Conciencia and miscellaneunoia

I'm off shortly to the lecture of Frances Elizabeth Allen, winner of the Turing Prize, who will be talking here about ' A pilgrimage to the higher senses of computation'.

Before that I wanted to link to a rather stunning piece of writing I found on the BBC website. Eunoia, written by Christian Bok is a novel written using only a single vowel in each chapter. From the BBC website, an extract from chapter 'A' is given:

Hassan Abd al-Hassad, an Agha Khan, basks at an ashram - a Taj Mahal that has grand parks and grass lawns, all as vast as parklands at Alhambra and Valhalla. Hassan can, at a handclap, call a vassal at hand and ask that all staff plan a bacchanal - a gala ball that has what pagan charm small galas lack. Hassan claps, and (tah-dah) an Arab lass at a swank spa can draw a man's bath and wash a man's back, as Arab lads fawn and hang, athwart an altar, amaranth garlands as fragrant as attar - a balm that calms all angst. A dwarf can flap a palm branch that fans a fat maharajah. A naphtha lamp can cast a calm warmth.

Take a look at the BBC link for more.

Porto in brief part I

Written Monday evening...

I arrived back from Porto at around 5.30 this morning after a three hour bus ride having failed to secure a ticket in time for the afternoon bus. I had to be in Santiago today to get a few admin tasks tended too, and consequently I'm feeling pretty tired.

However, Porto was truly wonderful. I spent Friday in the university and gave a talk in the afternoon, which was very enjoyable, even if the bulk of it was aimed at a minority of the audience. It's tough to give a specific research talk to a group who knows little about the generalities of your subject, so I gave a half hour introduction and then a half hour on the details of my last paper. After this I spent some time discussing with one of the researchers there about his recent work, and some possible extensions which I hope we will explore via email over the next few weeks.

I left the department in the evening and walked over to the Casa da Musica, a striking contemporary building, to meet my couchsurfing host. We met up and did a little shopping in preparation for an evening feast with around ten of us. I was exceedingly lucky with my host, who was not only a lot of fun, and a very generous human being, but she happens to have a degree in the science of wine and winemaking and works at one of the major Port makers in the city as a tour guide when she isn't making her own wine in her family's estate.

This meant that the weekend was a luxurious treat of learning and tasting some of the best wines of the region (produced in the Douro valley), as well as having a private tour of the port cellars and a tasting of a huge range of very very fine beverages.

In terms of gastronomy, Portugal never suffers from any subtlety in its foodstuffs, and on Saturday as I walked around in the town centre, I spotted a cafe offering Francesinhas. I'd heard of these but wasn't yet aware of what they were. Never, to be scared by the unknown I ordered one (the waiter asked me if I just wanted one, to which I nodded, not knowing whether this would be enough). This must truly be the king of high calorie lunches, designed for a hard days labour. A Francesinha, ironically given the title 'little French girl' is prepared by taking: steak, minced pork, fried egg, sausages, sliced ham and thick slices of cheese, and putting the whole thing between two or more slices of bread. You then take this and drown it in cheese, so the whole thing is covered and you have to dig to discover that this is a carnivores delight. Take your meat-drowning-in-cheese-feast and pour a thick and spicy tomato sauce over the top.

My guess is that this beast has around a 3000 calorie kick to it. Just in case you're not satisfied, it comes automatically with a plate of chips. Apparently by ordering it with a glass of water and not beer I may have caused some sort of gastronomic offense to the owners of the establishment!

Anyway, I finished my lunch, worrying slightly about heart palpitations and spent the next hour or so wondering the streets. Later I met up with a friend of my couchsurfing host and he took me on a tour of the city, describing much of the history and how it had evolved over the last few hundred years. His time studying architecture made this a fascinating insight into the city. During this time we went up the steeple of one of the old churches to get this wonderful view of the city (click for a huge version!):

We then headed over to the other side of the river to spend a glorious afternoon Port wine tasting with my host, trying everything from dry white ports, great with tonic, to 30 year old tawnys and a deep rubys.

The evening was spent at a chef's house, eating vegetarian cuisine which made me feel only slightly less guilty about the herd of animals which had been slaughtered for my lunch. The chef was also a tour guide for the Port cellars and so a fine selection followed the meal....do I see a theme emerging from this weekend?!

To be continued...

Porto seminar trip

Tomorrow I head for Porto, my first time in Portugal, to give a talk on Friday in front of what I understand will be a fairly interdisciplinary audience. I'm looking forward to the interaction with some more people in the nearby community, which is making a big effort at the moment to arrange a good number of small meetings to stoke collaborations.

The bus from here should take a little just a couple of hours, and I'll be staying near the department. This is going to be a short visit within the university this time, as things are rather busy here in Santiago, with several projects genuinely nearing completion (I feel I keep saying this, but projects in my experience always take longer in the final stages than expected). Saturday and a little of Sunday I'll have in the city, and will be Couchsurfing with a tour guide to the Port cellars. I've been promised a tour! I will also be meeting up with a journalist Couchsurfer who would like to know about physics and what us physicists actually get up to.

Things have been busy this end too with Couchsurfing and every night recently I've come home from work to find a host of people cooking up wonderful feasts in my kitchen - always a pleasure! In fact, as I type this I have two Australians and an Estonian cooking up a fish feast which is due to be ready about.....now.

Drawing to a close-ish

I've just given the last of my eight talks on this trip. It's been enjoyable discussing with so many people, though I'm feeling pretty pooped right now.

We have ideas spilling out of our notepads at the moment here, and not enough time to finish them all off. I have another week or so with the researchers here and it would be great to get something really concrete going quickly. There are also unfinished projects in Santiago which will really be demanding my attention as soon as I'm back home, in fact they should be demanding my attention now and I've been working on a few of them in the background, but they really need a push soon.

It's been a great, productive and interesting few weeks going through France, Germany, China and Korea, but I am looking forward to settling back into life in Spain for at least a few weeks (give or take a few talks I have to give when I get back). I'll be back there at the end of August, after a few days here to do some sightseeing and track down some san nak ji.

Back in the Wu

Somehow it feels like I never left. Everything here in Beijing feels so familiar. Stranglely the very fact that many things have changed feels familiar. You become used to the continuous dynamic of the buildings, the restaurants and bars, the flow of students in and out.

There's still building work going on at all hours of the day and night and despite the promises two years ago, the taxi drivers still don't have any English at all. It was said that during the Olympics, all taxi drivers had to obtain a minimum standard of English, but it seems that this idea has been dropped and foreign visitors coming to the games have been advised to only take taxis when they know exactly where they are going.

The weather has at least improved significantly from the first two days where the visibility was truly atrocious, and yesterday with temperatures around 35 degrees, we had a decent day of blue skies. Jet-lag was taking longer than expected so I crashed in the afternoon before going to catch up with some old friends in the evening.

Today I find myself in one of the same cafes I used to frequent where the coffee is strong (if not terribly tasty) and there is free wireless. Due, I believe, to a lack or regulatory enforcement, China is still the country with the most impressive wireless access I've ever seen, easily beating Japan, Korea and most of Western europe.

Today I'm attempting to finish writing a seminar I will be giving on Tuesday afternoon. This is one of the hardest seminars I've had to give. I will be talking about our latest paper on spectral functions in the quark gluon plasma form holography, which is something I talked about just last week in Munich. However, the Munich group has more string theorists per square inch than anywhere I've ever been, and a large number of them specialise in AdS/CFT. On Tuesday however I will be giving a talk at a conference on flavour physics, as an invited speaker. I've been to such conferences before and given overview talks on AdS/CFT, but to attempt to give a full-blown research seminar without losing everyone in the first few minutes is not an easy task! I'm going for lots of pictures and trying to repeat my main points in as many ways as possible without it becoming boring. Keeping this up for an hour and a half is going to be tricky...

It's going to be a learning experience for me at any rate. After this I'll be preparing a series of blackboard talks to a smaller group. This is all enjoyable, but means I can't concentrate on my research as much as I'd like right now. Still, I have scheduled a few discussion sessions with people here were I will find out what they've been up to since I was last here.

On a completely unrelated subject I'll leave you with a picture from the conference I went to a few weeks back in A Toxa, on heavy ion physics. A few of us went for a walk on our last day there. I waited back with another friend to take some photos and took this silhouette of multinational physicists disappearing into the sunset:


Anyway, better get back to generating graphics which will keep people on the ball!