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:

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.

Christmas, New Year and a look back

I'm back in Oxford, sitting in the Summertown Wine Bar with glorious sunshine pouring in through the windows in the roof. It's freezing out but a lovely, crisp day nonetheless.

I have just a couple of days left in England before heading back to Spain. It's been great seeing friends and family, but I'm also looking forward to getting back home and getting back into work which I've been itching to do ever since I realised that a vital file which I thought I'd bought with me was safely and uniquely stored on my computer in the office. Still, I've been able to scribble a few calculations down in the meantime and have plenty to get on with as soon as I touch down.

So, I thought I'd update the last couple of weeks with some photos.

Just after Christmas three of my Korean friends from Santiago turned up in Oxford and so I took them round the city, to see some of the views and the colleges. They were rather disappointed not to bump into Harry Potter in Christchurch but I think that in all they were rather impressed with my hometown. I took them to the top of St Marys on the High Street which offers one of the best views over the city. The sun was low and cast a rather beautiful light over the stone buildings surrounding us, including the Radcliffe Camera:

and the High Street and hills in the distance:

After a home-cooked Indian meal I saw them back on the bus to London and I had some time to spend with my uncle and aunt and cousins, catching up after many months without seeing them. I have to bite my tongue not to comment how much my cousins have grown (I didn't appreciate it much when I was in their shoes).

Anyway, with skateboards, juggling equipment and puppets in tow we made our way around various parks around Oxford, including a trip to Blenheim Palace which was great to walk around, having not been there for perhaps 15 years:

After saying goodbye I headed off to London to meet up with friends, staying in Mortlake, and Dulwich.

Sitting in a traditional London pub with an open fire and warming up over good conversation and good drink was truly a lovely way to wind down after the normal Christmas chaos. It's great to see friends all doing extremely well in their various endeavors.

On the 30th I made my way into central London to walk along the South Bank to the Tate Modern to see what was showing and get a view over the city (great view of St Pauls from the top floor). The city was bustling with shoppers looking for a bargain and the museums were similarly heaving with tourists. The crowds offered a great chance to try out the new lens which I'd picked up for a ridiculously cheap price on ebay just before leaving.

It seems that Parcour is the new Skateboarding, as this time there were more people jumping from bollard to bollard than there were falling off planks of wood:

With a 70-300mm lens I could get shots like this from a distance without feeling intrusive. Similarly from afar I could catch the tourists pouring over Westminster bridge:

Getting to the Tate Modern I wasn't in a Rothko mood and although I like his work, the idea of seeing it with a room packed from wall to wall with other people somehow detracts from the calmness, so I forwent that for the Cildo Meireles exhibit which I enjoyed a great deal. Rather fun was the room filled with hanging tape measures, with clocks covering the walls. Interestingly the room as a reference frame was never mentioned:

New Year's Eve was spent with friends in and around Farringdon, at a bar which had been hired out for the evening. Nothing huge, but a great chance to talk with people I haven't spent enough time with over the last few years. We headed back at three, feeling that that was pretty respectable though remembering the days we would have kept going through to the next day with no problem at all.

With a chill in the air on New Year's day we went to Richmond park, London's largest park with its local population of deer and parakeets. The park was full of families enjoying the crisp winter's day, people running off their hangovers and amateur photographers seeing what the first day of the New Year had to offer. I was lucky enough to spot my first Kingfisher, sitting by the stream and diving into the water to catch fish. Sadly I never managed a shot as it dove in, but did get a few perching shots.

I still have to get used to this lens, as it's clear that on an overcast day I do need a tripod for a steady shot at 300mm. The parakeets were also out, flashing their colours and squawking away incesantly:

After the walk I made my way back to Oxford where I've continued to gorge on Christmas food and spent lot of the rest of my time in cafes finishing as many Christmas books as possible. Proust and the Squid on the go now, which I'll talk about later, I hope.

Dreaming in Code was a fun, if somewhat quixotic look at the world of software design. The author spent several years following a company in Silicon Valley which was trying to design and build a large piece of software. It's simply the tale of how difficult it is to coordinate a large team of people to write good code and the frustrations which go along with it are clearly immense. In fact I was attracted to the book by the title, a state that I've got myself into on many enjoyable occasions where a problem won't leave you, even when you're asleep. These tend to be the occasions where I have the most breakthroughs in a problem and it can make you feel hugely focused, if exhausted!

Anyway, I'm going to leave it at that for the moment, but I wish you all a very happy New Year!

Miscellaneous links from last week

A few items that I've starred in my Google Reader this week:

There have been a number of interesting posts on the mission to Enceladus, one of the many fascinating moons of Saturn which the Cassini orbiter (NASA link) has been studying for the last couple of years (including the Huygens mission to Titan) and will be for the next few. This week the probe skirted across the surface of Enceladus (well almost) including going through a giant gas plume. I've yet to see more than pretty pictures (any data), but the pictures can be found here:

From Toomanytribbles

Before the event, TMT also posted some data on the plans for the flyby.

More astronomy links:

From Physics world, the news that Alpha-Centauri, our nearest star may itself have an Earth-like planet. All simulations of planetary formation about the star seem to suggest an Earth-like planet is likely.

A Boing-Boing article on the giant cargo which took off this week on its way to the International Space station. A large part of this cargo is a huge robot, slightly reminiscent of those in Alien.

Astronomers are not terribly good with coming up with names for their new bits of equipment. For instance one overwhelming large telescope being built is going to be called the OWL (I'll let you work that one out!). At Slashdot is an article on the similarly aptly named Large Binocular Telescope which took its first image (sadly not of a terribly inspiring object, in the grand scheme of things - from the Bad Astronomy Blog)

Lubos Motl discusses the news that the sonic equivalent of a black-hole has been simulated. A Bose Einstein condensate in certain conditions should exhibit an event horizon and even Hawking radiation.

On the ArXiv:

A tour de force of calculational complexity is the result that the six-gluon MHV amplitude at two loops does indeed equal the hexagonal Wilson loop (An AdS/CFT prediction amongst other things), though not equal to the BDS conjecture - again as expected from AdS/CFT because the dual conformal symmetry is not strong enough alone to tie down the form of the amplitude. This was seen in two papers, by J.M.Drummond, J.Henn, G.P.Korchemsky and E.Sokatchev and by Z. Bern, L. J. Dixon, D. A. Kosower, R. Roiban, M. Spradlin, C. Vergu and A. Volovich.

We also saw another step on the path to understanding unquenched flavour in gravity duals of gauge theories in the paper by Felipe Canoura, Paolo Merlatti, Alfonso V. Ramallo where they studied the holographic dual of a 2+1 dimensional field theory with backreacted flavour branes in various regions of the parameter space of the N=1 field theory.

Frederick Denef has his notes on constructing string vacua, from the Les Houches school, online which I'm yet to read through but would like to.

Off the ArXiv but still in physics writing, Blake Stacey continues his discussion of supersymmetric quantum mechanics>

A link from a long time ago about hydrophobic sand (from Food for design). A fascinating substance which, if the cost could be reduced, would be an ingenious solution to quickly clearing up oil spills.

Videos from TED continue to be almost unendingly fascinating and the good news is that the whole archive of recordings from the very first TED conference will gradually be released. It says a lot that back in 1984 TED was forward thinking enough to record all the talks.

From Slash-dot, comes an article discussing whether huge cash prizes could be a good way to quickly progress in making breakthroughs in major scientific and technological problems. Definitely worth debating.

From Cosmic Variance comes a link to the Bloggingheads video with Sean Carol and John Horgan. I watched this this evening and thought that Sean did a great job at setting the current status of much of modern cosmology.

And finally on a couple of non-scientific notes:

I don't have the time to read as much as I'd like these days. The last book I finished was Godel, Escher, Bach, a rather monumental study of logic, art, consciousness, beauty, the foundations of mathematics, music and much more besides. A fascinating book and great for an introduction to the logic by which our universe seems to work, though I felt he tried to pack in a too many subjects which, while they do have connections and these connections go deep, it felt as though each topic was trying to burst out of the seams of the book and become a book in its own right.

Anyway, from Boing-Boing came a link to a beautiful looking book on Mumbai, somewhere I'd love to go and I'm sure that if I read this, my desire to go there would increase even more (Maximum City, Mumbai lost and found by Suketa Mehta)

And finally, an essay from The Online Photographer on the tendency for the populist photographers of today to overdo colour contrast and saturation to create a candy-filled world, with none of the subtlety which great photography captures. I know this is something I have to be careful of and the comments made for an interesting set of reactions.

Anyway, a full day tomorrow of Mathematica decoding - I plan a blog post on this subject alone some time :-) but for now I've Spanish practice to be getting on with.

Kabuki coming to Beijing

Anybody who has kept up with these travel adventures will understand how pleased I am to hear that Kabuki is coming to Beijing. Just for two days in September, but if you are in the city and want to see a Japanese art form, which is certainly the most spectacularly beautiful stage art I have ever seen, then buy yourself some tickets.

See here and here for my previous encounters with Kabuki in Tokyo.

The many degrees of Wuhan

This evening I'll head off on a ten hour train ride to Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, famous for being one of the four furnaces of China and also for having some excellent spicy duck's neck (superb as a snack with a cold beer). There is more to Wuhan than this, though last time I spent more time on the plane and road getting to and from the university than actually seeing it or any of the researchers.

This time I'm staying for a three day workshop on quark matter and again presenting on QCD from the AdS/CFT correspondence. I hope to see a bit of the city as well as discussing with some excellent researchers, both from China and the US, who will be at the workshop.

I spent most of yesterday stuffing myself in the all you can drink for 18 kuai (a little more than a pound) cafe near my flat while working on a current project and getting my talk for tomorrow polished off. I do find the buzz of a cafe inherently conducive to good work and almost without fail have more breakthroughs in these relatively noisy places than in the rather sterile environment of my office.

After spending all day in the cafe, a few of us headed over to Sanlitun in the East of the city, went to Kokomo (up on the roof of one of the taller buildings in the area), ordered a beer, sat back and watched for the Perseids. A strange sight for the others in the bar perhaps but we wanted to take advantage of the fact that Beijing is pretty cloudless at the moment (I speak a little too soon, I fear) due to last week's artificially induced storms and reduced traffic. We saw a few throughout the night, coming from the East, though you really need to be up in the early hours of the morning to catch the height of the showers, as the part of the Earth you are on is travelling towards the patch of dust and rock.

(The Bad Astronomer on watching the meteor shower)

Anyway, for now I'll leave some photos from last weekend, when I took a good friend for a birthday meal at Haiku, one of Beijing's top Japanese restaurants. Well worth a trip for the atmosphere and service. The food is good but sadly by my sushi standards which have been permanently affected by my stay in Tokyo, the food was excellent but not mind blowing.

The first photo is of the Beijing national gallery, currently housing an exhibition of works from the Prado. An excellent collection from Titian to Goya, with lots in between. Well worth a trip (though check online if it's still on). We went there in the afternoon before going for dinner.

I attempted to get a good view of the new, amazing structure which will be the CCTV headquarters. These two, leaning towers which will meet in a tangle at the top should be great for photographing, but from our position we could only get a hint of them.

and some photos from Haiku:




OK, got to go finish getting ready for the train ride ahead.

Weekend snaps

Truly no time for blogging at the moment but a few pictures for now from this weekend, which included:

• Elliott Sharp at D22
• Artwalk Beijing at Dashanzi
• Sonic Youth at Tango

amongst other things.

Flash Slideshow

All of them are worth writing about and I'll do so when I have a spare moment.

Bowling them over

I don't include Google ads on here but I'm happy to promote products and services if I think that they're worthy of a plug, especially if my family and friends are involved.

My father went into semi-permanent early retirement in order to work twice as hard as ever before (not that he ever slacked off) to start turning bowls - the obvious sideways step from chemical engineering and scientific consultancy. His website has lots of his work but I thought the new postcard was worth a post here. So, if you are looking for fine wood turning, take a look at the site.

Art for the people

I've written recently of the Bird's Nest and in the past about the new CCTV building. Recently from Toomanytribbles came this video of the Ren Building, currently under construction in Shanghai which looks like fun.


I spoke in the above post on the CCTV tower about the odd dichotomy of the freedom to build outlandish buildings as the government spends a lot of their time making a statement to the rest of the world. There's some truly hideous architecture in Beijing but there's also some startling and attractive buildings going up around the city.

Weekend ramblings

We're back to a completely full schedule again with the first English corner since I arrived back from Japan. Work is still a little crazy with too many projects on the boil but I did get a chance to escape from the office for a bit this weekend.

It's a pleasure when the rather anonymous words on the screen turn into a real person and I finally met up with Kevin of Weifang Radish fame and his wife Jinjin of Weifang Radish fame, by proxy. A very enjoyable evening chatting with someone who has spent a good length of time in various parts of China and who's blog continues to be an interesting read. Lots of hints for places to try and visit in my remaining time here, too, though I fear spare time may not be in great supply.

There's been talk in the local papers of the rather infamous Sensations art show coming to Beijing's Capital Art Museum. Unfortunately, having read the papers I completely forgot which gallery it was to be shown at and ended up at a rather insipid exhibition at Beijing's World Art Museum of photographs of 'new Beijing' which was very uninspiring. They're currently also showing a display of Egyptian artwork with some fine sculpture but anyone who has been to the British Museum or the like is probably going to be rather unimpressed. In the basement is a carved mural of Chinese history which is worth a peak and the central golden columns are wonderfully gaudy, if nothing else.

On the way to the train station I passed a young girl sitting idly in a chair overlooking the remains of the flats which had once sat where she now was. I found it rather more moving than any of the art on display at the museum.

artWALK Beijing

Next Saturday (21st of April) will see the second of Beijing's artWALK events which will be going back to the Dashanzi art district (see here for my first impressions of Dashanzi). This will include tours of several galleries, a chance to meet and talk with some of the movers and shakers of the Beijing contemporary art scene and a lot more besides. The website currently hasn't got so much information but I received the following after e-mailing for more details:

• artWALK Beijing has invited the following 798 Dashanzi art district venues to participate on Saturday, April 21st : 798 Beijing Art Place, Anni Art, Dimensions Art Center, Xin Dong Cheng Space for Contemporary Art I & III, Marella Gallery, Red Gate/798 Gallery and Star Gallery. As part of its monthly lecture series in conjunction with artWALK, Timezone 8 Editions will also host a discussion with owner Robert Bernell, who will talk about the history of the 798 art district.
• During artWALK there will be a few local acting troupes doing improve and outdoor theater. The cocktail reception will once again be at Yan Club although we're looking for new entertainment (the lovely Syndicate DJ's will be at a reggae gig that night over in Zub which would be great to go to as an after-artWALK party).
• As always we're looking for volunteers (email elyse @ artwalkbeijing.com) and are constantly improving our website www.artwalkbeijing.com. artWALK beijing is a non-profit organization and runs on the donations and goodwill. We will be selling tee shirts at the April artWALK as a way of getting better funding, so (and sorry, I have to do my plug here) tell your friends. One of the t-shirt designs is the tiananmen picture you see when you visit www.artwalkbeijing.com, another is a robot design. There will be a total of five more artwalks after the April one. Three will be at 798 but two will move off location to farther locals such as the winery and caocangdi. We're looking to get shuttles for those trips as they are rather off the beaten path.

This looks like fun to me so if you're in Beijing and fancy coming along to see what's happening in one of the most vibrant art areas I've ever been to then pop along.

I've been told that the event will start around 6pm, though I haven't found any confirmation of this. I will be going earlier to wonder around some other galleries so anyone who wants to come along too and doesn't know Dashanzi should send me an e-mail.

The best of a good lot

The Couchsurfing website was down for a good part of today and I haven't managed to get a place for tonight. It now being tonight means that I'm in the office again after a day which has not bought many surprises having had less than two hours sleep last night. I expect similar tonight but tomorrow evening I'll be flying back to Beijing where, unless my last guest has booby-trapped the flat (something which I'm not ruling out) I should have a good night's sleep waiting for me. 4 hours in 3 days isn't ideal but I can catch up soon.

Anyway, because I'm not going to write anything remotely original in this state I'll try and catch up with some links from the last week or so.

• One of the problems with the debate between string proponents and opponents is that there is usually little in the way of actual scientific debate. On the internet such debates usually end up in a comment section of name-calling and little physics is actually discussed. It looked like Joe Polchinski had really got the ball rolling when he wrote a reply to Lee Smolin's book, answering many of the accusations which had been leveled against the subject and the community. This was the perfect opportunity to have a level-headed debate but, as far as I'm aware, Lee Smolin never replied. In a comment on Asymptotia Lee states that he doesn't feel it necessary to respond to Joe's points because they are already answered in the book. Having read the book and Joe's article thoroughly disagree with this statement.
  
• However, there has now been a public debate on the subject (which can be downloaded from here) (now another debate at Oxford as well) with contributions from Lee Smolin, Michael Duff and from Nancy Cartwright. Clifford's thoughts on the debate can be found on his blog, together with a very long comments thread involving all relevant parties and achieving nothing, yet, as far as I can tell. (NB. I haven't listened to the debate yet but plan to as soon as I'm awake enough to concentrate on it).
  

• The last couple of posts from Backreaction have involved the interface between science and art. Justin Mullins is a British artist, also interested in science and has some pictures of some of the most important equations in physics and mathematics. I've been in contact with him since finding his site, about a couple of points of explanation. He seems like a friendly chap and I'd be interested to see the work and chat with him when I'm back in the UK.

• A nice article from the BBC about how technology can promise so much, but occasionally take much longer than expected to deliver, deals with high temperature superconductors and what they may/will be able to do for us in the near future.

• I was also interested in this article from the BBC about the robot which is teaching itself to walk. The linked sites from the article are worth looking through for more information, too.

• Another great photo from Bad Astronomy Blog shows over 1000 black holes lighting up the sky. This may seem a little counterintuitive but of course black holes are not even slightly black if they are busy eating.

and a few videos:

• From Pharyngula comes the History of Creationist Thought, by Robin Ince, which has some lovely observations and superb timing.

• Toomanytribbles has a good range of interesting short movies on a range of both inspiring and depressing subjects, but I particularly enjoyed the short animation Das Rad.

• I had planned to post two videos a while ago but Retrospectacle beat me to both of them. The first is a demonstration of one of my favourite hands-on physics demonstrations from school - the phenomenon of non-Newtonian fluid dynamics. This can be found displayed within the scientific context here (though not very enthusiastically discussed), and the not so scientific context here, both are fun, but if you haven't tried it before I suggest getting a few tablespoons of cornstarch (cornflower) and mixing it with just enough water to form a liquid paste. Then try and pick it up and see what happens.

• The second video was from a documentary I saw on octopuses several years ago and is remarkable footage of what happens if you put a giant octopus up against a shark!

• Flip Tomato has an interesting discussion and impressive presentation on Split Supersymmetry. Sadly he doesn't get onto Supersplit Supersymmetry, which is a joy to read :-)
  

• From Laowai Chinese comes a table of all 409 Chinese words you can possibly say - with the odd variation allowed ;-)

OK, I've run out of steam. It's getting late and I have a desk to lay my head on so I'll see if I can get some shuteye.

Update: Just remembered this news today that caves which may have necessary conditions to harbour life on Mars have been spotted. This is all highly speculative, but exciting nonetheless.

Closing chapters

It's a little past 7am here in Tokyo. I'm in the office and have managed perhaps 2 hours sleep, so I'm feeling a little weary but the early morning light is filling the room and I'm not going to manage any more. I must point out that my current situation is completely down to my own frugal state. The university funded me for a generous number of days and simply because of possible flight times I had a few days over at the end. I try and avoid talking money on the blog but the idea of spending almost a week's wages on a night in a cheap hotel doesn't appeal very much - I'd much rather spend the money on good food; just my personal set of priorities in life.

Today is my last full day in Japan and depending on how I'm feeling in a little bit I may do some more exploring, though there aren't many major tourist sites left to see. Yesterday I took a morning walk around the Shinjuku area which is home to many government buildings along with plenty of shopping and the red-light district. The architecture is a mixture of very stereotypical modern Japanese high-rise with some great little alley-ways filled with noodle bars and run by the local Yakuza (The area I've been staying, Ikebukuro, is also one of the largest Yakuza areas). So, a few of snaps from Shinjuku:


A good tip is to skip going up the Tokyo tower, which is expensive and head to the Metropolitan Government Offices which also has a great viewing area and is free.



(The photo which looks like it's been taken with a fish-eye is a panorama of three shots tied together using ArcSoft Panorama Maker which I found online yesterday).

After some lunch in one of the local soba restaurants I hopped to the other side of the city with a couple of students from the department to go to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (MOT). The museum is an exciting and well designed space with very good lighting, showing some of the best of modern Japanese art. Currently the temporary exhibits are also excellent with a collection depicting the idea of the individual in today's digitised society, and an amazing collection of work by Hiroshi Nakamura. I wish I could find more online to link to but have had little luck.

Sayaka Akiyama records her journeys in a scrap/map format on homemade paper, fabric and any other materials which are relevant to her particular travels (be it within a single building or a more distance trip). She has a series of perhaps 20 or 30 maps created from her time in Barrow-in-Furness in 2004. I find it hard to believe that Akiyama hasn't been heavily influenced by Peter Greenaway's short film A Walk Through H: The Reincarnation of an Ornithologist which is filmed almost in its entirety as a voiceover describing the mysterious journey of Tulse Luper showing a series of maps through H. This is a rather hypnotic film and the DVD of Peter Greenaway's early short films are intriguing if not always fully comprehensible.

Among the other interesting works at the gallery I would advise looking out for Daisuke Nakayama who has some haunting and rather pessimistic views of the digital age and Yuri Shibata whose "Material Color works involve the harvesting of some natural material (hair, kudzu, etc.) to be ground into pigments and made into paint. The resulting paintings are both of and by their subjects. One cannot conceive of a more completely representational art form". Sounds cliched but the work is actually rather fine.

In comparison the Chinese contemporary art scene often feels less polished but consequently more visceral than the Japanese scene which has been growing pretty steadily since the 1940s. The Japanese work seemed knowingly clever whereas the work in Beijing feels more reactionary, which is no surprise.

I've recently discovered artWALK Beijing which looks like a great resource and I'll be going to the next meet-up if at all possible.

I'm really looking forward to getting back to Beijing now, though I've had a great time out here. I have three or four projects to work on and really want to push them forward quickly. This whole trip has been immensely valuable, from the serenity of Kyoto to the frenetic but stimulating atmosphere in Tokyo, both of which have been useful for my work in different ways. When I get back I'll have to prepare some lectures for an upcoming workshop to introduce AdS/QCD which will be more detailed than my previous seminars. I also have a friend/collaborator turning up in a few days and several friends and family booked up to head out. It don't stop!

Rounding up

I'm resynching as my mathematica code whirls away in the background, losing decimal places and approximating integrals as it does so. Now, I thought I'd put my weekly summary in a slightly more appropriate place so, when possible, Friday will be the day I attempt to compact the week's web finds into a few bite-sized morsels.

• Where better to start than perhaps the finest mathematically orientated all-male a capella group your likely to find at Northwestern University. From Flip Tomato comes a fine Valentine's offering from the Klein Four Group.

• To go with your musical harmonies, Clifford picked up on a particularly stunning astronomical harmony. In fact this story is more than just a pretty picture. The signals from this particular object (a white dwarf surrounded by the shell it threw off in its old age) don't behave as one may naively expect, but from recent studies of several similar objects it looks like the answer may have been found.

• Also in an artistic vein is a link to the work of Vija Celmins on John Baez's diary (Feb 11th). Well worth a look.

• Asymptotia as well as Cosmic Variance have been posting their favourite titles of papers on the arxiv. OK, so maybe we don't get out enough, but this week not only was there a good title from a friend of mine, but what looks to be a rather interesting paper. In Matrix Big Brunch, James Bedford et al extend the work of A Matrix Big Bang to include a big crunch in their cosmology and glue together the big bang and big crunch geometries to get a closed cosmology. Using matrix string theory, both of these singularities are resolved though it seems like there are some questions regarding the perturbative nature of the theory at the turning point between big bang and big crunch. Any additional commentary on the paper is welcome.

• Another good explanation from Bee at Backreaction talks about our fascination with understanding the universe on ever smaller scales, and in particular gives another nice explanation of why we should all be aware of what's going on at the LHC and the ILC. The questions of whether we should be spending the large sums of money on these things are discussed at the end, but there's a huge amount one can (and should) say on this subject.

• As I noted in the last post, there's a good review of Michael Dine's new book over at Jacques Distler's Musings. As I said in my review, it's a good overview of a lot of topics. It's not going to get you up to research speed but it will point you in the right direction.

• I've mentioned it before but I thought I'd also note it in a summary post that for a very nice introduction to 'the world as a hologram', you can't go far wrong with this video from Raphael Bousso. As I discovered from showing this to some graduate students, in order to generate some discussion, a basic knowledge of black holes is useful.
  

• There's a truly stunning movie linked via Pharyngula of the mechanics of DNA replication. No prior knowledge required, but what looks like a fun animation is backed up with some unbelievably complicated calculations. (Note that in the comments is a note which I don't claim to understand on a technical level but it seems to indicate that aspects of this model - for it is only a model - may have been discredited). See some more, impressive biological animations at this site.

• While I'm on movies, and in Japan: For all your trivia about both contemporary and classic Japanese cinema go to Midnight Eye. Absolutely rammed full of good information about the weird, the wonderful, and everything in between.

• In software I thought I'd share a find this week which is making the use of Windows Live Messenger (WLM) slightly less painful. As I've mentioned before I spend some time each day on WLM discussing work with various collaborators around the world. This is a great tool with which I've had many, many hours of useful conversations. With a little tinkering it's possible to write in tex and get an output of the conversation saved in order to remember the conclusions you came to and the paths you took to get there. With Messpatch (once you get over the gaudy web page) you can tinker with Messenger to get it looking and acting just the way you want, well, just about. I can't vouch for the amount of spyway which is put on your system when you get this program but Adaware should see to that.

Here endeth this weeks summary. If people see or write articles which they would like me to link to, then please ask. I'm very happy to do so if I think others will benefit.