Back in Santiago

Time in Munich has been passing quickly but relatively uneventfully, the sunshine comes and goes and we have hints of summer between the cold snaps in which walks through the elegant streets of Schwabing and into the English garden are really lovely. I've been meeting a few new friends here and there but I'm keeping to myself a little more than I was in Spain, mostly in order to not drown in the various piles which are taking up the rest of my life, the three active projects are going pretty well, though on the language front I'm finding motivation a little hard with the German given how easy life is without it. I discovered the main university library a week or so ago though which looks like it may be my refuge in which I can't escape from the study.

Right now I'm back in Santiago after an exhausting day on the road yesterday - a 4.30 alarm clock followed by a 7am flight to Barcelona and then arriving in Santiago at 3pm, only to give a talk at 4pm. The talk itself was on my last paper and while I'd spent a long time getting the slides ready, the computer breaking down half way through meant that most of the talk was given on the black board. I still need a lot of practice with blackboard talks!

Today is a wonderful sunny day in Santiago and I'm about to head off to the wedding of a couple of good friends, a Colombian and a Galician. Hugely looking forward to seeing lots of good friends again! This will be a super-traditional Galician wedding and I'll be dressed up in something akin to a medieval monks outfit which could be interesting, given the soaring temperatures. Photos of me perspiring are likely to follow.

Next week I'm in the office here for a couple of days before popping down South to the university of Braga in Portugal where I'll be giving a talk (though I can't quite decide what it's going to be on as the group there isn't stringy so yesterday's talk would certainly not work). I'm also hoping to start a collaboration with a friend there as we've been discussing a possible calculation for a year or so now.

Anyway, that's where life is up to at the moment. After I get back to Munich I have a couple of weeks and then the annual silly-season begins with too many travels to even think about, but we'll cross that boarding gate when we come to it....

The science of homeopathy

It turns out that if you take intelligence and fact, and dilute them with a few centuries of woo, folk-lore, misunderstood quotations, here-say and shake for several years in the head of the gullible and the misguided, then repeat the process over and over again for a few generations, what you end up with is the science of homeopathy. For legal reasons I shall say nothing of the overall intelligence of the women presenting her ideas of how homeopathy works, but I can say quite confidently that she manages to get more facts wrong in the fields of mathematics, physics, biology and biography than anyone I've ever seen before. It's truly remarkable.


On another note, you may have noted my absence for the last few weeks. The normal excuses follow...I've just come back from a very busy two weeks in the UK, working with my former boss and some other friends in Southampton on a paper which we hope to be out next week. We're actually very pleased with these results, and the paper takes a rather different form to most of my previous papers in the fact that we're really trying to construct a framework for other people to use rather than applying techniques to a new problem.

The other things which are taking up lots of time are currently various language classes and meetings. I've set up a Chinese conversation group here in Munich and the first meeting, just before my trip to England saw a group of 12 of us getting together in a cafe to chat. The range of abilities was very varied from complete newbies to a few native Chinese and I think with a few more meetings we should find a good rhythm so that everyone can benefit. Second meeting is this afternoon, hopefully followed by hotpot.

Anyway, speaking of which I have homework to be getting on with, but just wanted to pop by to say that I'm still here, just on the verge of chaos.

negligible friction in the time direction - no slowing down!

A Flamenco concert on Monday night was a wonderful surprise. Having seen an opera, styled in Flamenco in London last year I was a little put off by the florridity of it all, impressive though it had been. These regular concerts which take place in a tiny bar in Santiago every couple of weeks are intimate and powerful, with none of the waving of polka dot skirts and machismo which I'd always connected with Flamenco. The concert was a simple performance by a female singer, a guitarist and a drummer, playing songs about love and loss with far more emotion than I could take from the large scale, touristified version in London. A great way to start the week and I'll be back in the future.

Wednesday saw my first attempts to make home made tofu, turning it eventually into mapo dofu. Cooking for a friend from Sichuan meant that the pressure was on, but though the texture wasn't quite right and the flavours weren't strong enough, I didn't feel too embarrased by the attempt. Again, a repeat attempt will happen soon enough.  Chicken marinated in home made kimchi paste, Korean kochujan and soy was a big success!

Thursday night saw a return to the climbing wall after a five year absence and while my mind knew exactly what to do, my body was having none of it and I became tired and frustrated at an embarrassingly early stage. A little meditation on the evening has left me feeling more positive and I can see already the areas that I need to concentrate on to get back into climbing shape.

Work-wise the week has seen the proofreading of a major review paper by one of my colleagues which should be out soon enough, the beginnings of a couple of projects on flavour backreaction (though I'm forced, in professional circumstances to call it "flavor" - yeuch!) and some really exciting work on bubbling geometries - a subject which I'm new to, but frankly it's about time I tackled something a little out of my field of 'expertise'.

Tomorrow I head off on the train, papers in hand, to go to Asturias - a mere three and a half hours by car but a mammoth 8 hours by train. I'll be taking the train along the scenic route which takes you along the Northern coast of Galicia and Asturias and I'm looking forward to that a great deal. I'll be heading to see my sometimes flatmate who spends half of her time studying in Asturias while she's not in Santiago, or Romania, or Paris.

Speaking of which, exciting plans are afoot for an Easter vacation of distinctly exotic proportions. Tickets are pending.

Right, I gotta review some basics before I give an introduction to modern physics to a friend tomorrow who devours such discussions with gusto along with some of the most perceptive questions I've ever heard.

Gap filling

This week I have been mostly.....Santiago leaving, Stansted fretting, coffee drinking, Oxford home-coming, mince-pie scoffing, cold feet chilling, night snowing, wine mulling, TV despairing, Christmas present belating, academic meeting, paper writing, deep breathing, London visiting, norovirus cuddling, program writing, cafe frequenting, gallery visiting, book worming, photo taking, path pondering.

Gaps may be filled in, or not.

Heating up

I know that blog excuses are generically tedious, but sometimes enough time goes by with the neglect of your thoughts and jotted opinions that such a statement is needed. With the termination of in-house internet the chances for such stream of consciousness writings has diminished, but they will continue, when time allows.

I'm still getting on with the papers which have been plugged into my bloodstream, gently leaking my energy levels for more months than I care to mention. They are genuinely in the final(ish) stages of writing and though thoughts of having them finished by the beginning of, middle of and end of summer vanished quickly into the distance the light at the end of the tunnel is at least close enough that parallax effects are noticable.

On top of this I've had a full house including two year old which has made for a surprisingly peaceful and enjoyable week. Cooking good food in the evenings with said baby's parents has added to the pleasure and a week's worth of hearty, good quality meals is helping the energy levels.

Tuesday saw a visit from James Lovelock who won this year's Fonseca prize, last year awarded to Stephen Hawking. The 90 year old polymath gave an impressive, if depressing speach, with little of the cliche and ranting that many climate change talks may be liable to, but with bleak predictions and the urge to plan for the future rather than to try and alter current fuel usage, the emphasis being that we've simply gone too far and are pearing over an inevitable cliff with no reasonable escape. The main claim and attack was that climate models tend to focus far too much on a small range of affects, be they meteorological, biological or otherwise, and few look holistically at the world as a complex entity with many interlocking effects - Lovelock's Gaia theory being the antithesis of such commonly used models.

Anyway, with thoughts of climate change, baryon densities, flat hunting, food hunting and tedious preoccupations with recurrent chalazion attacks (truly more boring than aggravating) the last couple of weeks have gone by apace and the coming weeks will likely have the same blurred passing.

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.

Past improved - on getting there in Spanish

In September 2007 whilst still in Beijing I penned the fateful words:

I've just started learning Spanish while keeping up with the Chinese and I so look forward to the day that I can sit in a restaurant in Santiago de Compostela and talk with those around me naturally. I'm smiling now thinking of the first time I will be able to open up a Marquez and read the words in their untouched form.

In reality my attempts to learn Spanish while in China quickly sank without trace and I only started when I arrived here.

So, yesterday, I found myself in the main bookstore in the centre of Santiago, looking for some Hemmingway or Steinbeck that I had already read, translated into Spanish. I couldn't quite decide what to go for when "Cien años de soledad" caught my eye. I laughed to myself, wondering how much longer it would be until I was allowed to open the pages of such a book, but with nobody watching I took it off the shelf and started reading the first sentence...and the second, and the third. There was something rather confusing. I had expected code, something for which I would need a key which would only be bestowed on me when I 'knew' Spanish. In fact it was written in a language which I could follow, if not fluently, then certainly with a respectable comprehension. I decided to go for it and ditched the idea of buying my favourite American authors in their bastardised form. I went straight to a cafe, placed myself in the sun and dived in.

An hour, and some thirty pages later I put it down, tired, but happy. There are many words that I don't understand, but I have plenty to build an almost complete picture of what is happening. I'm also not reading it with a dictionary because I believe what you save in comprehension you lose in fluency and I'm understanding enough that picking up the dictionary several times every page will make the whole process more painful than it should be. I'm quickly learning that there are a few unknown words which recurr frequently and these can be looked up after the fact.

Today I plugged away for another hour and I'm enjoying it a great deal. It's going to take me a few weeks at this rate given that I only have time to read at the weekends (I usually read before sleeping but Marquez in Spanish requires my complete attention) but this has already given me a good confidence boost (which as a trend I find is usually followed by a big kick in the linguistic privates).

In addition to the Marquez, I've spent this evening with a couple of Spaniards who are friends of my current Portuguese couchsurfer. During our dinner we discussed string theory, the anthropic principle, our respective views on God and religion (I discover post facto that they are Jehovah's witnesses, though they absolutely didn't fit my stereotype), evolution and intelligent design, not to mention a brief foray into the unusual world of composting toilets, almost entirely in Spanish. This isn't to say that it was a perfectly fluent conversation but I'd like to think that they didn't leave more confused about the world due to my linguistic inabilities, but rather that they discovered a side of things which perhaps they hadn't considered before.

Anyway, so, this is where I am after learning Spanish for a year and a half. In the last year I've probably averaged about a lesson every three weeks as I'm usually too busy to organise or go to a class, but the amount of time I'm spending speaking Spanish has gone up considerably. I have a long, long way to go to get comfortable, and in particular I find that speaking in Spanish around my colleagues, with whom I've been speaking solely English for the time I've been here, is proving harder than I'd like.

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Tomorrow I'm off to Barcelona for a meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday and will be back online in Santiago some time on Thursday. Until then...

Christmas Break

All is well here in Oxford, where I'm back for a couple of weeks over Christmas and New Year. I'm just taking a bit of a break from sitting in front of the computer all hours and leaving the blog to take whatever direction seems most natural after the New Year.

Anyway, being at home with family is enjoyable, but I find myself getting lazy (despite cooking many of the family meals, which brings me great pleasure), something which I find myself easily slipping into but a facet of my personality that I don't like at all. Hence I'm going to take off from here in a couple of days and spend some time in London, seeing friends, going to galleries and sitting in cafes reading some of my Christmas gifts. I've almost finished off Cry, The Beloved Country, a very powerful book about South Africa in the 1940s. After this I'll be diving into some Pinker (who without exception manages to change my view of the world in a few hundred pages), Kundera, Steinbeck and Susan Sontag's On Photography. There are another six or seven in the Christmas pile which I'll write about if I get the chance.

On art and museums, I did finally make it to see Guernica while I was in Madrid. My final afternoon in the city I dashed to the centre and made straight for the Reina Sofia. There is a lot of wonderful 20th century art on display, mostly Spanish, though the centrepiece is without doubt Guernica, a painting which I've read plenty about in a book devoted to this historical piece. It was every bit as powerful as I'd expected and the trip was well-worth it as I stood transfixed with no other museum-goers to disturb me.

Anyway, I hope that everyone else has had a peaceful and enjoyable Christmas! Enjoy the holidays if they're being celebrated in your neck of the woods.