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Abstract nouns
On the train on the way home I started creating a iTunes playlist called abstract nouns. I put in Suspicion by R.E.M. and Shame by Low and so on, but I'm not sure about Joy Division's Transmission. Is it as in "the transmission of knowledge?" - in which case, okay, or is it as in "my car's transmission is shot?" in which case not. I think it's the former. What else should be on the list? And also - what about gerunds? My inclination is not, but I do like Mercury Rev's Frittering. hmm |
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flora
I has a baby let me show you it
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Tennessee
Hi! I'm in Tennessee. I managed to get in to the US okay, even after the immigration official looked at the Cuban visa in my passport and asked me what I was in Cuba for (I said "scientific conference" and didn't mention that the science was nuclear physics). Tomorrow I'll fly home and see if they'll let me in there. I'll probably have a few hours to kill in Paisley on Wednesday evening if anyone wants to meet up there... |
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Inclusive, plus fees
It's not a great picture because of the reflection (hi! that's me and beth you can see), but it's one of my favourite signs from a business just up the road. Look at our INCLUSIVE prices, oh except for the fees...
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Knoxville!
I've just booked flights to Knoxville. I'm quite excited - I used to live our there, and haven't visited for years. It'll be great to see my friends children for the first time... The only downside is that I'm only there for two days, but still. Woo! Last night I sang karaoke at work. I would have done Okie From Muskogee by Merle Haggard if they'd've had it, because I always do, and I can sort of sing like Merle Haggard. I might have done Everybody's Talking by Fred Neil, if they'd've had it but they didn't. All the songs I fancied doing were woefully inappropriate for my meagre singing skills, but it was karaoke... so I went for Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood by the Animals. I can't sing like Eric Burdon, and I had to sing the chorus an octave lower than I should have. Never mind. Then I did a duet of I Got You Babe. The most surprising song in the list was O Superman by Laurie Anderson. I really should have gone for that. |
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kiss and make up
![]() I made potato, spinach and gruyere gratin for dinner tonight. It was nice. Then rhubarb crumble. nom nom nom. There's a picture of the gratin to the right.
On Friday there was a learning and teaching symposium at the university. I presented a poster, having been asked by the deputy dean for teaching and learning. I also went along to the keynote address, which was given by a physicist from Harvard, and was interesting. He made a lot of sense, and I should give some of the ideas he presented a go. Because I didn't have my glasses, I sat in the front row. This meant that the hosts - the university bigwigs - introduced the speaker to me, and we got chatting. That was all good. Because it was a big event, there was a photographer taking pictures of the speaker and the audience throughout the lecture. Then, at then end, when I was about to leave, the photographer came up to me and asked whether he could take a picture of me. I said he could - and he did. He didn't to it to anyone else... curious. Maybe it was because I was dressed so nattily, or because my makeup was so nicely done. I wonder. I was wearing my new waistcoat and pale pink pashmina. Maybe I shouldn't do that when attending events where senior staff are present, but then ... it's one of the perks of being in academia. |
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two posts in one day? How unlike me...
This is quite good: http://www.internetisseriousbusiness.com/ (sorry) |
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a normal day
Today was pretty much a normal day. Oh, except that I was propositioned for sex on the train on the way home. |
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lost books
On Friday I left the novel I was reading on the train when I got off at Guildford. Oops. I tried getting in touch with the lost property people at Waterloo. It wouldn't be the first time that I'd recovered a book that way, but this time it was not to be - It had not been handed in. This morning, I was standing at Fratton station when the man who reads the Times and looks like Stuart Maconie tapped me on the shoulder and said, "You left your book on the train on Friday. Here it is." hooray! what a nice man.
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Tiny Danza
last.fm just keeps getting better. Now you can listen to a large amount of the music there in full and on-demand. The bands get royalties every time a song gets played, and it all works rather well. Earlier today I used the facility to explore my secret shame of liking Elton John by playing Tiny Dancer. Bethan then sang along, but substituting "Tony Danza" for Tiny Dancer. This is apparently a popular pastime. I had never heard of Tony Danza. Bethan and I once believed that Milton Keynes was named after John Milton and John Maynard Keynes. I was wrong, but it did help me immediately see the answer to the clue in today's Independent crossword "Milton Keynes' economic rival? (8)." I seem to recall looking up in Fowler about the placement or otherwise of the 's' for possessives of people already ending in s, following the apostrophe. My memory is that you should put it there if you pronounce the 's' but not otherwise. That would make the crossword clue wrong... but then, when would you ever not pronounce it? Perhaps I remember the rule wrongly. Fowler is over on the other side of the room, though, and saying "Accio Fowler" is not working, so I don't think I'll check what he says. I picked up several shopping lists over the last couple of days. One has already gone to |
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having space
Hi! A few years ago I contracted headlice. Nice, I know. I got rid of them by shaving all my hair off, as it seemed easier than the shampoo / strange metal comb combination. An upside to being a skinhead for a couple of weeks is that no-one would come and sit too near me on the train, meaning that I would have a lot of space on my commute in to work. Last week I discovered that wearing make up performs the same function. Win! |
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The return of Semester
Last week I was in Italy. It was destined to be a last reprieve of relative calm before semester started again, and so it proved. But semester is never really as bad as I fear it will be the week before it starts. I have a new PhD student, who seems nice and competent, and some new project students, who I already know to be nice and I'm teaching some classes I quite enjoy, and the undergrads taking those are nice too, and everyone has been too polite to laugh in my face at my eye make up, except a couple of the lecturers. All-in-all, it's actually quite nice to be back in the swing of things. Even better,
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phrases
I'm going to Italy in a couple of days. Are there any key Italian phrases I should know to impress the locals? |
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Summary of Recent Times
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Boppin' Heads
My Brother's band's first single is available on iTunes. It's very excellent, and it's only a download away! (assuming I got the link right)
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Flora & Bling
Look at my pretty baby! Thanks to Since I have your attention, here's the advert: Now that it's December, why not take photos of houses near you which are covered in garish lights and sleighs and so on, and post them to my community
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Hai from Edinburgh
Hello again internet. A whole month seems to have elapsed since I have regaled you with tales of minor commuting incidents or descriptions of moments spent in airport lounges after physics conferences. Well, I'm sitting in Edinburgh airport waiting for a flight home, having flown up here this morning for a physics conference. Since it's a day trip I think it counts as commuting and I get to remain true to form. I have composed various journal entries in my head since I last posted, though the neurons involved in remembering them have since put themselves to other uses, and my original thoughts are lost. I think some of them might have involved music, along the following lines:
Being a father is still lots of fun. Flora is lovely. At the weekend, we took her up to her maternal grandparents for a couple of days. To a large extent, this is because Bethan's mum was due back from a gruelling sponsored cycling trip of India on Sunday, and we planned to be there to greet her on her return. Unfortunately, she hit a pothole, was thrown off her bike, and broke her arm, and returned on Friday. Ouch. She was in surprisingly good spirits, though.
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Flora
On Sunday, we held a non-christening party for Flora. Partly it was to welcome her in to the world, but mostly it was an excuse to invite friends and family down for a party, and just to show off our lovely baby. We had a good time, and as ever at one's own parties, we didn't seem to get enough time to talk to anyone in particular, but thanks to This morning I ran 4.5 miles. Click here for the map, if interested. It is now getting to the stage that the runs take quite a while, so finding time in the morning could get difficult. I still made the train that should get me in to work for 9, but unfortunately it got stuck behind a broken-down slow train just outside Liphook, and then had to to take on the role of the slow train and stop at all the stations between Haslemere and Guildford. I ended up getting in half an hour late. Still, it was a beautiful morning, and the scenery is very pretty around there, so I gazed at it while listening repeatedly to Two For Joy by Electrelane.
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running
I ran two-and-a-quarter miles this morning. Go me! I like it now that I can run far enough to spend some fraction of my run going along the seafront. School managed to beat any interest in physical exercise out of me for years, but I have it back;
P.S. Anyone want a ticket to see the Wedding Present in Portsmouth tonight? I've decided I'd rather spend the evening at home... |
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Catching up from Finland
I haven't really posted for a while, have I? I'm sitting in Helsinki airport between flights, and it seems like a good time to catch up. Travelling always seems to make me a bit reflective anyhow. I've got about an hour more to kill before boarding, and have had enough of marking. I should perhaps prepare some problems for a course I am teaching, but well... It's Sunday, and I think it's time for a break.
Having not posted for a while means that I haven't posted a picture of my lovely daughter, so here is a picture. I hope this placates those who think I prefer to post pictures of scrabble boards to pictures of Flora. It's just now with scrabulous in facebook, posting scrabble boards has become as easy as taking as pressing -$. Being a father is really the best thing ever, and Flora is a constant source of surprise and delight. She's getting bigger all the time, and is getting ever more alert and aware of her surroundings. Now she smiles when she sees or hears me or Bethan, the novelty of which hasn't worn off me yet.
So, Finland. The middle of nowhere in Finland at the end of October can be a bit bleak. I haven't seen the sun for several days. Not because it doesn't rise - it does - but there has been thick cloud cover the whole time. That, and the landscape, makes for somewhere rather stark and pretty, but ... well, I felt like I was staying in the hotel in The Shining, sometimes. Except all the other people there, of course. The purpose of my trip to Finland has been to attend a workshop on nuclear energy density functionals. These are a method for solving problems in nuclear structure physics, such as 'if I have 20 protons and 20 neutrons together (this makes the most common isotope of calcium) then what will the nucleus look like? What will it's shape and size be? How much energy do I need to give it to make it vibrate and what do those vibrations look like?' to name a few. Trying to do this by worrying about the individual motion of the 40 particles, along with all the associated pairwise interactions (all 780 of them) is a dead loss in terms of the sheer effort it would take. The density functional approach says that all that really matters is the density of the nucleus at any given point - i.e. the concentration of the protons and neutrons in one part of the nucleus or another. This is a much simpler thing to calculate, and it turns out that knowing about this density lets you answer most of the questions you want to answer. The workshop was interesting, and I gave a short talk, which seemed to go okay, and prompted some interesting discussion. The workshop was in a resort hotel which is in this middle of nowhere place from the picture above. Its isolation seemed to attract huge numbers of Finns wanting to get away from it all, and paradoxically not succeeding. In the evenings, the hotel appeared to be the gathering point for nearby people to drink and dance to a quite competent band who covered sixties pop songs in Finnish, which was entertaining for spectators. As fun as it all was, I've very glad to be heading home to see Bethan and Flora. Finally, and in unrelated news, I've recently gained an appreciation for music with synthetic voices. Such music really spans genres, and here is a small selection: Sample and Hold by Neil Young, O Superman by Laurie Anderson and Intergalactic by The Beastie Boys.
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