane seat. Not in a fit state for clear thought right now but will have a good night's sleep tonight and hopefully get back into the swing of things tomorrow.

---------------

Tonight I'll be making my way back home to Santiago. The journey is a long and tedious one as I have to get to a rather awkwardly placed airport for an 8am flight. I'll be leaving home at 12.30 tonight for a 1am bus which will get me to the airport at 4, where I'll hang around until the two hour flight back home at 8. The journey door to door is roughly the same as door to door Oxford to Beijing, but I am looking forward to settling back into 'normality'.

Getting back to Santiago I have a couple of big projects to get on with, including arranging a long program for 2010 and three papers which are, as normal, in the pipeline.

For now I'll get on with packing up for the journey tonight and will get back to you when I'm settled back into Santiago.

Christmas roundup

A few more pictures to get back up to date with the Christmas break back in the UK.

I mentioned in a post a week or so back that I'd been with a friend to the South Bank to see a couple of exhibitions. The usual skateboarders and bikers were falling off their respective pieces of equipment in the concrete playground by the side of the river. There was however one guy who seemed to be consistently not falling over and he gave me a chance to try some shots in the shade at high speed. With a bit of playing around I got this image:

The next day, the changing of the guards at Buckingham palace drew a huge crowd, and I'm still unsure if I missed seeing the Queen by a matter of minutes. Anyway, in one of the doorways of the palace I spotted this royal pair who were clearly interested in taking my photo:

For New Year's Eve I was back in London and we headed for the London Eye to get prime viewing position for the fireworks. Waterloo was mayhem and there were apparently 700,000 people out on the streets for the event. The fireworks were spectacular and the slight drizzle didn't put a damper on the atmosphere:


Next week I head to Madrid for a couple of days before going on to the winter string school in CERN which I'm thoroughly looking forward to. I hope to report on some physics from the school - there will be a working group on AdS/CFT with flavour.

The death of physics

This really saddens, though sadly does not surprise me. This has been a while coming as my friends in England who are physics teachers can attest to.

This open letter to the AQA board and Department for Education from Wellington Grey about the loss of physics in GCSE physics makes my heart sink. It outlines the fact that the precision of the sciences which is the very thing which attracts so many - the pursuit of truth in a world where so much is indecipherable - has been replaced by politics, sound-bite and skepticism.

Calculation is no longer involved in the GCSE physics syllabus, and this is a crime. I still remember many eureka moments from my physics career, in school and in university. All of them were related to coming up against a problem which wasn't simply a matter of 'common sense' but could be tackled with the strict rules of a mathematical formalism. You got an answer, a number, a yes or no. Something which could be compared to the real world. You had something which made the real world even more solid, more comprehensible, something which allowed you to both understand and manipulate the world around you.

This, it seems, is no longer the case. Now, with the information you learn in the sciences at school, you can argue with your friends in the pub about the benefits of renewable energy, but you will be remembering a list of facts which have been dictated to you. Non-mathematical facts about reality are much harder to manipulate and reuse in other, interesting ways than their mathematical counterparts. We will end up with a nation of parrots who can do nothing more than quote the views of previous scientists, and not even understand where the facts come from, let alone come up with their own theories.

Anyway, I would urge you to read the letter in its entirety, as depressing as it may be.

(Thanks to Flip Tomato who has an article on this same piece)