Of air and water and light - solar halos over China

My flight to Japan was a remarkably comfortable one. Last week saw me in the sky for over 70 hours and thoughts of DVT played heavy on my mind as I got ready for the last leg of a rather mammoth few days. Days that I would however repeat, travel included, given the chance. Thankfully on changing at Amsterdam airport the ground staff took pity on my grizzled face and booked me into a seat with two spares next to it so I could finally stretch out.

I managed a couple of hours sleep on the 11 hour journey which is not a bad proportion for me, given that I normally manage none at all. After a recent flight where, on asking for a whiskey, I was presented with a good half pint of the stuff, I have been staying away from alcohol on flights. The whiskey did knock me out, but it also gave me a horrendous hangover for the waking hours of the journey.

Anyway, I was up to watch the sunrise over China and managed to see the faintest of green flashes, though sadly didn't get it on camera this time.

Later on in the flight however as we neared Japan the air at 30,000+ ft became filled with ice clouds and the interplay of light and ice made for a truly spectacular display.

The conditions were very interesting. Around the plane was a thin layer of cirrus clouds, with a high density of ice crystals, and below us where much thicker clouds, also packed full of ice crystals, many of them plate-like. Plate-like hexagonal ice crystals like to lie flat in the sky and act like mirrors to the sun. These are the crystals that cause sun pillars:

and sub-suns (the reflection of the sun off ice crystals in the clouds below):

This time however the display was a lot more complex. The column crystals in the clouds around us caused a 22 degree halo while the plate crystals gave a faint sundog (also known as a parhelion). In the thick clouds below however things got more interesting. The plate crystals below gave an effect that I'd never seen before. Not only did the light refract as it was passing through the sides of the crystals, but it also bounced off the bottom face, and back up, acting like a mirror to give a so called subparhelion. Moreover, because of the high density of crystals in the lower layers there was a strong 46 degree halo coming from a rather rare dynamic of light through the end of column crystals. It seems that this may not have been photographed before.

Here is the almost undoctored photo:

and here is a rather more doctored one just to enhance the effect to see the different arcs more clearly:

The reason that the circle around the sun is so distorted is because it's from the edge of a very wide-angle lens (Sigma 10-20mm at 10mm).

I sent this through to Les at Atopics who has been my source of knowledge and inspiration in the subject over the last few years and he sent me back a ray-trace computer simulation of what was going on. This is the simulation of the particular conditions so you can compare with the images above (click to view the full image):

The 46 degree arc in the clouds below seems to be an extremely rare event and the infralateral arc is also something rather special. All in all one of the best halo displays I've ever seen.

I've seen halo displays a few dozen times when flying now. Take some sunglasses with you, look out the plane and see if you can spot them next time...they're are there to be marveled at.

Now in Japan for the next 3 weeks. 2 weeks at a machine learning summer school and then a few days at the Yukawa institute where I will be giving a talk and hopefully chatting with some of the experts on entanglement entropy in holography. There are some ideas I need to talk with them about...

The meal of a lifetime at NOMA

Things are beginning to slow down, with a couple of the major Coursera courses coming to an end. I will write up a post when possible about the Natural Language Processing course which has been spectacularly well taught/paced and executed in just about every way.

I've been wanting to write up a post also about my trip to Denmark a week or so ago, on a gastronomic pilgrimage which lead us to the best restaurant in the world (whatever that means). A trip three years or so in the making, with all the possibilities for dire disappointment, but eventually a trip which was with out a doubt the highlight of my life's food experiences so far. Much of this may seem a little Emperor's new clothes, but to be honest I don't mind. If 90% of the enjoyment was in my head, rather than in the tastes themselves, then fine, that still resulted in a great deal of enjoyment.

Noma was the destination, and being my first time in Denmark I planned on making a few days of the trip. We had booked the table at the beginning of the year, having tried and failed for the last 3 years, ever since it took El Bulli's place at the top spot of the gastronomic hierarchy.

I was lucky enough to have hosted a very friendly Dane through Couchsurfing when I was living in Spain and this gave me the perfect chance to crash his place. This worked out fantastically as well as it gave me, as couchsurfing always does, a view of the city which I almost certainly wouldn't have seen had I stayed in a hostel.

Having returned from South Africa to a very sunny Munich, the weather continued to follow me and the first day in Copenhagen was a spectacular 25 degrees. We spent the afternoon sightseeing and sitting with a drink in Christiania, catching up on the last couple of years of our lives and watching the world go by.

Konrad, who had booked the table, turned up on the Wednesday evening and we went for dinner and a drink in the centre, sampling Copenhagen's only CAMRA rated pub where the price of the pints was as much the cause of weakened knees as the strength. Retiring after a couple of pints we cycled back through the city at night, ready for the feast which was to come the next day.

Booked for lunch at one, Konrad, his friend and I headed at a leisurely pace through the city (having warmed up our stomachs with a fine breakfast), still in full spring haze to the North Atlantic House, the ground floor of which houses NOMA, done up in relatively unpretentious decor

The second you step through the door you are made to feel special. You forget about the fact that the place itself is special, but the waiters are immediately interested in you, asking questions and making you feel like you've just met a best friend of a best friend.

They introduce the concept of the restaurant: Nordic inspired cuisine, with Nordic ingredients in highly seasonal, frequently unusual combinations. This is not another El Bulli, where the food was all about the processes - a lot of incredible molecular gastronomy, but is really about the freshness and purity of flavours and the subtlety of their combinations.

I know very little about music and I wouldn't claim to know all that much about food, but, at a piano concert a few years ago, a friend who really does know a great deal about music told me that the brilliance of the particular performance was not about getting the notes in the right order, or at the right time, but was about the subtlety and exactness of the strength of those notes.

In the same way, at NOMA you are not going to be blown away by whizzes and bangs in your mouth, there is not the satisfaction of a great steak or burger, or the sugar and fat buzz of a tiramisu that may satisfy for a few moments, but there is an incredible harmony of flavours that are so finely woven together that one follows another follows another, each one creeping up as the other fades, just as the notes of a brilliant piece of music follow in perfectly weighted succession.

For me the pinnacle of this melody was a dish of scallops, sepia ink and biodynamic grains in a pea puree. The sepia ink gives a background platform which carries the first hit of the scallops, which have been processed for around a day, purifying their flavour and turning them almost into caramel wafers, and finds its way into your mouth before the scallop is even there. The flavour of the scallop slowly fades as your mouth habituates to it, at which point the grains and puree are building to a head and take over, the chemical similarities between the scallops and peas allowing this to happen seamlessly:


The very first dish was actually sitting on the table when we arrived, in the form of malted bread sticks, hidden within the flower pot and dusted with juniper (these are in the back, the strange rather furry looking things sticking through the foliage).

Along with the 23 courses came 9 incredible wines, all white, bar one rosé, all from Europe and there were some outstanding pairings with the meal, including a wine which was almost calvados in its depth.

After almost 4 hours we were left wonderfully satisfied, slightly drunk and enormously happy. Konrad and I went to a bar after this and sat in the sun, giggling like little kids about individual bites, about surprise flavours and about the experience as a whole, sipping a cold beer and lapping up the waves of emotion.

The day continued in much the same vein until around 6 o'clock the next morning, when I returned exhausted to collapse asleep for a few hours before having a very easy day the next day.

I shall simply leave you here with a slideshow of the meal. It is an expensive meal, but I can say that for anyone who loves food experiences, this is truly one of the greats, and for me, as a once every few years extravagance, I am willing to forgo a long holiday for a journey like this.

 

I should also add as an important postscipt, that I was hugely taken by Copenhagen and by the Danes in general. I would certainly love to return some time and spent a bit more time exploring that part of the world.

An attempt at a Cape Town catch up

Time simply doesn't allow to do all things I want to do, and to write about them. As of the last post my life has been taken over by the online courses I mentioned, and this means working till 2 most mornings to get through the material while having a normal time in the department during the day. I wrote the following when waiting for my plane in Cape Town, and while it's by no means a polished blog post, I want to post it before I disappear again tomorrow morning for Copenhagen. The next 3 days are part of an absurd trip which has been in the planning for several years and will come to its climactic conclusion on Thursday with lunch at NOMA.

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I find myself once again sat in a cafe, in an airport, waiting for another 12+ hours of plane flights. This time I'm in Cape Town, waiting to go via Johannesburg back to Munich. Another overnight flight, another night of watching others loll in and out of sleep as I wander the aisles trying to get tired enough to ignore the discomfort of folding my frame into a spasm-inducing gap.

Anyway, the above sounds a bit negative perhaps and the rest of the post, I hope will not be. I've met enough interesting people on flights now to know that flights have the possibility to be as enjoyable as they are ghastly.

I've spent the last three weeks in Cape Town, my second time here, and each extra day I spend here makes me realise even more what a wonderful place it is. Scenically it is almost unrivalled for a city. With the sea surrounding it and the mountain defining its geography, you are never away from a spectacular view. I've been for a couple of sundowners (a phrase I'd not heard before but means, unsurprisingly, drinks drunk during sunset, generally with a majestic view to accompany them) which have been wonderful evening highlights, a time to really sit back and appreciate.

The city itself is made up of an incredible diversity of populations and cultures, the mixing of which is often not present but always available. I've met some incredible people here, in taxis, in shops, in cafes, from refugees of Rwanda to ex-militants who fought in Umkhonto we Sizwe, the spear of the nation, the group that was the force behind the ANC when talks and peaceful action only managed to tighten the grip of Apartheid. Everyone here seems to have a story to tell and I've met so many people who are actively pushing to make the situation better. In many ways South Africa has come a long way since Apartheid, but in others it has gotten nowhere. There are many embarrassments of the current social and political situation but there are people out there who are really trying to make a difference in a non political context. One of the taxi drivers I met also worked as a coast guard guarding the local ecology from abalone poachers, who often come armed with guns during the night. This is a man who puts himself in a place of enormous danger because he cares - lessons to take from this, for sure.

I am in no way qualified to make judgement calls on the current situation but I can recommend these books that I've read over the last couple of years to give some picture of South Africa's history and recent developments. Sadly time does not allow for in depth reviews of any of them but I can say that from the point of view of someone who knew very little about Africa or its politics, these are great starters (Thanks to Ben for all of these recommendations):

The State of Africa - a history of the states of Africa since independence
Country of my skull - a journalist's eye view of the truth and reconciliation commission
My traitor's heart - a white man with a difficult family pedigree coming to terms with his place in Africa
The shackled continent (don't read this without reading The State of Africa as it will give you a terribly biased view) - a view of why things have not improved since independence. As I say, this does not give anywhere near the whole story and for the reason behind these reasons you have to read more.
Long walk to Freedom - Mandela's pre-freedom autobiography.
The autobiography of Ghandi also gives some very interesting insights into the relatively recent history of South Africa.

The trip has been as eclectic a mix as the city is and I've been both giving seminars as well as starting some collaborations with the string theory group. I gave my atmospheric optics talk to the undergraduates which is always a pleasure, though I still struggle at times not to include too much material in this talk. After this I gave a series of lectures on a particular method of machine learning as applied to neuroscience. This was my first time lecturing on a non-physics subject and it was a great experience. The subject is fascinating and thankfully there were a huge number of questions which I find always make a lecture course a lot more enjoyable. It also makes me, the lecturer, understand the topic much better when you have a lot of intelligent people giving you questions that perhaps you would never have considered.

Some light photo relief:

 The outrageously beautiful University of Cape Town campus

Ivydene guest house, where I would sit and work at the weekends under the tree with the dogs and cats resting in the garden. This is without a doubt my favourite guest house having stayed at many over the last decade or so. Lucille, who runs it is absolutely fascinating and introduced me to a slew of amazing people while I was there. Her daughter Jackie and son-in-law Rob also make the place feel like family.

And finally I gave a couple of talks about one of my last string theory papers which again was a lot of fun. The group ranges from those working in emergent geometry (how space and time can emerge from some other theory which don't include space and time as input) to AdS/QGP - how we can use string theory as a tool to understand the internal constituents of the nucleus in particular conditions. It's always good to have a diverse audience like this because, again, you get a great range of questions, from the abstract to the very practical. The outcome of this was some really nice ideas for future investigations which I hope to continue remotely.

and apart from a little socialising my life has been almost entirely overtaken with the online courses that I discussed in the previous posts. As an information addict these are truly fatal. How can I turn down a perfectly good course on automata theory given by a world expert, even if it means sleeping a few hours less a week.

The first round of courses on computer science finished a couple of weeks back which I can highly recommend, CS101 for those without much experience in programming and CS373 for the more advanced and those who may be interested in control theory and dynamical programming.

The course on natural language processing (NLP) is now over half way through and is the best taught and most instructive from the point of view of programming assignments and problem sets, of the Coursera courses I've been taking. Right now I'm struggling, along with most of the rest of the class to write our own English language parser (how do you write a computer program which can work out the logical structure of a sentence - ie. which nouns do which verbs and prepositions relate to - in the sentence "fish people fish tanks" does the word people correspond to a verb or a noun - does the second 'fish' correspond to a very or a noun, etc. These are the sorts of question that an automatic parser would try to answer in a probabilistic fashion (ie. it will find various ways to break down a sentence and give probabilities for each possibility)).

The NLP course also ties in very nicely with material in the automata course and the programming languages course from Udacity. The link being finite state machines and Markov networks.

Probabilistic Graphical Models is also very good, but it really does need 10-15 hours a week to truly understand the material. This is a large investment and something that I will probably split over two runs through the material.

In other news, the publication I was working on about Malaria has now been accepted for publication which is great to have finished. More work is ahead on this front and there are some very exciting possibilities in the pipeline. Through the same link that gave me the Malaria connection (many thanks Victor!) we've started also on another investigation into an area called medical ethnography - a subject whose existence I was unaware of until I dove into some data analysis on a related project. This area is related to the interaction between society, ethnological behaviour and medical practice and is so far very interesting to work on.

So, with the above I have very little time for a normal life right now. I work until late at night including at weekends on these projects and courses, which is great in terms of learning and in terms of the excitement of pursuing new areas of investigation but I am aware that this is not a sustainable pace. I am also aware that I am out of a job in 7 months and am desperately trying to mold a future which will be interesting, sustainable, economically viable and will allow for some constancy in my life. Most of these factors are falling into place, it's just the small matter of economics which may be the biggest hurdle. It's easy to find people with whom I can work on interesting projects, it's not so easy to get them to pay me for it. The thinking cap is on and I have a few ideas as to how to construct this Rube-Goldberg machine of a life out of gaffer tape and fuzzy felt.

Lightning and thunder and drum and bass

Blog posts remain half written and history becomes irrelevant. I've got a dozen minor stories from the last few weeks written up but they all seem rather parochial on re-reading them. A trip into the Alps a couple of weeks back with two friends, cycling through the forests and mountains was the highlight of the last few weeks. The weather has however been unseasonably bad and so good intentions to repeat the trip have fallen on soggy ground. The bad weather did at least bring one positive note which has been plenty of powerful storms. One of them came as I was safely at home and though the view from my window is mostly of trees and the block of flats the other side of the road, I carefully set up my camera with a 10mm wide angle lens and so was able to capture some of the lightening with long exposure takes:

Apart from this, the photography has been on hold for the moment, though I've found a shop who is keen on selling some of my work so I'll head out on a picture hunt this weekend for some more Munich scenery.

Work has been very busy and I really need a break, which thankfully is coming in about 3 weeks - I've got to the point where my attention span is seriously lacking and I have to lock myself up in a room somewhere, out of the way of any electronic devices in order to concentrate on reading. In the mean time I got a new paper out last week and have a new one due in the coming days. The one coming has been a big effort, of numerics and of understanding but in the end we're very happy with the result.

On the going out and having fun front I discovered a new place last night. Planning on spending a quiet night in I got a last minute text from a friend, suggesting we head to a drum and bass and dubstep event - This was not to be missed, and in the end it was as much fun as I'd hoped! I've been going out about once a weekend recently, last weekend to the tenth anniversary party of a magazine that a friend writes for - lots of good music, lots of fun, especially with the two Russians and one Ukrainian Couchsurfer who were staying at my place. Most of the events I've been going to are full of the pretty fashionable strata of the Munich scene, and frankly I can't keep up. I get the idea of fashion, and I'd hope that compared to the stereotype (not necessarily the reality) of a physicist I do just about ok. But I find myself questioning the meaning and motivation behind fashion frequently and frankly I find myself confused most of the time. A very fashionable friend lent me some of his clothes when, after a dinner party, I was considered not well-dressed enough to go out to the place we were heading (this wasn't as harsh a decision as it may sound - I just wasn't dressed right for the place we were going). I was given some great clothes and headed out. The result was that I got a fair few complements on my clothes - but this did nothing more than dissuade me. I was the same person as always, just with some different colours and cuts. I didn't see why I was deserving of a compliment, or, put another way, why I was supposed to be somehow 'better' than my normal self. Although I do understand it, the whole thing feels more or less meaningless when I try and analyse it and I end up frustrated with the seeming weight that is given to the different facets of those we meet. That said, yes, I'm human, and yes aesthetics are important to me too, I guess though that on the fashion front I just don't attach that much value, though I also, hypocritically, appreciate it when someone dresses well. Perhaps this is all a self-pitying statement trying to excuse my lack of fashion senses - who knows?!

Anyway, the whole point about the above schpeel is that the event last night was completely the opposite. At a drum and bass event nobody cares what you're wearing and this felt really refreshing. People are there to dance and have a good time and this lack of pressure is wonderfully refreshing. I'll continue to go to the more trendy places, as some of my good friends here are fashionable enough and kind enough to not only go there but to invite me along too, but it's nice to have found a good contrast to this part of the Munich scene as well.

Anyway, I have 1000 Chinese flashcards to catch up on, two papers to write and a dozen other tasks to finish before I can head to the gym - better get on with it!

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.

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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.

Full circle to Buenos Aires

My South America trip has come full circle and I'm back in Buenos Aires, having flown from Santiago de Chile this morning. The last few days have been exciting and surreal and for some reason, still unknown to me, I had my 15 minutes of Chilean fame (ok, mild fame, but I'll take that too). The last two days have seen interviews with three different papers, including one which promises to go into Chile's biggest magazine, El Mercurio, a videoed interview and a couple of rather odd photoshoots. This was all in relation to my talk on Atmospheric Optics which was the first in hopefully a series of talks for the general public in Andres Bello University, one of the top private universities in Chile. The talk itself went pretty well, with plenty of questions once the students got their confidence up and my first experience of being simultaneously translated. I ran through the basics of the talk with the translators beforehand to make sure there wasn't too much jargon, and the only thing they wanted in the end to look at in detail was the quote from Descartes which I include on the section about rainbows:

"A single ray of light has a pathetic repertoire, limited to bending and bouncing (into water, glass or air, and from mirrors). But when rays are put together into a family - sunlight, for example - the possibilities get dramatically richer. This is because a family of rays has the holistic property, not inherent in any individual ray, that it can be focused so as to concentrate on caustic lines and surfaces. Caustics are the brightest places in an optical field. They are the singularities of geometrical optics. The most familiar caustic is the rainbow, a grossly distorted image of the Sun in the form of a giant arc in the skyspace of directions, formed by the angular focusing of sunlight that has been twice refracted and once reflected in raindrops." 

Still the most poetic explanation of a rainbow I've come across.

Anyway, there are still adventures galore to catch up on, but these, as normal will have to wait. For now I thought I'd share some of the photos I've just put up on Flickr from the trip across the Andes by bus from Bariloche to Valdivia, where I gave an enjoyable two hour talk. The seminars in Valdivia are legendary for their questions and the idea, which I highly approve of, is that there should be no time limit, but that the talk goes on until the speaker wants to stop, or the audience truly understands what is being said. The atmosphere is really wonderful and although there are a huge number of questions, none of them is aggressive, and I get the impression that the members of CECS in Valdivia really have a deeper understanding of a larger range of subjects than the average group of theoretical physicists, largely due to this atmosphere of probing questions.

Anyway, the trip to Valdivia was stunning (I was lucky enough to see the Andes from above today as we flew straight over the top with perfect clear skies. I sat in my seat itching to get the camera out but there's no moving around until you're clear of the peaks) and although from the bus I didn't manage to get any good shots of the higher mountains themselves, the snowy scenes were pretty spectacular. This was the lake skirting Bariloche town centre as we pulled out early in the morning, with the morning fog resting on the water

And the tree lined roads leading up into the Andes:

Getting to Valdivia I met my Couchsurfing host and we went for a quick stroll down the river where the sealions were basking in the rather unusual sun (Valdivia is reknowned for its constant rain):

So, I leave South America on Sunday, though I'm sure I'll be back. It's been a good trip for giving talks, a fascinating trip for talking with lots of great physicist, an excellent month for thinking of new ideas, but in terms of sitting down and calculating, it's been pretty tough. Moving from place to place isn't conducive, at least for me, to deep concentration and now I'm really looking forward to getting back and having two weeks in Santiago to try and finish some long overdue calculations before heading off again for weddings and a two week stay at a long term program in Vienna...it doesn't stop.

Fading memories from Croatia

Where to start? It's only been two weeks but the littlest things that caught my attention and I wanted to write about have slowly faded and I'm left without the words that came to me at the time to explain as vividly as I'd like quite what went on.

Talking of vivid however, I was hoping, as I walked into work a couple of days back that the cirrus clouds and the quickly rising sun would do their dance and end up giving us something special towards midday. As we went to lunch at around 1.30, the white crests below the sun which had risen above 58 degrees started glowing with vibrant reds, yellows and blues as I got my first ever display of a circumhorizon arc. These, most colourful of halos, are only visible in the summer when the sun rises high enough in the sky, and therefore there is a latitude above and below which they can never be seen. The Northern Europeans may get the best winter halos but we get the best summer ones! No pictures of the CHA itself, but I got a few shots later in the day as the clouds maneuvered themselves into and out of the local optical geodesics. I have to do a little more reading up at the moment on this subject as I'll be giving three or four lectures on atmospheric optics in Argentina and Chile over the coming month.

Anyway, step back a couple of weeks and the last post saw a rather sleepy me sitting in a North London front room waiting for my taxi to Stansted. I've since discovered that the taxi costs almost as much as getting a discount room in the Hilton right next to the airport, which is what I did on the way back. The slightly later time to get up, along with the gym, sauna and swimming pool made this a much more pleasant way to not get much sleep!

So, I flew from London to Dubrovnik where the sun was fierce and the drive along the coast from the airport gave a hint of the stunning blue, green waters which would be the site of a few wonderful afternoon swims over the coming days.

I checked into my hostel which had been pre-heated to boiling point and wandered into town where I got my first taste of tourist prices thanks to a few slices of smoked salmon and some notably tasty horseradish hollandaise. Over the next couple of days I met a bunch of interesting people in the hostel from around the world and spent time reading papers and books in the old town. Two good friends from Santiago also turned up and we spent a couple of perfect afternoons reverting to teenage years by jumping off cliffs and reveling in the ease of swimming in salty water.

(The walk from the hostel to the old town:)

and the view from the cafe Alex and I were working in in the centre of the old town:)

Time to relax ran out fast as we headed up the coast to Trpanj (emphasis on the Tr with a slightly rolled r and the nj sounds a little like a Spanish ñ) where the school on black holes was being held (we had somehow held court the previous day when we met an American woman who discovered she'd lucked out with a bunch of scientists and we gave an impromptu lesson on the practice and philosophy of modern theoretical physics - this happened on a number of occasions when I mentioned what we were doing in Croatia). Trpanj is a town on a T-junction which would be a lot worse were the vertical not to lie in the valley of two mountains and the cross-bar not to meet the Adriatic sea. The main road plays host to a bunch of almost identical restaurants which serve a fairly small range of pretty tasty meals.

The same view at night with a 30 second exposure - the colours are not altered in this shot:

In terms of food we realised pretty quickly that although similar to the Croatian fare, the most famous Bosnian restaurant in Dubrovnik, the curiously named Taj Mahal, seemed to offer a much better selection of dishes than any local restaurant we could find - the cheeses and steaks were really superb.

Anyway, the school itself was fantastic, with the most relaxed atmosphere of any school I've been to. Although there was a rough time-table drawn up, the lectures started and finished when the dynamic in the room dictated and so all of the talks (which were given on the black board) had a good pace where the lecturers could really expound to their heart's content. For me the highlight of the school was a series of talks by Gaston Giribet on 3-dimensional gravity. I'm hoping to be able to learn some more on this subject in South America over the next few weeks where much of the early work on this subject was pioneered.

The final talk of the school was a discussion session led by Holger Nielson (Of backwards causality from Higgs production at the LHC fame). While I may not subscribe to all his thoughts on black holes, he's an extremely knowledgeable guy and the session turned out to be thoroughly thought provoking, leading to a good deal of chat about black hole information as we walked away from the blackboard towards another meat-heavy meal.

After the school I headed back to Dubrovnik, hitchhiking from Trpanj with Alex and on arrival we were propositioned by an elderly lady asking if we'd like to stay at her house. Strange as this may sound it actually turns out to be by far the best way to stay in Dubrovnik, and from what I understand, this holds true for much of Eastern Europe. We had a whole apartment to ourselves and paid less than we paid for a bunk in a smelly, hot room in a hostel.

We spent the last couple of days seeing a few more sights and kayaking around one of the local islands, before saying our goodbyes and heading in separate directions. Having spent a good deal of the last half a year with Alex and his family, discussing physics till early in the morning, cooking outrageously tasty meals and getting into plenty of adventures it was a rather sad goodbye, having already had to say my farewells to Eliina and Sahtah (wife and daughter) a short while earlier.

So, I find myself now back in Santiago with a couple of new projects on the go (we're up to four at the moment) and several talks to write for South America. Come Thursday I'll be heading back to England for the stag do of one of my good friends before leaving on the 15th for Buenos Aires where a great mix of adventures and physics awaits me during a month of intensive travels - Tickets are booked for the various legs of the journey and I can't wait to get there and indulge my physics/travel passions in one fell swoop.

Off to Dubrovnik

Just waiting for the taxi at 5.30 in the morning after little sleep to head from Hartford to Stanford airport on my way to Croatia and minute now. Bags packed full of papers and books, and possibly a little suncream, and thoroughly looking forward to getting to know a new city before diving into the Black Holes school. During this time I have plenty to do to prepare for a trip to South America next month where I have a half dozen talks already lined up around Argentina and Chile plus a couple more colloquia on Atmospheric Optics to present. This all happens with only a week in between in Santiago (de Compostela) and an immense amount to organise in between, plus the KITPC program I'm arranging looming up quickly. It's these early mornings which give me a few moments to reflect and breath, but for now the taxi is pulling in and I gotta dash...

Arrival in Cape Town

We come to the end of the craziest week in some considerable time, as I sit in the 'tree' (only by name) apartment in a self-catering guest house a short walk from the University of Cape Town and in the shadow of Table Mountain.

The week started off with my first Tango lesson, which passed without too much bloodshed or too many twisted ankles. Sadly as I'll be traveling pretty constantly for the rest of the year, this is only going to be a very occasional occurrence but I'll see if I can get in a couple more lessons before going to Buenos Aires in July.

Tuesday saw my first ever performance on the Geiger Counter at the quantum music festival in front of a crowd of several hundred

videos to follow. While Wednesday and Thursday evenings saw music courtesy of Emir Kusturica and some fine blues players in Dado Dada.

Friday the fun began for real.

Friday afternoon I headed over to Paris to meet up with a good friend from Beijing, who, five years ago got me involved with the Couchsurfing scene. I've since hosted well over 100 people in my place in Santiago, thanks to this connection and it has been a fantastic aspect of life since then, getting to know people from all over the world and, something which has been an added bonus, to be able to explain many aspects of my work and science in general to a huge audience of people who are interested but generally come from non-scientific backgrounds. Being able to share the passion of what I do is a real pleasure and in return I find out about cultures from every corner of the world, usually accompanied by some fine local cooking.

Anyway, so I spent the night in Paris, going out to a few bars and meeting a very international crowd in the Richard Lenoir and Oberkampf districts, before getting up slightly woozy headed on Saturday, making my way to CDG airport and flying to Istanbul. I was advised by the air stewardesses that I wouldn't have time to go into the city but I got the name of a good restaurant from them and, with newly acquired visa in hand, I took a taxi to the banks of the Bosphorus to the site where the first light house sits, on the inlet from the sea of Marmaris as the river makes its way into the city.

I sat watching the sunset and had an excellent meal (though outrageously overpriced - had I had more time I would definitely have gone somewhere a lot, lot cheaper) before heading back to the airport and waiting for another four hours as the flight was delayed (in the mean time I bought the most expensive cup of coffee I'd ever bought - at over 5 euros I thought I must have been mistaken but sadly it was already in my hands when I discovered that this was truly the price!

From Istanbul I flew with Turkish airlines (who served some of the best in-flight meals I've ever had) to Johannesburg where we waited for an hour to refuel before coming to Cape Town where I sit now in a beautiful apartment and wait for sleep to roll over my tired eyes.

It's going to be a very busy couple of weeks here but I'll do my best to update when possible.

African adventure, part V, South Africa to Mozambique

and so began the most ridiculous day of the trip, if not the decade...

We knew that it was going to be a long day so we arose at 6, and were packed and in the car by 6.30, ready to leave the Lower Sabie camp in Kruger National Park where we had spent the last three days. It was good friday and the storm from the night before was easing off, but hadn't completely ceased. The roads were wet and we feared that this might mean trouble later on as we headed into Mozambique.

We didn't count on the trouble arising quite as soon as it did. We went South to the Crocodile bridge exit of the park and an hour later, after saying our final farewells to the giraffes, elephants and herds of impala (having failed to see a single rhino in the trip) we draw close to the gate. Between us and the gate however was Crocodile bridge, a bridge unlike any I had seen before, submerged as it was in water in the middle section, the river surging over it for a good few meters. In our non four-wheel drive such a sight filled us with dread. The only other way out of the park would mean a couple of hundred extra kilometers, so we sat, watching the water flood over the bridge and working out our possibilities. M suggested getting out of the car to take a look at how deep the central section was submerged but reminding her that crocodile bridge was so named for good reason put this plan out of the picture.

Thankfully ahead of us were a few other cars, also working out their plans of attack. First a couple of 4x4s braved the water and got through safely, the wheels submerging in the center by a good foot or so of racing waters. After this another estate made it through, tentatively but safely and so, with baited breath we made our way towards the torrent. We have a video of the moments driving through the floodwater, as the possibilities of a single slip raced through our minds but the video is not in my possession at the moment, I'll attempt to upload it as soon as possible. Anyway, thankfully we did make it through without any problems but with slightly heightened blood pressure and pulse-rates.

After a little bureaucratic arguing (lack of certain necessary tickets etc.) we made it out of the park and back onto the public roads of South Africa, making our way towards the boarder control between SA and Mozambique. We had been told to expect chaos and delays of up to a couple of hours, but there were factors that we hadn't taken into account.

It took another hour or so to get to the border control, or at least close to it, with pretty reasonable road conditions and only minor drizzle along the way but as we draw closer a thought dawned on us. This was not just any day but Good Friday, a public holiday in South Africa and a day that many would be traveling for a weekend break into neighbouring Mozambique. The queue that greeted us was truly monumental and we ground to a halt in a completely stationary line more than a kilometer from the border itself. Trucks, families in 4x4s, businessmen, South Africans, Mozambicans and holiday makers from abroad filled the road with an exodus of vehicles of biblical proportions....and nothing was moving save for a line of cars which seemed not to care about the thousands in front of them and would simply drive along the other side of the road only to be turned back at the frontier.

We got out to speak to people and find out what the situation was, a friendly South African woman walking with me to the front of the line to see what was going on. The gun-toting police at the front-line were pretty friendly and helpful given the situation and explained that we simply had to be patient and that we should sit tight for the next few hours.

A couple of photos of the queue, and us, sitting patiently:

After walking to the front of the line and trying to get through the pedestrian section (as advised by our helpful SA lady) and getting turned back by a rather less friendly man with a gun, we spent the next couple of hours in the car getting to the first post.

Eventually we made it in and started the bureucratic process of exporting ourselves and the car into Mozambique. K dealt with the car's paperwork and was sweet-talked by a guy who very kindly helped him fill in the forms for the car, pushed into the line for us and promptly disappeared, telling us that he would see us on the Mozambican side with the correct pieces of paper. Having been scammed enough times in my life it seemed sensible not to go with this option so K filled in the forms himself, stood in the queue and got a new copy of all the relevant documents. We had a little trouble later on on the other side when we claimed to know nothing about the guy waving a duplicate copy of our documents and asking for money. Thankfully this didn't deteriorate into anything worse.

So, SA side dealt with we made our way into no-man's land and towards the Mozambican side of the border control. At this point things took a turn for the crazy. It turns out that Mozambique is the only country in the world to have weapon on its flag, and they have wisely chosen an AK-47. These you see all over the place and although these days the country is relatively peaceful, there is a constant reminder of the violent past that it has been through, devastating the land (there are still areas of the land unsafe to walk on because of the landmines), the infrastructure and the economy along the way. At the border control you are met with a difficult situation, not wanting to put a foot out of line, but simultaneously realising that you simply can't take the kosher route.

The black/white divide is of course enormous and as soon as you arrive as a car load of white people you are approached by dozens of Mozambicans offering to help you out. At first we turned all of these down, making our way to the queue, and wanting to go through all of this in the most official way possible, but it soon became clear that the chaos would make this almost impossible, with a dozen lines all merging and circulating to different desks with a plethora of forms, punctuated by perplexed looking white-folk and helpful looking Mozambicans. After getting thoroughly confused for a while we found a 4x4 full of Afrikaans South Africans who had just successfully had their documents sorted out by one of the badged unofficials. We figured that if they had got through the process in one piece this way then it was probably the best option, and indeed this seemed to be the way that 99% of the SA holiday makers were getting through the controls, only a small fee being paid at the end.

We handed over our documents to the guy who seemed friendly and completely unofficial and saw him disappear into the distance. I walked around for a bit, bumped into the woman who had helped us out on the SA side and asked her if what we were doing was sensible. Yes, she replied, as long as you don't lose sight of your passports! My heart sank, realising what it would mean to lose our passports, sat in the middle of no-man's land without an embassy in sight and a million other people dashing around. The ease with which someone could have taken our passports was frightening and so we ran to find the guy who had our identities in his hands. Thankfully it didn't take too long to find him and he was busy filling in the forms for us. From this point on, we stayed with him, making chit-chat and keeping an eye on our passports at every second.

After an hour of filling in forms and waiting for him in various queues we were ready to go, paid him his fee, took a deep breath and headed towards the point where we would have to give the forms at the very border itself. Thankfully this passed completely without incident, as the woman took the forms without looking at them and placed them on top of the large pile of other forms which had collected through the morning.

By this point 6 hours had passed since we left the camp and we were only at the border - we had expected to be at this point within a couple of hours at the most.

As we drove into Mozambique the contrast with what we had previously seen was startling, with huts dotting the hillside along the road, people all over the streets, selling foods cooked in pots precariously placed on mosquito infested puddles and police all along the roadside stopping anyone they thought might not have the right documents, or at least who might have enough cash to improve their lunch options. We had been warned that the police would stop you for the slightest possible speeding violation or traffic infringement, but through some miracle we weren't stopped at a single control point.

We also noticed quickly the number of trucks and cars stopped by the side of the road with punctured tyres, and as we sped along in our polo estate the possibility of the same happening to us didn't do much to still our anxieties.

Having traveled a reasonable amount, I've never really experienced shock at arriving in a new country, always prepared for stark differences, but the immediate chaos and contrasts on going from SA to Mozambique was really quite astounding. I simply hadn't expected such a distinction, though knowing the history of the two countries, I probably should have.

We made our way towards Maputo, where our GPS was guiding us on the way up through to Inhambane, further North on the coast. The roads, though busy were not slow and we stopped by the side of the road to get something to eat, having eaten almost nothing since the night before. We stopped into a gas station and picked up some fairly tasteless meat sandwiches, but at this point we were fussy.

We passed around the outskirts of Maputo and it quickly became clear that we had not escaped the worst of the Good Friday traffic as those in the capital having a half day left for work and headed out of the city. we ground to a halt in the chaos of the ring-round going around the city and edged forwards for the next 3 hours, attempting to avoid hitting anyone or being hit by one of the kamikaze local mini-buses packed like sardines and tilting dangerously to one side or the other. These mini-buses would cause us no end of stress for the remaining journey.

Getting out of Maputo at around 3 we started on our way to Xai-Xai, the next major stop along the way. The road between the two was pot-holed and full of people and the crunches which we had to endure every time there was no way to get around a collection of holes in the tarmac jarred our spines at every encounter.

We were due to meet our friend Ben up in Inhambane and with the GPS had no worries about getting there, but we had no address, and the lack of mobile signal left us rather worried. Buying a local sim-card didn't seem to help either as it refused to work in any of our phones.

We took the route to Xai-Xai in the fastest time possible given the conditions and arrived there around 7 in the evening, exhausted from being on the lookout for pot-holes literally every second of the way. We stopped into another gas-station and filled up on terrible sliced cheese and even worse croissant (this wasn't our will to disregard the local fare, but simply the only obvious option available at the time). Eventually we found a small shop in a hut which had a phone an I used by best Portuñol (Spanish with a mock Portuguese accent and a few noted phenomic transformations thrown in when appropriate) to ask to call out. We got through to Ben, hoping that he would tell us that we should stay in Xai-Xai for the night and make our way to Inhambane the next day, but he said that it was worth pushing on - the tiring option but probably the best.

We got back in the car and drove for the next two hours on something akin to a pot-holed beach, attempting to avoid falling into ditches, crashing into other cars (something that others didn't quite manage as there were a couple of horrific accidents along the way), or getting stuck in the sand. During the day, passing the slower trucks had been ok as one could normally see how far away the oncoming cars were. The darkness brought with it new dangers as it was impossible to gauge the distance and the sand and dust thrown up by the trucks made this doubly difficult. After this we had another few hours but at least the worst of the major road had been dealt with.

We played games and sang songs to keep ourselves awake and alert and somehow made our way safely up North. As the time drew on it became increasingly difficult to stay awake but the promise of a bed and a bite to eat at the end was enough to keep the sparse quantities of energy recycling. Finally a little after midnight we made our way into Inhambane, having avoided all the drunken partygoers who had lined the streets at the local drinking shacks along the way. At this point the GPS was as tired as we were and started to get confused with where to go and our final destination was not on the system at all. We managed once more to get through to Ben who gave us directions to get to the beach hut and we headed out of Inhambane and onto the dirt tracks. An hour later we knew we were in the right area but phoning and finding that we had taken a wrong turn drained our last ounces of energy. Ben, Ryan and Ode drove to us and guided our final kilometers to the beach hut where, after 19 hours on the road, with a total of a half hour break we were finally able to collapse in what appeared to be a little piece of paradise.

19 hours on the road where every second you are watching out for animals, drunkards, potholes and oncoming maniacs is outrageously tiring and it took a good couple of days of doing nothing to recover from this. The fact that K had driven the whole thing without anything but vocal help and encouragement makes the man a true hero. K, we salute you!!!

After the chaos of the drive up,  we'll have a few photos from a far more relaxed few days!

Santiago-London-Johannesburg-Maputo and back again

Yesterday I felt, for the first time in a long time, the fibers of my body, without the flow of energy which usually accompanies such filaments. This week was an exhausting push to get a paper finished, which culminated in three days of virtually non-stop work, coding, writing, calculating, talking over syntax and interpretation, figures, angles and resolutions. A piece of Mathematica code I had written a few weeks ago was cut down by several hundred lines, a great satisfaction, simultaneously frustrating in the realisation that I had been complicating matters until then. But now I am drained. As the adrenalin left my body yesterday, a vacuum was left in its place, a scant few molecules of ATP keeping things ticking over.

Anyway, last night I slept a good 6 hours and I'm feeling refreshed this morning, back into the normal weekend routine as Santiago once more treats us to a downpour.

And now what? Now we have more to do for the next installment on this work but first I have a holiday coming up. Last year a couple of good friends I know from Santiago moved to Maputo in Mozambique where one of them has a job working as a governmental consultant. I promised that I would visit the Easter break here seemed the perfect time. So, on Thursday I head off with a couple of other friends, via London for a couple of days, through Dubai and into Johannesburg where we will pick up a car, drive through Kruger National Park and make our way into Mozambique. Until today I've barely had time to think about it, but right now I just can't wait! We will have less than two weeks in Africa but I'm thoroughly looking forward to the experience.

So, for now, lots to get ready and plenty of papers to print out to take along for the beaches of Mozambique! I'll do my best to blog from the trip and update with pictures wherever possible.

Santiago-A Coruna-Leon-Oviedo-Ferrol-A Coruna-Santiago

I'm busy these days reading up on a new line of research with some of the others here in Santiago, and enjoying it hugely. It's nice to see things afresh and coming across a few authors whose work I have never read before but I find to be superb writers is a pleasure. Anyway, as I let the new thoughts sink in I thought I'd update the last weeks events.

Last weekend I headed away with a Couchsurfing friend to Oviedo, in Asturias (just East of Galicia) via Leon, where we enjoyed some rich morcilla and fine embutidos before gorging on Asturian fabada and some of the finest cheeses in Spain. Both Leon and Oviedo have picturesque, traditional old centres, centering around a Cathedral, with windy streets leading off, easing into the newer areas of the cities. On a Sunday afternoon, when everyone else is with their families or siestaring, these are lovely places to walk aimlessly around.

Getting back to Santiago was a rather mammoth task as we took the train (Feve), six and a half hours through the lush Asturian and Galician countrysides, up along the Northern coast. The view is stunning and if you are not in a rush I would highly recommend taking this trip. The train arrives into Ferrol which, at 9.30 at night, is not well connected to Santiago so I found myself couchsurfing in A Coruna before heading back early the next day to Santiago on the train.

Anyway, now we find ourselves at Friday once more and the weekend looks to be full of reading, but from where I'm sitting this is quite an enjoyable option for now.

I'll leave you with a few photos taken from my flickr photostream. More can be found here and all can be seen in larger format.

The cathedral roof in Leon:

and that of a church in Oviedo:

plus a little fun with the zoom lens above the Cathedral in Oviedo:

and Santa María del Naranco, a pre-Romanesque shrine overlooking Oviedo:

Currently the first photo on the stream is that of yaure, a Cuban friend whom we met in Oviedo. A trumpeter who, when asked if he had seen the Bueno Vista Social club responded coyly that he was IN the Buena Vista Social Club! We will definitely be seeing them next time they are touring in Spain!

Anyway, for now have a great weekend!

On chaos and the teaching of mathematics, in no particular order

The normal busyness continues apace but I fancy punctuating this chaos with a little update. I'm currently doing some proofreading of a book (not my own) which is both fascinating and densely packed with information (I'll reveal details when possible). At the same time I'm attempting to get two papers finished before Christmas and if at all possible next week.

Ah, yes, and I'm back in Santiago, if only briefly. My carbon footprint continues to increase month on month and December is no exception as I had to come back to Santiago for a week in between my Dublin trip and Christmas. After an 11 hour mammoth journey back to Spain on Thursday (starting from Oxford at 4am and culminating in a 4pm collapse back home) I have lots of things to finish before I head off again on Thursday including giving a short talk to the postdocs and grad students in the department. I'll be introducing in 15 minutes the depths of string theory, gauge theories, the problems with strong coupling dynamics, AdS/CFT and its applications to heavy ion physics, and more importantly why they should care about all this. This will be aimed at a diverse audience ranging from the groups which work on non-linear systems to those in nanotechnology and beyond. Anyway, it'll be a challenge but it should be a fun one.

Christmas farewells are filling the evenings, with a big party last night (in which I managed to make sushi for a group of 30+ whilst avoiding food poisoning, the latter being my principle triumph) and dinners until I leave but somehow I have to get these papers finished and as much of the book proofread as possible in the meantime (snide comments about my own bad spelling are not strictly necessary/neccessarry/necisary/nessacary).

On the night before coming back to Spain I had dinner with a friend of my parents, an ex maths teacher who has spent a great deal of time attempting to spread his ideas for teaching maths not only more effectively, but in a way which avoids the building up of the normal hierarchy of students in a class which leads to a range of bad feeling between those who can and those who can't. The method is simple and I'd like to talk more about this some time, but the basic idea is to get the students to read out a very short section from an appropriately chosen text book following which another student will explain what the section means. I think this is an extremely intelligent way to get pupils not only to be able to solve maths problems but to truly understand the workings of mathematics as they are introduced to it. Far too much emphasis is put on getting kids to learn through repetition of solving problems and not enough is put on building up the background of true understanding which is needed for getting onto ever more complex concepts without getting lost in the forest of terminology and notation. Clearly problem solving itself is necessary for polishing the edges but problem solving is infinitely easier if one has a thorough understand of the internal workings of mathematics rather than simply knowing how to turn the handle.  Unfortunately it seems that getting teachers to try this method is extremely difficult, especially in the current climate where schools are terrified of trying anything new for fear of dropping down the league tables - one of several curses of the current UK education system. Anyway, I'd love to devote some more time to discussing this so we'll see if the Christmas 'break' allows. Until then, it's back to reading and typing...

Atempia

Ten hours on a train from Beijing to Shanghai, eleven hours in a plane from Shanghai to Frankfurt, an hour from Frankfurt to Heathrow, an hour and a half in a bus from Heathrow to Stansted, four hours on the floor overnight in Stansted airport, two hours stood in queues in Stansted, two hours from Stansted to Santiago - home, tired, happy, in need of nutrients, will update when lucid thoughts flow with less interuption from bodily needs.

Barcelona on the fly

 All is well here in Barcelona where I've spent the last couple of days at a meeting between the Spanish heavy ion and AdS/CFT communities. It's been an intense two days where the talks have been excellent and I've had a good chance to speak to people from all around Spain about various pieces of work. In particular it has been good to catch up with some current collaborators from Madrid with whom a project is currently ongoing.

I'll have a couple of hours of sightseeing tomorrow before taking the plane back to Santiago where I'll have a pile of projects to be getting on with. This weekend looks like a full working weekend so you may not hear much from me for a few days...we'll see...

Always with the if onlys

I happened to stumble across an old post of mine, from back in the era of cold Beijing nights and surreal days which promised the unexpected around every corner. I've been away from there for over a year now, but it stays in your blood - everyone I know who has spent serious time there attests to this. The feelings of true love for that city are those of a stormy relationship, with highs and lows which even in retrospect bring back vivid feelings of elation and desolation.

In fact it wasn't the content of this particular post that I was reading, written around two years ago which caught my attention, but a little twang of nostalgia for the days that I took great pride in sculpting a post, paying attention to the flow and rhythm of every sentence and, on occasion if I was very lucky, causing others to comment that they had enjoyed the insights, the weirdness, the humour, or simply the string of words.

These days I'm busy, really really busy. I've had to slow down the social activities a little as I've turned my days inside out. Spending time in the office in the day and the library at night, reading the piles of papers that await my attention does not make for a very sociable timetable. I'm learning, I'm playing with new tools and ideas, and I'm enjoying it a lot, I would even go so far to say that I feel a current boost of creativity. But still the call of the open road was brought to my attention by the piece of writing that I put forth not so many moons ago.

Anyway, despite the momentum of work which I've promised myself will go on for the next couple of months at least - provided I don't burn out, I do feel the need to explore. Once again I'm feeling a little hemmed in by this beautiful, but undeniably small city. I want to get out at the weekends occasionally for an adventure, and though I enjoy my weekend trips to the local cafe where I continue with work, somehow I'm not feeling fulfilled by the current balance. It's a difficult balance to strike however, and the guilt and drive of wanting to get the work done must be carefully offset against my natural need for new stimuli.

Anyway, this Sunday I'll be heading to Madrid for the AdS collective at the beginning of next week, so I'm not going to be able to escape this time. However, I'll see what I can cook up for the coming weekends and hopefully look to post something more in line with what I have always envisioned this blog to be about.

Madrid in a flash

I returned last night from Madrid, where I've spent the last three days at the Christmas meeting where I was giving a talk and talking with some of the local researchers with whom we hope to start something in the New Year. The workshop was good, but intense and included a variety of topics, from the latest from the Pierre Auger cosmic ray observatory in Argentina, to the latest excitement on the M2-brane mini revolution. We also had a very interesting talk on the accident at the LHC whch gave an idea of the scale of the damage and what was now being done. Indeed the weak-links between the magnets are now being fixed in a number of other possibly vulnerable sectors. The good news was that there were spare magnets for every one which was damaged and it looks like this hasn't pushed the project into the red in any way.

Anyway, a quick picture I took on the way back from the workshop on Friday of this amazing leaning tower close to the Plaza de Castilla.


Anyway, last night my flight back to Santiago made a total of 26 trips this year which could go some way to explaining my current state of exhaustion. I still have a few things to finish off before Christmas including two conference proceedings which just have to be checked a final time, and a couple of calculations I'd really like to get done before I relax completely.

Tomorrow I head back to England where I'll spend a few days at home before running around the country to catch up with friends I haven't seen since doing the same thing last year.

The New Year holds a feast of possibilities which certainly can't be fit into a 12 months so I'll have to see how my time-stretching abilities are working and perhaps give up something to make a little more...sleeping should be first out of the window.

A couple more updates due before Christmas, but for now there's lots to be organised before heading home.

Interlude

Now in Dublin after a long day yesterday. I spent a tiring but surprisingly enjoyable five hours at the airport in Madrid waiting for the second leg of my journey but a discussion of the strange mix of mathematics and neuroscience I had a chance to read will have to wait.

I'll be giving a seminar tomorrow but will try and write something up tonight if my talk is looking in shape by then.

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.

End of travel adventures for the summer

I spent the last couple of days in Taegu, Daegu, 대구, mostly at Keimyung university, which has truly one of the most beautiful campuses I've ever visited, set as it is in the mountains surrounding Korea's third largest city.

I came back today on the very comfortable 300 km/h KTX train and arrived into Seoul at around 9 this evening. Tomorrow is my last day in Korea. My stay here, for a little over three weeks, has been extremely useful and I certainly feel as this rather ridiculous summer of work/travel draws to a close that talking with so many people over the last two months has been well worth the tiredness that I'm now succumbing too.

Tomorrow I fly in the evening to Hong Kong, stay there for a few hours, before heading to the UK where I'll spend 48 hours before getting back to Spain in time to go to work on Monday morning. Unfortunately I'm due to land in England around 5 am on Friday morning and given my usual inability to sleep at all on flights, I'm expecting my body clock to be all out of kilter for a few days.

Anyway, with this last post before I head back home I'll leave you with a photo from the Royal Palace in Seoul, which I visited on Sunday - some shameless HDR (click for larger versions)