Showing posts with label Dave Feldman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dave Feldman. Show all posts

Friday, August 03, 2007

beginnings and endings

End of a tiring, stormy week. The CSSS summer school, which I've popped along to when I had some free minutes, has been fantastic and very well organised by Dave Feldman and others, lots to think about after that. New projects taking off, others fluttering to the ground, some of them falling harder than others, papers in the making.

Less than three months to go here in China so plans are afoot for travels both work related (I'm presenting at a school in Wuhan in a week or so) and extra-curricula (plans for doing China in October have been scaled down to tackling Sichuan for two weeks at the end of my stay).

In the humid, stormy summer months I feel like I'm running low on steam a little. The program starting here on string cosmology in September should certainly perk things up and there are still many things to see here in Beijing before I leave.

The huge midweek storms were not captured on camera as my camera had been lent to a movie director (who needed a digital SLR). He was the same movie director who came down with appendicitis earlier in the week and so the camera was inaccessible. He has now, quickly, recovered, thus the camera is back.

A random end of the week post I'm afraid.

Anyway, before a friend's birthday last Saturday I was stood in Wudaokou taking shots of the local hustle and bustle and got a fun shot of some of the Wudaokouites whizzing about on their scooters.
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Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Random computations

There's an amazing looking summer school going on here at the moment. Run by Chaotic Soliloquy's Dave Feldman, the Complex Systems Summer School is about as diverse as any I've ever seen. Though I'm not officially attending I'll try and pop along to some of the lectures. There are lectures on genetic algorithms, the origins of life, Chinese characters, anthropology, molecular biology and lots more. I'll report when I've been to some, hopefully beginning tomorrow.

For now I'll leave you with Nicholas Negroponte's 'One Laptop per Child' talk from TED 2006:

and a photo I took a couple of days back of perhaps the most blatantly dubbed concert I've ever come across. I was just passing and didn't stay for the bad Chinese pop which I could feel was about to descend:
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