Kubrick continues

Watching Dr Strangelove in a bar in Beijing last night was one of those very special evenings. The twists of satire and irony will stay with me for a long time.

Next week:
Wednesday - 2001 A Space Odyssey
Thursday - A Clockwork Orange

Some interesting looking music on over the next couple of days, too.

I saw Elliott Sharp at D22 a couple of months back and promised to write a review. It's been bugging me ever since because, to be honest, I still don't know what I thought. I enjoy experimental music on the whole, the creative electricity of it can be exciting and the dynamics of the musicians is always fascinating to watch. I spent most of the Elliott Sharp concert with a big grin on my face. I enjoyed it, without a doubt, but I don't know whether I was smiling because of the genius of it or the chaotic self-delusion.

It was noise, there's no other way to describe it. It was disharmonies on guitar caused by random bits of metal grating against strings. It was flutes straight out of Star Wars warbling in different rhythms and different keys (there were no keys) with tuba accompaniment. It was expressions of deepest concentration making music that clashed in ways unimaginable before the evening.

A few people walked out within the first minute. Many stayed and enjoyed it, but I'm not sure what they, or at least I enjoyed. It was, without a doubt fun, and perhaps that's enough. Maybe I just don't understand the depths of musicality which went into it. It took explanation from educated friends and a lot of listening to appreciate a live jazz concert, which I do now, hugely. I can see the dynamics of the musicians as the tune is juggled and manipulated and I love the journey you can be taken on if you follow where they're going. I don't know if I need to know more about where Elliott Sharp was taking us or if I just need some chemical additives to fully appreciate his music. I'd almost certainly see him again because, as I said, it was a lot of fun to listen to and watch.

If anyone else is an aficionado of this sort of experimental music then please tell me what I should be listening for. If you think this is absolutely emperor's new clothes played loud, then I'd like to know your opinion, too.

In a random aside I was highly amused to hear about the klezmer-metal fusion band: Black Shabbat. This I've gotta hear. (from Charmaine X, a creative, amusing Beijing blog I recently stumbled upon).

Flash

I've just returned from a photo shoot, which I will explain at some point soon. My family is still here so I'm trying to cram in as much work as possible in the hours available. Hopefully things will ease up around the weekend and I can start to fill in a few blanks.

For now, the widget to the left called 'blog posts and news of note' is a link to my Google Reader which allows me to share stories which I believe to be noteworthy at the click of a button. This can be placed as a widget into any blog by copying a few lines of code. Ironically, anyone who reads this blog through a feed reader will not be able to see this widget.

Blogrolling

Chaoyangmen as taken a couple of weeks back:

Click to view the full image. Panorama created with ArcSoft Panorama Maker 4, by far the best software I've found so far.

The blogroll in the left column has finally been updated to reflect most of my Google Reader content.

The Criteo blogroll to the left is currently underwhelming me with the content that it's providing. As I wrote a few posts back, this tracks which blogs readers of this blog also read, though it can only track blogs with the criteo tracker installed. It's going to take more time and more people to install this for anything useful to come of it and it seems that people are being put off too soon to really see any benefit. I'm going to give it 6 months and see what happens.

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.

The Thinking Blogger Awards

I return to this polluted, noisy orgy of people and concrete which is 'The Jing' (So good they only named half of it), and though the smell of the smog-filled air crept into the plane as we landed and the jack-hammers greeted us as we left the airport, it does feel like home, and that's pretty good.

I have all the detritus of a long trip to clear up and mounds of dust which have crept through the gaps in the door frame to hide, but that's fine because having managed 5 hours sleep in 3 days I need a bit of catch-up.

On arriving back into the office this afternoon I was greeted with 100+ blog posts to sift through in the feed reader, including a very pleasing nomination from Retrospectacle.

The Thinking Blogger award means that I get to nominate 5 blogs which I deem to fit the title - I also get to show the badge of my pleasingly geeky status:
A bit of fun, but it's nice to know that the random mix of thoughts which I lay down here in no particular order are appreciated.

Anyway, so, my nominations for the award go to:

• Flip Tomato - An American Physics Student in England. As a part III student at Cambridge he's recently been posting a great mixture of expository writing on physics and his ideas and tips for how one can make the high energy physics community a better and more efficient place to work(not that it's not in many ways already).

• My personal bias is for blogs which have an eclectic mix of topics and not simply science. This helps to show the wider world that while we love what we do, many physicists have a wide range of interests and can be pretty well-adjusted people - I'm sure I've met some, anyway. Backreaction has some of the best sets of introductions and overviews of topics which I've read in any blogs and mixes this with a bit of art, a bit of social commentary and a bit of, erm, physics rap.

• I mentioned this as a newfound blog a couple of posts ago - Khymos mixes my love for food and science in excellently balanced proportions in his site dedicated to the world of molecular gastronomy.

• There are a huge number of expat blogs from China. I tend to stay away from a lot of them which simply expound on how stupid the Chinese are and how country-X is better. It's very tiring very quickly - sure, everyone has their particular quibbles with life out here but generally nobody is forcing us to stay in this strange land and usually the arguments about the ignorance of the Chinese are cheap, generalised shots to make the other expats laugh. The Weifang Radish provides a more level-headed commentary of life out here though includes the politics which I usually shy away from.

• There are many blog giants out there, some of whom I respect greatly and some of whom I enjoy reading, if only to get aggravated. However, one of them stands out for me as an exceptional mix of cutting edge mathematical physics and very good introductions to a whole range of subjects. In fact the title 'intelligent blog' may be debated simply because the site, starting as a proto-blog has a large range of formats within it. As an undergraduate I learnt many things from John Baez's site and was prompted to go and read lots of excellent books, having had a taster for various topics. Both the diary and this week's finds are blog-like areas of the site which frequently contain a lot of fascinating, thought provoking material.
  

OK, that wasn't easy, and I link to most of the above regularly, but I hope that those stumbling upon this site for the first time will check out some of these blogs and find lots to interest them.

Catch-up summary

I had assumed that many people who read this blog will by default read all the other blogs that I dip into each morning. I also tend to reason that if an article is on a BBC website that they will pick up on the story. This is clearly not the case and I hope that by doing what I'm about to do, I may be able to bring to those who wouldn't normally hunt around for such articles, what I consider to be an interesting selection.

I thought I would summarise, once a week or so, the most interesting articles I've found, which may include a list of papers I've been reading, news articles on any subjects and blog posts of note. I'll see how it goes over the coming weeks.

So, for this week I list the following as particularly noteworthy:

• On top of my own posts on the subject, including my review in the previous post, there have been articles about Nick's online popular science/ murder mystery book on both Asymptotia and Not Even Wrong. From what I hear it's going down well and getting a lot of hits.

• Cosmic Variance has had an interesting and important discussion about the uses and future direction of blogs as tools for outreach, teaching, collaboration, scientific dissemination and more. This has been followed by an interesting response from Flip Tomato. I know of several pure research blogs which I dip into from time to time and the dynamic of input and breadth of discussion is impressive. I have my own research wiki though currently I'm using a none-too-impressive free online wiki service, having no web space of my own. If anyone knows of a good, free web-server on which I can setup my own wiki that I can tweak, I'd be very interested to know.

• An important point in the development of the International Linear Collider, the successor to the LHC, was announced in a press release here, and follow ups from Cosmic variance and Asymptotia are both fact filled accounts of the physics, technology and politics involved. The announcement is related to the completion of several design aspects of what will be a most spectacular piece of engineering and a huge leap in our understanding of the forces of nature. Some of Clifford's comments are a good summary of the physics discussed in the Newtonian Legacy (see previous post).

• Over at Retrospectacle there's an article for those who have always wondered where prions (the proteins responsible for mad cow disease and its human counterpart) fit into the biological family tree. Certainly five or six years ago if you had a tonsillectomy in England, they would test the removed appendages for prions. I'd had such an operation just before starting my undergraduate studies and so this post clears up some of the questions I'd had.

• Prior to this article, still on Retrospectacle are some interesting, relatively technical (to the non-biologist) articles on the workings of the auditory system, Shelley's particular area of research.

• Also tied in with Retrospectacle is this article from the BBC about the incredible language skills of one particular African Grey parrot with a vocabulary of almost 1000 words and the ability to combine these into new combinations when shown never before seen objects.

• From way back in the year at Bad Astronomy blog are the top ten astronomy images of 2006. All of them are stunning photos, but the number 1 spot blows me away every time I see it.

• In research papers, there have been several preprints over the last couple of months on baryons in the Sakai-Sugimoto model - in particular this one, which came out not long ago. The Sakai-Sugimoto model of AdS/QCD includes a non-abelian chiral symmetry, using a stack of D8 anti-D8 branes. In the most recent work a five-dimensional soliton is studied on the world-volume of the D8s and the potential is taken to be that of a field configuration holographically dual to the baryon. The spectrum is then calculated by finding the eigenstates of the Schrodinger equation with this potential. Lots of interesting things to look into further with this work, I feel. (I can see that this review is too brief to explain what's really going on but if any of the words match your area of research, take a look at the paper).

• I came across this paper by Green and Bachas "A Classical manifestation of the Pauli exclusion principle" from 98. This is related to the existence of two, unique holomorphic curves in M-theory describing fermionic states in IIA string theory. The two solutions correspond to no fermions and to one fermion, but the lack of any other solutions is said to be a 'classical manifestation of the Pauli exclusion principle'. If anyone knows of more work that has been done on the spin-statistics connection in relation to string theory objects I would love to know. Looking through the citations I can't find any other papers which discuss this for more general systems.
  

• In Chinese blogs, The Weifang Radish reports on a new post from Chinabounder which has caused the violent spectrum of replies it was expected to. For those out of the China loop, Chinabounder is a blog by a British expat in Shanghai who seduces Chinese women and then writes about his exploits. A Chinese professor got hold of the story, started a witch hunt to find the guy, give him what he thought he deserved, and wrote a large number of extremely aggressive articles about the behaviour of expats in China. Some of his articles are also discussed here on The Weifang Radish. The whole story is completely over the top, somewhere between amusing and terrifying and seems to be a lot of people venting their collective spleens over the web.

• This BBC article on queuing in China is an interesting one, though I can see many similar situations ahead as China gears up for the Olympics. Taxi drivers will only be licensed to drive during the Olympics if they reach a certain fluency in English speaking and listening. I'm yet to see this progress, but I'm beginning to feel that just about anything is possible over there. There's a famous, modern saying that in China nothing is possible and nothing is impossible - this sums up life there pretty nicely.

• I've discussed in previous posts about my wonder at some of the incredible engineering feats which are somehow not only dreamed up but actually come to fruition. The LHC of course being one which I've spoken about in the past, in detail. However, away from science and into the commercial world, Dubai has somehow jumped onto the world scene of spectacularly lavish buildings. Though the Taipei 101 is currently the world's tallest building at a little over 500 metres, this is going to be dwarfed by the Burj Dubai, due to be completed in 2008 at somewhere in excess of 800 metres tall (One official website comments that the latest redesign puts the final height at 1100 metres, but I don't know how official this is). Marvel at the photo at the bottom of this page for an idea of how this is going to change the landscape.

OK, that's probably a little overwhelming, but I hope that there's something interesting in there for most.