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.

soaking up the sun

I've just arrived home from the library, a little after midnight, walking back in shorts, tea-shirt and flip-flops, feeling wonderfully comfortable. We've been having a fantastic few days of weather here, occasionally tipping the scales a little over 30 degree.

This weekend was the first (almost entirely) non work weekend in quite a while, as an old friend came to visit. Having not seen each other for several years there was plenty of catching up to do over some excellent Galician food and a few local brews.

Saturday we attempted to go to the beach in A Coruna, just fifty minutes by train north of here, but the final couple of kilometers saw us drawn into the sea fog and the temperature dropped by 15 degrees, leaving us shivering in the rather strange twilight zone. With no beach to be seen we found our way to a Japanese restaurant and indulged for lunch, before going to the Museo de Bellas Artes, housing a fine collection of Spanish paintings chronicalling some of the best work of the last 500 years. A nice, well set-out museum and definitely worth checking out if you're in the area.

After a typical Spanish night (something that I can rarely manage), terminating as the sun rose on Sunday morning with venus glinting in the dark blue sky, Sunday was spent lazing around in a park, attempting to defrost after the previous days meteorological surprise. I managed a little reading of the papers I'm currently trying to read through but it was slow and ultimately rather unproductive.

I have around 1000 pages of papers left on my desk at home, of the 3000 or so I had a few months ago. The routine of going to the library at night seems to be working nicely and the simple act of getting away from the computer makes a big difference to my non-programming productiveness. The students in the library on the other hand seem to have different ideas and those sitting around me with laptops are constantly plugged into facebook, their attention spans limited to around 2 minutes before another input of stimuli are needed to get the neurons going again.

Anyway, travel adventures are on hold for now as my passport is in England, awaiting the Chinese visa I'll need to go and see the eclipse in July. For the mean time life revolves around Santiago and while the sunshine lasts, I'm happy to continue this way for a few more weeks.

Importance of a good caffeine intake in research

Perhaps the brand should have been included in the acknowledgments, but this is the most firm evidence I've yet seen for the place a high level of caffeine intake should take in one's research:

The paper in general looks impressive, but page 19 particularly!

NB. This is not a mistake, it's included as a pdf on the background.

(That said, I've been on the wagon for five months now and feeling better for it.)

Lunacy and more

For those of you foolhardy enough not to have Universe Today bookmarked in your feedreader, then you may not know that today the moon is at its closest approach to the Earth this year. It will be 14% larger and some 30% brighter (for those who are not, like I am, in overcast venues) than the moon at its further point this year. This is good for moon watching, but not so great for the Geminid meteor shower which will be somewhat obscured by the extraterrestrial light pollution.

As for me, I'm feeling pretty tired after a busy but successful few days, other than spending 20 minutes trapped in a lift on Wednesday morning. Trust me to be in the lift when there's a powercut. The emergency light was sadly neither bright enough to let me read, nor to take a photo of myself in my encarceration.

I'm currently writing up a review for a conference proceedings which I'd like to get out of the way before 't Hooft turns up next week to give a couple of talks (both departamental and public) and before I go off to Madrid to the Christmas meeting where I will be giving a talk. I'll simply link to my paper from this week with no more commentary for now than the fact that this was an extremely enjoyable paper and one of the best collaborations I've been in, given that all of us bought very different skills to the table. We already have several more ideas on the go and hope to get more done soon.

Monte Pindo and the end of the Earth

It's been a ridiculously busy week this week, though some things never change. We finally got our paper out on Monday, though I have another two somewhere near the end of the pipeline and hope to have them out before Christmas. The rest of the week was busy with getting these a little closer to completion, though Monday night I went out to another film at Cine Europa to see Breath (Soom) by Kim Ki Duk, one of my favourite Korean directors.

Breath is not a film of clear logic and linearity, but it is a beautiful film of deep sentiments and powerful imagery. Kim Ki Duk manages always to lighten his dark subjects with the absurd, and wonderful scenes of a women in a seemingly continual battle with the past singing a love song to an unknown, suicidal man on death row are so full of confusing feelings that you can't help but laugh. The film is going to leave you with questions, which probably don't have answers, but for me I'm happy with this. I would recommend this film if you want some answers to the questions that Herzog was contemplating.

Today has also been a long day as 12 of us, mostly from Couchsurfing, headed out to the coast of Galicia for a day of hiking to the top of Monte Pindo, a rocky hill, some 600m high (11 mile round trip) right on the coast, overlooking Fisterre to the North and the Atlantic to the West. It took us some four hours, including breaks, to make it to the top of this very rocky mountain, but the view was well worth it. In fact this is without a doubt the most stunning view I've seen in Galicia. I have a lot of photos to go through today but I've put together a panorama from the top for now. The large size is pretty huge, and there are still some artifacts from the large contrast in light that can be seen in the sky. Still, click through to see the whole thing in full detail.


In fact, coming down we watched the sunset from half way and the last quarter of an hour was in almost complete darkness. We were exceedingly lucky that we left without a single twisted ankle!

Anyway, tomorrow I have to get on with some work for my trip to Dublin next week and will be cooking in the evening for a bunch of Korean friends. If my kimchi dumplings aren't just like their mothers' I'm going to be in some trouble!

New beginnings

After an exhausting couple of hours yesterday evening we finally uploaded our latest paper to the ArXiv. After two and a half hours of struggling we realised that the class we were using for our LaTeX document wouldn't allow references to equations within captions to figures and
finally we sent it off. The project has taken longer than we'd hoped because the problem we were trying to solve turned out to need a lot of computational time. At some points we were running five computers with our code for several days at a time, only to realise that the region of parameter space we were studying be improved. Anyway, all done now and another project is already starting. This last one has been very enjoyable though, if frustrating at times!

Today I'm off to the wedding of my Spanish teacher and one of my colleagues in Ourense, a city some 100 km from Santiago. My first Galician wedding promises a wealth of seafood and some fine celebration. I'll endeavor to bring back some decent photos. Anyway, for this weekend at least I'm going to relax, practice some Spanish this evening and get back to it on Monday.

Have a good weekend!

Miscellaneous links from last week

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

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

From Toomanytribbles

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

More astronomy links:

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

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

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

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

On the ArXiv:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And finally on a couple of non-scientific notes:

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

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

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

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

All nighters

I was up until 4 this morning trying to get some work finished. We're getting there but still things to polish off. The time delay between my collaborators and myself means that there is always some dead time when one person has finished something and is waiting for a response. In fact I'm in this non-overlap time now while I wait for the others to wake up before I can give them my results from last night.

I took the dead time yesterday evening to go and see the Kabuki performance at the Poly theatre in Beijing given by the famous Chikamatsu-za group. I've gone on about this before on the two previous occasions (here and here) I've seen Kabuki in Tokyo but if you have any interest in the arts at all and in particular of the exotic Eastern variety then you have to go and see this amazing spectacle. It's truly a beautiful thing to watch, and though I didn't understand a word of it bar the Chinese surtitles I could make out I was mesmerised for two and a half hours. In fact so much so that I'm going back today - I'm not expecting to see much Kabuki in Spain!

Anyway, with a very late night to the tune of Sufjan Stevens and Devendra Bernhardt I got some good work done yesterday as I glugged my strongly brewed tea into the early hours of the morning.

OK, back to it...

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In addition: Anyone else who was at the Kabuki, did the audience get up and leave before the show was over? I believe there was another act to see! I will see tonight, I hope.

Near misses

Things have been utterly non-stop recently. I haven't seen the inside of my flat for more than about 5 minutes this week while not sleeping or trying to forget about the day's events and attempting to sleep. This isn't to say that anything has been bad, just very busy. I'm finishing up some work which has to be done really very soon and have written a couple of long posts about how I got to be where I am now (not in the Darwinian sense) and a little background to what I do, or maybe why I do it.

In the mean time I've been helping friends move house and running round the city saying goodbye to people leaving Beijing, teaching, attempting to start learning Spanish and continuing with the Chinese. Tomorrow I go out of town for a party, back on Sunday, take a friend to the airport and then straight back to work. September is looking to be very full with three couchsurfers staying at my place for a continuous period of 10 days. Also we have the string cosmology conference coming up all month at the KITPC, which I'm very much looking forward to. (first week's lectures here).

Today as I ran out of the office and caught a cab to get to my friend's house to help her move house my blood began to boil as the Beijing roads mingled with my already high pressure state.

I usually spend my time in a state of calm chaos, but just occasionally it boils over - in fact in the UK it very very rarely happens but the bloody stupidity on the roads in China just got my goat today. I love cycling and I know that I'm not a very safe cyclist. This has improved since I learnt to drive and realised how much I must terrify drivers as I speed around as fast as possible. Anyway, with however many million non-driving cyclists on the roads in Beijing combined with 3 million cars all of whom think that they have the right to get from A to B faster than everyone else, cutting up all who are in their way and slowing the roads down for all, the situation is often unbearably frustrating.

After several near misses (both my driver's fault and that of others) he got out of the car and had a fight with another road hog - a full on slamming each other against the bonnet fight, red-faced arm waving and general macho nonsense. I was either going to laugh or cry as I waited in the car for the frivolities to end so I laughed at them and they split up and got back in their respective cars.

So, we continued to weave our way through the ever-honking traffic and an hour later had deposited more clothes than you can possibly imagine to their temporary residence. The taxi driver left and I went back to the office.

As we reached the traffic lights I saw something which I so often see here in Beijing. A cyclist somehow forgetting that there are two sides to a road. She looked left, seeing that there was a gap in the traffic and pulled out to cross the road. However, she seemed hypnotised by the lack of traffic on the left, presumably thinking this to be a good enough omen. As she got to the middle of the road without appearing to slow down I looked in horror as the speeding oncoming car didn't notice her behind the central bollard. She pulled out, still looking left as the car slammed on its break, turning the wheel as it did so. The car screamed to a halt, in a haze of tyre smoke centimeters from the girl on the bike, who just sat there, looking puzzled at the car.

The police driving the police car, which had been the offending missile, shouted at her as she sat in the middle of the road, still looking unperturbed but a little angry at being shouted at.

The police car sped off and she stayed, sat in the middle of the road as other cars honked at her to move. Normally I would have put this down to shock, but Beijing cyclists get into these situations so damned often that she just seemed annoyed at the whole affair and couldn't be bothered to move.

I'm writing this having let myself calm down a little. My heart has left my throat and my pulse has dropped below 200.

ok, rant over - it just winds me up no end and sometimes I need to vent.

Hot footing it...

Sometimes I fear that my concentration on the scientific disciplines has left me with strong abstract analytical skills but little in the way of common sense. I'm to be seen hobbling around the department today having been for a lovely walk in the warm afternoon sun earlier. Having spent the afternoon shivering in an air conditioned office I took off my shoes and reveled in the powerful heat of the tarmac. I greeted the burning pain with a smile of satisfaction as the rest of my body heated up. Back in the office as I put my flip flops back on and started to walk around the welts started swelling and I now can not let my feet touch the ground.

Anyway, apart from a mild loss of any dignity I may once have had, today has been superb as I've been attending the Complex Systems Summer School. A lecture this morning on the mathematics of genetic algorithms got my mind racing through ideas from topology and the possible studies one could do of the properties of a manifold mapped out as a system evolves through an evolutionary algorithm (the species are defined in terms of a real vector space). It made me realise the power of such interdisciplinary collaborations. I'm sure that I wasn't thinking anything very new but with enough time spent talking with other researchers in other areas, I'm sure that a lot can be achieved.

A second talk about the logarithmic relationship between metabolic rates of animals and their mass which holds over around 15 orders of magnitude of mass was also very interesting. If you measure for instance the heartbeat of animals as a function of their body mass, the data lie on a straight line to incredibly high accuracy over a huge range of animal sizes. What this allows is then the understanding of the differences between animals by finding the subtle deviations from these logarithmic scalings.

By dimensional arguments and studying the behaviour of the cardiovascular system in a relatively simplified model, the observations can be explained very well.

A third lecture on symbolic dynamics and measure theory was also very interesting, though having missed the first lecture I failed to understand the application.

Lots more interesting talks to come. See the Wiki linked from the previous post to read some of the slides from the talks, all very interesting.

I'm spending the rest of my time, apart from trying to finish writing a paper, reading through two very impressive papers: Exploring improved holographic theories for QCD, parts I and II, by Gursoy, Kiritsis and Nitti. I'll be giving a talk on these next week and the 110+ pages have a lot of detail to get through. Some great work though and vital reading if you are interested in AdS/QCD.

I'll leave you with another view of my favourite puzzling Chinese sculpture outside the Zhongguancun book building.

Hints, tips, and pointers

It transpires that the Flickr problems from yesterday were Yahoo-wide, which temporarily became unavailable out here. It's back on again but we'll see what happens over the next few days.

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I discovered a nice speed-up for Acroread which seems interminably slow these days. It turns out that when you load Acroread there are dozens of plugins which load up automatically. Most of these are completely unnecessary for every-day use. There are three or four vital plugins. If you download Adobe Reader Speedup and run the small setup program, most of the plugins will be disabled and Acroread will load in a fraction of the time and waste less space.

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I've just received the proofs for a magazine article about, emm, me! It's a strange one and I'll post it up here once it's been published.

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An interesting paper today on a subject I've been flirting with for a while. I'll just point it out here and hope to discuss it in more detail when I've the time.

Erdmenger, Ghoroku and Kirsch: Holographic heavy-light mesons from non-Abelian DBI. Some interesting looking results but it'll take me a while to go through everything.

Strings '07

Strings 2007 starts today in Madrid. The videos from the week of talks on the year's progress should be available online, linked from this page.

It was pointed out last year the importance of keeping close connections between the experimental community so that those working in the many interesting but often deeply theoretical aspects of string theory do not lose sight of the ultimate goal of science.
The first talk this year is on 'Status and prospects of the LHC machine and experiments'. (Schedule here).

With some interesting and appropriate timing Witten has today released his long awaited paper on three dimensional gravity. I look forward to watching this talk in particular but the others which are of particular interest to me are Beisert on 'strong/weak interpolation in the spectrum of AdS/CFT', Kallosh on 'testing string theory with the CMB', Bern on 'the UV finiteness of N=8 SUGRA' and Sugimoto on 'baryons from instantons in holographic QCD', though there's lots more of interest besides.

Besides Witten's paper today there is the pre-print 'Quark Mass in the Sakai-Sugimoto Model of Chiral Symmetry Breaking' From Evans and Threlfall where it is claimed that by studying the rotations around the vacuum manifold in a holographic model of QCD the goldstone mode studied in the original Sakai-Sugimoto model is not the correct physical state and that the original formulation which only includes massless quarks can be extended simply to incorporate massive fundamental matter and a massive pseudo-goldstone boson. The similarity of the quark bilinear condensate as a function of quark mass compared to the form in the non-supersymmetric D3/D7 cases with non-constant dilaton is interesting and it looks like there is more to explore here, especially in looking for agreement with the Gellmann-Oakes-Renner relation.

The weekend has been enjoyable and there's plenty to write up when I have a chance.

Linear, or otherwise

I've just presented a blackboard talk to the students on 'The linear confinement problem in AdS/QCD', a topic which I'm particularly interested in studying more myself. I spoke about the papers by Karch et al. 'Linear confinement and AdS/QCD', Csaki and Reece 'Towards a systematic holographic QCD - a braneless approach' and Shifman 'Highly Excited Hadrons in QCD and Beyond', all of which are clear and inspiring for future research.

I've rather given up on the summer school, which was either too elementary or a little too hand wavy, or just too intensive on subjects I have only a passing interest in (4+ hours in one day on CP violation from the B-meson sector is more than I can take). There's talk on several Beyond the standard model conferences in the far West of China and down in Yunnan which would be lovely to go to but they're not quite in my area. I'm keeping an eye out for a good cosmology conference, before the KITPC program which starts in September.

Cosmologists, string theorists and string cosmologists should all come to China for this program!

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After completing most of the preparations for my talk yesterday I headed over to D22, a local bar with an eclectic mix of people, music and events, to watch one of their movies. Having seen clips on TV various times I was keen to see The General from 1927 with Buster Keaton. It's a beautiful film, dated and cliched but Keaton is such an incredible physical actor that everything else apart from his balletic movements and amazing expression are rather overshadowed. Slap-stick, especially of the modern variety doesn't do it for me, but Keaton is so seamless and so expressive that it's a joy to watch.

Looking at still photos of Keaton it's a strange contrast to the expression that come from his movements and if anyone knows a good biography of him I would be intrigued to know why this contradiction is so vast.

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Having met him in person a little while ago, I had Jonathan Tel's 'Freud's Alphabet' shipped to me, courtesy of my sister, from England. This is a fictional account, based on the true story of Freud's last few weeks spent in London with terminal cancer. The book is split into chapters labeled alphabetically with Freudian symbols and the book becomes increasingly dreamlike and non-linear as Freud drifts in and out of his morphine haze. Tel's turn of phrase is playful and powerful in equal measure and as long as you don't require linearity and clarity in your stories this book is an interesting journey into dreams, metaphor and the subconscious. Well worth a read.

This links in to the Mario Vargas Llosa book I read while in Japan on the subject of a Storyteller in a Peruvian tribe, which is equally dreamlike, non-linear and imaginatively written. It's been too long since I read it to give it an in depth review but Llosa's story telling, both from his own narrative style and that conjured up for the storyteller's tales of a magical reality weave into each other naturally and give an eloquent picture of an ancient art.

I'm reading another Steinbeck now and enjoying this one as much as ever...expect a review soon.

Unparticle physics

I only stumbled across Howard Georgi's latest work when his paper "Another odd thing about unparticle physics" appeared on the Arxiv today. Clearly there was a first odd thing to know about unparticle physics, which leads the reader to "Unparticle physics". This is a very short paper with some fascinating commentary on a possible, previously unremarked scenario for LHC phenomenology (unremarked as far as I'm aware).

The idea is to have a non-trivial scale invariant sector, at least with an IR fixed point, and see how the coupling between the normal particle sector and the scale invariant sector, using effective field theory techniques, effects the low energy physics. The strange terminology is used because in a scale invariant theory the quantum mechanical treatment of particles doesn't make sense and Georgi names the 'stuff' 'unparticles'. The question he tackles in the first paper is what signals one would see in the accelerator if there is a coupling between unparticles and particles. The answer is that although the theory may be highly non-linear, the conformal nature means that the correlation functions can be understood simply through the scaling behavior of the unparticle operators.

Depending on the scaling dimension of the 'stuff' the signature gives a different decay width of regular particles as a function of energy. This very specific signature would be quite clear, giving signals of missing energy at particle accelerators, in a different form from SUSY or large extra dimensions.

The paper is short and clear and gives a hint that there's lots of interesting, easy phenomenology to extract from this strange but not necessarily crazy model. Two new papers today follow this although in the conclusions of the latter paper it seems that the signals from the LHC would not be so clear.

From Kyoto with links

Lots of picks from this week's news, blog articles and random finds.

• From the BBC is an interesting article about the new high resolution bionic eye being tested in the US. An implant on the back of the retina feeds into the optic nerve from a camera placed in front of the eye. This new technology has around 60 electrodes, corresponding to 60 pixels which compares to the previous version with just 16. The previous version was already helping people to detect objects around them, though wasn't high enough resolution to recognise faces. Prohibitively expensive now, I guess it will be some time until it can help any large number of sufferers of the particular conditions this is supposed to aid. Still, the steps ahead in technology and the increase in our understanding of the visual cortex are all leaps in the right direction

• For information on image processing and the visual cortex I recommend Paul Churchland's rather grandiosely titled book on the brain: The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul. If experts know of better sources for non-experts then I'd love to read more.

• From eyes to mouth and Kevin Smith reports on his experiences with Chinese dentists. Considerably hairier reading than my stories of international mullet catastrophes.

• And from teeth to ears, from Retrospectacle comes the most bizarre headline of the week and an interesting story to boot. Rather than using piezoelectric crystals to convert movement to energy, NASA is using protein found within the inner ear to help turn astronaut's body movements into energy for their space-suits.

• This story has been talked about in a number of places but Peter Rhode debunks the myth that what most would define as a quantum computer had been built. After much hype that a fully functioning, completely coherent 16 qbit device was manufactured and on the market, the makers agreed that in fact it was a quantum computer in the, err, classical sense. It seems that the device uses some quantum mechanical effects for very specific purposes, but then that's one way to define the regular computer you're sitting at now.
  

• From Bad Astronomy Blog came a fascinating article about an area of research which has taken so many exciting leaps forward in the last few years. Before the late 90s we could only presume that our planet was not alone. Technology then reached the phase that we could detect extra-solar planets and we quickly started racking them up. We now have a list of over 200 known planets outside our solar system, most of which are gas giants but our ability to spot smaller ones is continually getting better. Another step forward was recently published when the spectral signatures from a couple of planets some 100 light years away were analysed. The analysis seems to show silica dust in the atmosphere and no detectable water, which is presumed to be hidden in the lower layers. I'm not sure how significant the spectrum itself is, but the fact that we can now do this is amazing, and there is bound to be a lot more to come in the very near future.

• Some interesting, more technical articles to peruse: Kicked off from the articles here and here on Cosmic Variance, talking about Boltzmann brains - rare statistical fluctuations in the vacuum in which a conscious entity appears and has time to make observations of its surroundings (This is a big simplification, but you really should read the CV articles for more of an intro) - I had a read of the paper by Don Page, which was being discussed. It's fascinating, seemingly on the verge of metaphysics, but there seem to be enough clever minds interested in the consequences of all this that it is taken seriously. Reading the paper is a challenge in semantics and I can't profess to have taken it all in. The general idea seems to make sense but I can't help but feel that it's all rather too subjective in terms of discussing the ordinary observer's place in the universe.

• From Bolzmann brain's via entropy and to the ultimate computer. Seth Lloyd talks about the maximum possible computing power allowed by the universe, in this nature article. Something that B.G wouldn't even dream of, though Google might.

• In this paper by Casero et al, a new model of chiral symmetry breaking from AdS/CFT is proposed by studying open string tachyon condensation. One of the most interesting results is that this type of model automatically seems to give linear confinement: which is hard to produce in most AdS/QCD scenarios. In addition, the full non-abelian chiral symmetry breaking can be studied, with non-massless quarks (c.f Sakai Sugimoto model). There are many interesting aspects to this paper and I'm sure that anyone working in this field will be digesting the results.

A couple of photography pages to finish with this week.

• I'm currently thinking about upgrading to a high quality, not broken camera and so have been looking on flickr at photos, photographers and camera discussions. I came across this guy's site. He specialises in high dynamic range images (HDR and links therein) by which many photos with different exposures are overlayed and altered such that the contrasts and tones stand out significantly more than a single shot would. My feeling is that sometimes this is rather over the top, but some of the time the effects are startling and the photos are truly beautiful. Here are a few particularly impressive images (1,2,3,4). Some of them begin to look like caricatured drawings but I'm interested in learning more about this.

• and via Toomanytribbles comes Zullo photography. Some lovely astrophotography and lots more. Worth a browse too.

Hope there was something for most. Interesting contributions from sources I haven't seen are welcomed. E-mail address is in my profile.

• I almost forgot, for cephalopod fans everywhere I couldn't miss off the first collosal squid ever caught, in the Ross Sea.

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.