Some runner beans and a fine dose of phytohaemagglutinin - a warning!

I tend to eat healthily at home, cooking a good meal every night and including a lot of fresh vegetables and plenty of wholefoods.

I recently got to know the people who work in the greengrocers around the corner from my flat which turns out to be a family business, selling vegetables from their own garden. I've been buying my food from there for a while but after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma recently I wanted to know more, and so spent an enjoyable evening finding out about where all the produce came from, about the seasonality, and the disbelief of most locals that you can't get potatoes in the summer and the fact that perhaps it's better to have a few bugs in your lettuce than a layer of pesticides - this was a surprise given that Galicia is a province whose people are historically tied closely to the land. It turns out that I was the first person who had ever asked about where anything comes from in their store - a rather depressing state of affairs.

So, I left with a great big bag of locally grown produce to create dinner with and set about making a lush salad with a sesame and honey dressing (the honey also being produced locally).

I knew that eating raw kidney beans was bad for you, but having no kidney beans I thought nothing of the runner beans, that had come directly from the garden to the shop that morning. So I chopped up the bright, crunchy beans and threw them in the salad for a bit of texture and the flavours that you only get from produce this fresh.

A Chinese friend was passing by and on seeing the preparation warned me that eating raw beans was bad for you - I took it as a bit of Chinese folk-lore, having eaten plenty of raw legumes before and dismissed the warning.

Well, lesson now learned - after turning distinctly pale, shaky and nauseous for the last two days and having a few other symptoms, which I shan't go into here, non-stop yesterday, A) I shan't be making this mistake again and B) I wanted to post a little warning to everyone else!

The omnivore's dilemma is ever present, and the dangers and pleasures marking the fine line which is dictated by science, culture and folk-lore make for exciting possibilities - in all directions! Be warned!

Turning up the heat

A quick one this evening while I'm in a particularly productive mood...

I finally succumbed to the urge and bought a pressure cooker this evening. Not a cheap buy for a pot with a rubber seal and a couple of pressure valves, but I thought it was probably worth the investment. After one evening I can see that it absolutely will be.

As I've mentioned before, the Spanish supermarkets are kind enough to give away bones for free. I can pick up three of four chicken carcasses while I'm doing my normal shopping and normally I save them in the freezer for when I have a few spare hours. My particular recipe for chicken stock normally takes around five hours, all in. This is not only a lot of time to have to be at home, but it also uses a lot of gas.

Well, for a stock which is just as rich as the normal one I now need to spend around 30 minutes, which is a serious saving not only of time, but of gas too. After the attempt I now have several litres of chicken stock cooling down, to be put in the fridge and freezer for soups, paellas and sauces.


There are a huge number of websites dedicated to pressure cooking and I'll be trying a few of the recipes out soon. The idea that I can cut down the time and money spent on the cooking process by such a huge margin is going to make life that fraction better.

Degenerate synchronicity via Dropbox

I've discovered a tool which, over the last week has considerably simplified the awful mess which was an unsynchronised set of work files, spread between my office computer and my laptop. With 20 versions of every file at different stages of completeness it was getting ridiculous.

I write a lot of files, mostly for mathematical programing. It's what I spend most of my time at work doing, and I enjoy it a great deal - the breaking down of a complex problem into workable, smaller steps which are understandable and efficient is as much a game as anything, it just happens to lead to papers and new results, which is always good.

Anyway, because I create lots of files at work which I often want to continue working on in the evenings I would normally e-mail myself the file, or take it home on a usb stick and add to it at home or in a cafe. At home I would regularly create two or three new versions of this program as I tried out new methods to solve a problem. The next day I would take one or all of these to work and continue working. The outcome was that I had dozens of different versions of every file and I was frequently confused as to which file was the newest/most correct version. My two computers got more and more out of synch as the degeneracy in files melted and the whole thing became a great mess.

Until now...Dropbox is a wonderfully simple application which in a matter of 24 hours seems to have solved all of these problems, and more. It's free to download and has an online storage capacity of a couple of gig (plenty for my current mathematica files).

When you download it and set up an account, the program creates a folder on your computer. You then put files into this folder and a copy of this folder which is online synchonises with that on your computer. The two versions only synchronise when you turn on the program on your computer, but what I've found best is to turn it on automatically when I log on in the morning, and then again when I log off at night, to get everything up to date. Provided I haven't created any huge new files it should take a matter of seconds.

So, the vital part is that I have a second version of the folder on my laptop. It again is synchronised to the version on the internet. When I update a file on my computer at work, as soon as I go home and connect my computer to the web, I have a synchronised version on my laptop with everything I've done during the day. I effectively now only have a single version of my files, it's just no longer local.

What is more I can connect to these files wherever I am by logging into my account online and using the web interface to get any file I want - be it a talk, a mathematica file, or a half written paper. There is no longer the problem of having multiple almost equivalent versions of the same file - life has been greatly simplified!

Of course I'm not relying on this system to hold up (though I have no reason to suspect it won't) so I back up my files religiously with Time Machine.

Anyway, I would highly advise this program to anyone else who has problems with the mess of using multiple computers, or who simply wants some free online backup. Definitely worth spending a few minutes to get your life back in order!

Linky goodness catch up

It's really good to settle back down to a normal routine here in Santiago, however busy that may be. I was greeted with friendly smiles in the cafe that I hang out at every weekend and it's always a good chance to get on with some random bits and pieces of research/Spanish/Chinese and other miscellania. Work picked up straight away and it's going to be a hectic few months. My first trip will hopefully be to a workshop in Gijon where I'll be presenting a talk on transport coefficients in holography, as in Madrid last month.

As a random Saturday sample I thought I'd catch up with a few of the links that I've clicked on over the last few weeks in my feedreader. I'm simply going to post them in rough date order, so have a browse through and see what you find interesting.


Sir Ken Robinson's new book, The Element. If his TED talk (School kills creativity) is anything to go by, this should be a fascinating and very well written look into finding one's passion in life, including case studies of artists, physicists and movie stars.

Scott Aaranson points to Freeman Dyson's article discussing P versus NP. This article doesn't go into the complications and details of this famous theorem, but it's a good starting place to start rummaging through Scott's many excellent posts on computer science and mathematics. In particular, I thought that the following sentence stood out as an important point to take from one of the most slippery concepts in mathematics:

P versus NP is the example par excellence of a mathematical mystery that human beings lacked the language even to express until very recently in our history.

Martin at Khymos discusses a recent culinary trip and a miscellany of interesting points from molecular gastronomy. I link to this in part because it includes a note on Peter Barham, who taught me thermodynamics at Bristol University and happens to hold the world record for the shortest time to make ice cream (demonstrated in a memorable class with his world-famous liquid nitrogen technique).

On the gastronomy front I'm planning on making a trip down to Extremadura one weekend to go and sample the morally acceptable fois gras, as discussed in this TED talk by Dan Barber.

Following the discussion by Phil Plait's (who is in the popular running for the next NASA administrator) some time ago that we may be in the sights of a potential gamma ray burster in our back yard, it seems that we should be in the all-clear given some new results on the orientation of the binary system, from Universe Today.

Blake Stacey has a sci-fi novel out which looks like a lot of fun, and includes String Theory in it's keywords! If his fictional writing is as good a read as his blogging then this should be a lot of fun. I'll be sure to pick up on any AdS/CFT anomalies however ;-)  (Until Earthset)

Dimitry at NEQNET points to a set of lectures by Leonard Susskind on quantum entanglement which I've started watching and are rather good. With 15 hours of online lectures, that's going to need another day in the week for now though. NEQNET has a lot of thought provoking posts, including a recent couple on AdS/QCD from guest-blogger Josh Erlich.

If you haven't already read The man who loved only numbers, I would highly recommend it as a look into the mind of one of mathematics' most prodigous and intriguing characters, Paul Erdos. All of his papers are now available online (from God Plays Dice).

Again from Universe Today, not content with simply finding extrasolar planets, astronomers are now looking for moons around extrasolar planets (exomoons). One of the reasons for looking at this is that we may be able to find Earth-like moons circling larger planets in the habitable zones of sun-like stars. It seems that the techniques works by looking for the wobble in the wobble of the star.

A meeting of skeptical minds par excellence, Dawkins interviews Derren Brown on the art of stage psychics.

Going back some considerable time now, Boingboing links to Malcolm Gladwell's article detailing the importance and difficulties in finding good teachers. Seems obvious, but as always Gladwell makes you realise how much more there is to such a situation. Gladwell added some of his additional thoughts on his blog.


Toomanytribbles continues a fine stream of interesting links on atheism, skepticism, photography, fun and wonder, interposed with wonderful photos. One of my recent favourites from her photostream.

Atoptics continues to provide excellent information on atmospheric phenomena and was the main source for my colloquium on the subject back in December. The recent Wendelstein halo was a stunner.

That'll do for now as a gentle brush at the surface of webby goodness.

On a side note and to make up for the time spent catching up on the above links, I've found a solution for my inability to stay away from e-mail for more than a few minutes. It may seem a bit much, but I know this is a problem that I'm not alone in having and this technique works for me. If you're suffering from the same modern addiction, try setting an alarm clock on your computer to go off at designated times (mine goes off five times a day), and only then check your e-mail. It's sad, but I personally need this self-imposed constraint and the time I save is worth the humiliation of admitting to such a foible. Personally I use this one, but whatever works for you

Anyway, now to catch up on some papers from last week.

Trips to La Coruna and Noia

I've had family staying with me for the last week, and while I worked most of the weekdays, last weekend we hired a car to make some trips around Galicia. Having now hosted many people in Santiago, I find that about 2 days is plenty to get a taste of life in this small city - which is very pleasant but not terribly exciting (give or take the raucous made by students on a Thursday night/Friday morning). The coastline and surrounding scenery however is wonderful.

It was also fantastic to catch up with family that I really haven't seen much in the last two years, and my little cousins are no longer very little. On a side note, I had always wondered about teaching relatively complicated principles in physics and mathematics to young people and with a (seemingly) willing audience (both of my cousins love maths, and at 9 and 11 are definitely advanced for their age) I launched into what I hoped would end up as a lesson on calculus. We didn't get that far, but I remain convinced that given not a significant amount of time they would have got the basics. They grasped the concepts that I gave them amazingly fast and seemed to want more! I'm not sure I can start a line in Skype lessons in calculus for under 10s just yet, but we'll see.

Anyway, I wanted to add a few more photos from last weekend's excursions, to the town of Noia and along the coast South to a series of sand dunes.

Noia itself is a lovely coastal town with a famed empanada (pie) and some very strollable boulevards.

From Noia along the coast, you have rolling fields to the East:

and jutting beaches to the West:

On Sunday we made our way up North to La Coruna, the main political centre of Galicia which is modern, but dotted with old churches, plenty of sculpture:

and the Torre de Hercules - a Roman lighthouse:

which gives more amazing views over the coastline. The day before we were there saw large storms, and the sea was still churning and turbulent:

For kids, the main attraction seems to be the aquarium, which is actually one of the best I've seen. It may not have the most extensive range of exotic sea-life, but the layout is great and enough to keep kids interested for a good couple of hours.

A few more photos from La Coruna and the trip down the coast.

Any other tips on the above places would be welcomed for future trips.

Skype Chinese lessons - an advert

Although I've always maintained that this site is for me to jot down my odd thoughts as I stumble from place to place, taking in what's around me, I'm also happy to write up the odd review and advert when there are things which I think are particularly worthwhile.

I was contacted through the blog a couple of weeks back when I said that I was getting on well with the Chinesepod lessons, from a company called EChineselearning who offered me some Skype Chinese lessons. Because life is just a little too busy at the moment and I'm currently not happy to take time out of the middle of my day to continue what is in essence an added extra to life, I've ended up scheduling these lessons at midnight once a week - this is 7 am Beijing time which is the earliest they can manage.

Anyway, I had a quick test over the phone to find out what my level was, and soon after received the materials for the first lesson: a chapter from some way through a text book.

My first lesson was a pleasant surprise. I wasn't sure if it was going to be awkward having a lesson over the phone, but as they are set up with web-cams, being able to see the teacher is a big help. We spoke predominantly in Chinese, though on the odd occasion where the teacher did have to explain something in English, she was clearly very good - As far as I know most of the teachers have degrees in teaching Chinese to foreign students. They use both Skype text as well as a blackboard behind them to write down anything supplementary and the Skype text is particularly useful as you can simply keep this is a file on the computer for later.

I've just had a couple of lessons so far, and though I don't have much time during the week to practice (though I have an hour extra conversation once a week with a Chinese student) it still feels like this is going to be a very useful resource to help improve my skills before I head back to visit the KITPC in Beijing.

This is also much cheaper than most one-on-one Chinese lessons would be. The lowest prices they offer are under ten dollars a lesson, and compared to most one-on-one language lessons, this seems very reasonable.

Anyway, if you're looking for a resource of very professional Chinese teachers but can't spare the time or money to find a private tutor in your neck of the woods I'd definitely advise giving this new language learning method a go.

Packing it all in

I'm currently trying to balance a few too many things in my life. It seems to be settling however and I'm not feeling too rushed any more. While putting most of my effort into my research I still want time to learn two languages, get to the gym and keep a reasonably active social life (frequently focused on Couch-hosting these days). I've found a few things recently which are helping me to manage this all of the above in a reasonably sane manner.

The first tip is that I'm taking full advantage of new technologies for my language learning. Having listened to the 90 half hour Pimsleur lessons for Chinese while I was in Beijing I now need something a little more advanced and Chinesepod is proving extremely useful. They have around 800 lessons, with around a hundred lessons each of six different grades, from Newbie to really very advanced. I'm still only on the second grade and listen to these while I walk to and from work. This gives me around 40 minutes of Chinese language practice every day and while it's not truly interactive, it is helping me to improve. One face to face lesson of Chinese per week on top of this means that I can actually practice what I learn.

(For a great blog on Mandarin, especially the Beijing dialect, check out Beijing sounds. Have a read of this post for the best explanation for the importance of the Beijing-R I've ever heard - from a 6 year old. The recordings on this site are very good and there's plenty of decent feedback after each of his posts - found on Laowai Chinese.)

For Spanish I went through the first 30 lessons of Pimsleur Spanish and found that they weren't quite as good, for me, as the Mandarin lessons had been. So, I've switched to the Michel Thomas method. In this method you and two other students (on the recordings) are taken by Michel Thomas himself from the very basics, quickly building up sentences and discussing some of the rules of the language. The male and female students on the recordings start from zero knowledge and spend about as much time messing up as you do (well, the guy is purposefully, I believe not a great student). With half an hour of this in the evenings I can become a little more familiar with Spanish every day. In particular Michel Thomas is all about relaxation and not about stressful rote learning.

I've also started a regular language exchange after lunch with a physics masters student who is looking to improve his English. It's probably pretty painful for him to hear me murder the language but I'm convinced that there's a barrier in terms of confidence, and not knowledge, which needs to be overcome to really see improvements in speaking. On top of all this is half an hour of more tedious rote learning and three hours of lessons per week.

In terms of not turning into a bag of potatoes as I sit at my desk most of the day I've been following Tim Ferris's advice and getting to the gym twice a week for half an hour each time. That half an hour is murder but I'm finding it just as effective as trying to pack in more time and more sessions. I don't agree with everything on his site by any means but he has a lot of great tips for cutting down wasted time.

Anyway, on this slightly drizzly Saturday evening on which I'm not attempting to expand my social life I thought I'd note down my current pointers for not having a nervous breakdown - Any other tips would be gratefully received!

Feeds and fields

I spoke about Yahoo Pipes a long time ago, but here's a fun one from Googlesystem blog. This pipes the comments feed and sees who has been commenting most on your blogger blog.

A quick pic from Sunday when I drove with a couple of friends up to Pico Sacro, about 10 km from Santiago de Compostela and a great peak for looking over a whole swathe of Galicia.

File transfer on Meebo and more

I'm almost alone in the building today. Everyone else has gone to Chengde for the weekend. The ITP organises these huge group outings a couple of times a year, but I usually miss the e-mails. It makes for a peaceful day in the office anyway and work is getting done.

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Anyway, this post is a quick tech note. I use Meebo as my instant messenger client. It's entirely web based, so you don't need another program running in the background constantly giving you adverts or using up more memory. It also allows you to integrate various accounts: Hotmail, Yahoo, Google Talk amongst others (not Skype - yet). I use instant messaging as a vital part of my work, talking with my collaborators in various continents.

The one drawback has always been that file transfer was not possible - until now! I always had to switch back to msn in order to send and receive files but now I see no reasons to use msn any more.

Of course if you're bothered by the design of Meebo there are dozens of Greasemonkey scripts you can use to make the interface more to your liking.

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Cory Doctorow, from Boingboing was in Beijing this week and spoke at the Bookworm. Sadly I couldn't make it, but the video is up on Youtube. Cory talks about the future of information dissemination, copywrite, Web 2.0, piracy, social networking and more.


Have a good weekend!

Auto blog-rolling

There's a new toy to the left of the blog which I'm giving a test-drive. I was contacted by Criteo to see if I would like to use this product which they've developed for blogs.

The information they gave me on this auto blog-rolling tool is:

What's it all about?
AutoRoll is the blogroll of your readers. It's a widget that displays links to the blogs that your readers are visiting the most often.

How does it work?
We trace the number of visits of each unique reader on each blog that has installed AutoRoll. The more often a reader visits a specific blog, the greater his affinity is with this blog.

What are the benefits for you?
First of all, you will provide your readers with a very entertaining blogroll since it's based on other readers with similar reading habits. Moreover, you will attract highly qualified incoming traffic to your blog. Indeed, as other similar blogs display your blog on their AutoRoll, they will feed you with new readers that have a strong affinity for your blog.

Sounds clever so I'll see if it's useful. I guess it will take some time to collect data about the readers of this blog.

Grease Monkey tips

I was in the office very early this morning and thought I'd try and fix a few pet gripes with the internet which have been bothering me for a while. When this is the case, Grease Monkey usually has an answer.

Grease Monkey is an add on to Firefox which allows users to write scripts which alter how a webpage looks and acts. As a simple example, if you don't like the Google background being white you can write a script which takes the source for the google page and turns the white to any colour you like. This is a trivial example and what is most helpful is that many people have already written a plethora of codes which you download and are automatically integrated into Firefox, via the Grease Monkey addon.

I still use Hotmail, purely for historical reason, and the advertising banner which takes up roughly half the screen is both an eyesore and inconvenient for viewing e-mails. Use the Windows Live ad remover to get rid of this and fill your screen with e-mails again.

I've been very impressed with Flickr since starting to use it a few months ago. One of the common complaints however is that viewing photos on a white background isn't the best way to get the most out of them. This addon to change the background colour does the trick though it leaves a few residual ugly spots.


The LaTeX for blogger script is another nice one, especially if you are using a blog for your collaborations, which I know try and do.

Hope this is of use and if others find particularly useful scripts then please let me know.

English Corner ideas

English corner returned this week and I managed to collect a couple of hours worth of material this afternoon.

It's difficult to find material online, simply because the students are all pretty advanced and the last thing I want to do is make it feel like a class. Most online EFL information is either too basic or too much like being at school for my purposes. A game of Call my bluff turned out to work pretty well however.

Having chosen five words for each team, that the students were unlikely to know, I gave each of the two teams the correct definition and asked them to come up with two more false but plausible definitions for each word. They then explained all three definitions of each word to the opposing team who had to guess which one was correct. As always I was impressed with their imagination and lateral thinking. Spoonerism was defined to be the philosophy of one who is born into a rich family (with a silver spoon in their mouth), a somnambulist was an expert in cognitive psychology and ebullience was the license you needed to drive oxen in Spain. For anyone who's trying to come up with an English corner idea, this seemed to work well. The idea is simply to get them talking fluently which they're all doing now. I've got some debate plans afoot but this will take more than a couple of hours of planning to make a success of it.

Basic resources for learning Chinese

I mentioned to a fellow blogger who is learning Mandarin that I would pass on the language resources I've found useful, but it seems sensible to make this list available to all.

I have a two hour lesson once per week, when work allows, and we use a book called Chinese Conversation 301. I have little to compare this book to but my impressions are that although it covers all the grammar needed and introduces about 15 new words per lesson, it's a bit drier that it needs to be. I tend to be rather fickle about these things and so without discipline I would simply flick from book to book, being a little dissatisfied with them all.

[Addition: Kevin mentioned his more extensive list of resources in the comments, which are definitely worth checking out here]

I would definitely advise getting a book on Chinese radicals if you're going to learn to read and/or write. A great deal of the complexity of the written language can be broken down when you understand the roots of many words and learning the 100 or so most often used radicals will give a good boost to the seemingly impossible task of learning characters. I have this book, and have found it to be very useful.

I haven't bought any yet but there are many kids books with lots of pictures of objects, animals, foods etc. with the Pinyin written by them. This is probably also a very good source for learning vocab by getting a rather more colourful image in your head.

ZDT is the best flashcard program I've found which allows the user to define several different modes to test yourself on Pinyin, English definitions and Hanzi (characters). There are also audio plugins so you can hear the words read by a Chinese reader. Importantly the format allows you to use word lists from several sources and there are a few which are well worth using, certainly for beginners, here.

Included in the word lists above is mention of the Pimsleur language lessons which I still use regularly and these are probably my best and, importantly, most hassle-free resource. The lessons are half and hour each and highly repetitive. I try and get through 5 or 6 of these lessons a week, though it wouldn't be a stretch to do much more as I potter around the flat or walk to work. I imagine this is the sort of thing you can get in most libraries in the UK and, I guess, in the US.

The Chinese pod lessons are also a useful resource though Pimsleur has taken over on the i-pod for me.

For Chinese dictionaries online I tend to use Zhongwen.com mostly because it has a useful interface for understanding the links between and roots of words. If it's not in this rather small dictionary then it usually gives an option to check several other dictionaries.

I added Laowai Chinese to my feed reader as soon as it started and although he tends not to post very frequently, this blog has had many interesting articles on different aspects of learning the language and I recommend taking a look and picking up a few words there.

Any other invaluable resources are welcomed in the comments section!

Spring cleaning tips

Though great plans were afoot over the weekend for various activities in the city it all fell through in the end in a fit of apathy and I ended up doing some much needed spring cleaning of the computer having scattered all the photos from Japan in a swathe of directories, some backed-up, some not, along with collections of papers and music in various degrees of replication. Anyway, this fact isn't so interesting but I found a couple of useful programs for anyone trying to consolidate files on their computer:

The first is Dump3 which can be used to find duplicate files on a computer by comparing the content, not the size and name, including music and picture files. You can set the criteria for a match manually allowing for similar but not exact copies of the same tune to be found. For pictures and music it takes a while but for pdf documents it's pretty snappy.

The second program is Foldersync which allows you to take two folders, searches for their differences and can copy and delete content accordingly. Useful if you have a backup of an old folder which has had a few changes made to it, including having changed the structure. These two programs together have let me get rid of a lot of duplicate files while making sure that I have everything backed up without replication.

Expandable post hack for Blogger

This is a quick test for a new Blogger hack I've been looking for for a while. Currently things are back up to full speed and I don't have much time to write an extensive post. If this hack is working then...

...you should be able to read all of this sentence.

The hack comes from this site, and includes a javascript add-in to the template file for the blog. If anyone has any ideas as to the security of this I would be interested to know.

Flickr Collections

Anybody with a Pro Flickr account will be pleased to know that subsets of sets has now been implemented. This feature has been a while coming and members have been champing at the bit for it. This is a huge improvement on the previous tools for organisation. Thanks Flickr.

Unfortunately Yahoo Pipes still haven't released their documentation and until they do I'm not going to spend hours trying to do what may be impossible. This technology promises so much but I haven't been particularly impressed by what's been done so far.

Yukawa reflections

I wanted to mention one of the features of the Yukawa Institute which particularly impressed me. In the departments I've been in as an undergrad, a postgrad and a postdoc I've found that the various subgroups in a physics department have not mixed as much as I'd hoped. I think that this is less at the higher levels and it seemed that the professors knew each other through committees which they commiserate each other for having to sit on, teaching arrangements and various social events. However, certainly at the grad student level, apart from a few friends I had in other sub-departments I had little idea what went on in the astrophysics department, the 'ultra-fast' department or the geophysics department, for example. I would occasionally peer into a lecture but was quickly put off by the quantity of buzz words which were incomprehensible to me.

Anyway, once a week at the Yukawa Institute is a lunch meeting, for the whole department. The first 20 minutes or so is set aside for having a bento lunch and chatting with whoever you find yourself near, be it a cosmologist, a solid state physicist or a string theorist, perhaps a new masters student and perhaps the head of the department. Then there's a short talk, really very short, perhaps 15 minutes or so introducing the basics of somebody's research area. It's at such a level that people in the audience start asking questions although it's not in their research area and by this simple, sociable meeting once a week, there seems to be more healthy discourse between the research groups.

It's not necessarily vital for a cosmologist to know about advances in traffic theory phase transitions, but it certainly introduces them to a slightly new subject and makes the department more of a transparent place to work. A good thing in my book.

Another inclusion, though of a technological nature which I was impressed by were the whiteboards in all the coffee lounges - though these are no ordinary white boards. I spent some time at these explaining to various people about what I did and chatting to grad students who asked questions, mostly about the fundamentals of the AdS/CFT correspondence. I would fill the white board with diagrams, equations and a few words at which point the student would press a button, an arm would move across the white board and a scanned printout of what I had written would appear. I'd then wipe the board and start writing again. By the end the student was left not just with the memory of my illegible scrawls but a solid copy. Perhaps this is an expensive addition, but in the land of such gadgets, this one ranks about as highly for me as the electronically controlled toilet, a fine invention in my book!

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Tomorrow is officially my last day at Ochanomizu, though I may return for a couple of meetings if I get the chance before I leave. After tonight I will be Couchsurfing for the rest of my time here and I'm not sure how likely an internet connection is. I'll report when possible.

A melodious tip

First of all a tip for anyone coming to Kyoto. Japanese cash machines generally do not accept foreign cards. I've spent the last three weeks hunting for one which will, to no avail. However, scouting around on the web, the most convenient one can be found just outside Kyoto station in the basement of the building below Kyoto tower (very easy to spot). This is a niche tip perhaps but it may come in useful for some weary traveler.

On Saturday, on the way back from the station I spent some time wondering in and out of buildings, cafes and areas which looked interesting. I was drawn to the mildly cacophonous sounds emanating from what looked to be an old scrapyard. I carefully peaked inside to have a look and was met with the surreal sight of musicians, dotted around randomly, playing their various wind instruments, standing between the mangled bikes, scrap metal and garbage blowing around the ground. It seemed to be some piece of conceptual art, though when I found someone to ask I was told that they were university students and this was simply the best place for them to practice. Somehow the strange contrast was rather relaxing and I stayed for a while listening to the practice and sneaking in a few shots.

Tuba practice:

and trombone practice:

Looking back now, I probably should have found a chair and stayed longer. Enjoyable in its rather eccentric way.