Orion setting over Santiago de Compostela

I don't post these pictures as great examples of astrophotography - that much is clear but I'm always keen to point out what is around us to be observed with very little effort and minimal cost.

I woke up around 3 in the morning a few days back and thought I'd take a look outside to see if the Leonids were in evidence. Sadly as I poked my head from the seventh story of the building to the West of Santiago there were no shooting stars in evidence but Orion was standing there clearer than I'd seen it for a long time - we've had terrible storms for the last week or so and this was the first chance to see the stars in a while.

I set up the tripod, mounted the 300mm lens onto my Canon and took a few snaps to see how clearly one can see the orion nebula from a small city. I'm pretty pleased with the results for a first serious try and with a body which deals better with low light I think one could get some spectacular results.

The point to make with such a shot is simply that although we think of the night sky as a simple distribution of points of light, really there is structure out there even at the grossest scales, from the giant gas clouds surrounding old supernova remnants to the galaxies observable with the naked eye on a truly dark night to the phases of Venus, the bands of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn - such things are not only there to be seen by those with research budgets and large inheritances. All you need is enthusiasm, some truly minimal equipment and a little time to explore.

Life in a 22 degree arc

Lots to do this weekend so not much time to write but I'll simply post a picture of a solar halo that appeared as I was on my way to work a few days back. An HDRified take on the scene taken with the new lens I got a couple of months ago. With my 17-85mm Canon lens I can just fit a 22 halo into the screen, but with the 10mm lens in fits in with acres to spare! Yet again I stood there contemplating for a good quarter of an hour with passersby not wondering for a moment what I might be staring at....I despair!

Sunday random odds and ends

• Go to the Everything Seminar blog to learn about the first beam splash at the LHC in 2009. This is exciting progress and means that the detectors really are doing their job and the machines are almost ready to start collisions.

• Cineuropa is in full swing and so far I've seen:
• Tokyo Sonata, which was enjoyable though had at least half an hour which felt completely farcicle. Generally a worthwhile watch and I'll be keeping an eye out for more films by director Kiyoshi Kurosawa.
• Tulpan, a film from Kazakh director Sergei Dvortsevoy. The cinematography is stunning, set on the steppes of Kazhakstan and centering around the seemingly simple story of a nomadic family and the tensions between traditional and modern life. It's sometimes hard to know how concrete the storyline was pre-filming as there are a number of sublime coincidences which seem impossible to manufacture in the absence of huge special effects budgets.
• Tonight a group of us are off to see Wong Kar Wai's Dung Che Sai Duk, seemingly a kung fu movie with a difference. Will give a one-line report if it seems appropriate...

• And on an asian theme, my kimchi supplies are back up to maximum after an epic kimchi making afternoon yesterday. I have a feeling it may even stand up to the assault of a large group of Koreans who will be descending on my place for dinner on Thursday night.

• I've almost finished Douglas Hofstadter's book: Fluid concepts and creative analogies: Computer models of the fundamental mechanisms of thought. This discusses Hofstadter's own projects in the direction of creating something akin to AI, and reading this really makes all other approaches I've come across seem so hugely lacking - although there are many projects which can solve much more complicated problems than those discussed in the book, the way they do so seems to answer none of the deep problems about how we think. The projects which he and his colleagues have tackled are simple to define problems in very restricted domains: anagram solving being perhaps the easiest to discuss. Clearly it is trivial to write a program which can solve anagrams. Brute force is really the forte of the artificial computer but this goes no way to showing how we think or even trying to imitate our thought processes. Instead Hofstadter's programs attack such problems with stochastic sub-processes which go in to attack the problem on a number of different levels, spotting groups, patterns, and finding the strengths and weaknesses in its own formulations as it goes. As the book discusses more and more such problems it really does appear that Hofstadter has managed to model to a high fidelity the fluid non-deterministic nature of our own methods for such problem solving. In some ways it's rather frustrating reading, coming from a generation where we see that the difficulty of solvable problems increases with Moore's law. We are used to being able to tackle more and more complicated challanges year on year, but the bottle-neck to the methods discussed here is not computer speed, but our own understanding of the processes by which we make analogues define concepts and spot solutions. This is another fantastic book from Hofstadter and a highly enjoyable read.
• I haven't had time to watch this video, but by the looks of things this is Hofstadter discussing the concepts which are dealt with in the book:

• Incidentally, if anybody has any knowledge of the views of Marvin Minsky on Douglas Hofstadter or vice versa I would very much like to know. These are two giants of the field, who frequently come over as feeling pessemistic of the current trends in the subject of AI and I'd love to have an idea of their criticisms of one another.

• I really, truly, genuinely have almost finished the two projects I've been banging on about for the last few months. When they're out I'll try and explain a little about why it's taken so long to give them the final push.

Carl Sagan day and a Cosmos coincidence

I was due to post an advert for a monthly event here in Santiago, part of the International Year of Astronomy, which has been going on for a few months and is due to continue into next year. Every month in Pub Fuco Lois the landlord has cleared the way for a showing of an episode of Carl Sagan's Cosmos. I attended the last event which was extremely enjoyable, though not as well attended as I'd hoped. After watching the episode (dubbed into Spanish) people chatted over drinks about the show before dispersing into the night. A fun evening but it will be improved by the inclusion of more people. So, come along next Tuesday and enjoy the show!

The coincidence of course is that today is Carl Sagan day and would have been his 75th birthday. For some words from a true Sagan oficionado go and see what TMT has to say on the subject and watch the videos linked therein.

Cineuropa coming back to Santiago

Just a quick note to advertise Cineuropa, the annual film festival here in Santiago which shows a great array of recent world cinema (all undubbed which is unusual for Spanish cinemas). The program doesn't seem to be up yet but the festival starts on the fourth of November and goes on all month.

Three years ago I went to no films, two years ago I saw one and last year I saw two. If the most obvious sequence holds I should see 720! films this year which means I definitely won't get to finish the papers I've been promising for so many months already. I heated few hours on google chat this week has cleared up a few issues with one paper and muddied a few others. I enjoy the challange of individual problem solving but for me the greatest pleasure of what I do is to discuss with other people and together evolve a coherent picture of a problem and a solution. This has been happening a goodly amount this week on a number of problems which has been a lot of fun!

Phineas Gage rediscovered

Of all the incredible pieces of history on this page of recently rediscovered photos, the one which really astonished me was the portrait of Phineas Gage, the famous railway worker whose dicing with death via a metal rod and a stack of dynamite was the cause of a revolution in our understanding of the brain. I've no time to write about him now but his story is well worth a read.

Photo taken from the above wikipedia site.

Lecture on gravitational waves and their detection

A little advertising for a seminar next Wednesday here in Santiago if you're around. A talk on the fascinating subject of gravitational waves and their detection which I'm told will be at the divulgative level. These experiments are truly spectacular in terms of their mind-boggling precision, measuring the length of a vacuum chamber several kilometers long when the distance changes by one-hundred-millionth the diameter of a hydrogen atom! These mammoth experiments are designed to detect the gravitational waves given off when extremely violent astronomical events occur, such as the merging of black holes (see the LIGO website and and VIRGO website for more details).

One o'clock in the department of physics on the South Campus of the university of Santiago de Compostela (presumably in Spanish).

quote of the hour/day/week/until next time

The plural of anecdote is not evidence

A quote which rests on the definition of anecdote and whereabouts it might lie on a sliding scale of observation, a worthy sentiment nonetheless.

Too busy to blog at the moment but was tickled by the above line, the source of which eludes me (though an elusion through lack of searching as opposed to clever hiding - perhaps here).

Light painting spectacular

A quick note to tell you to go see TMT's latest photo which just made me gasp in wonder this morning. This is a fantastic use of a long-exposure technique known as light painting and I hope to see some more of this from TMT in the near future.

With thoughts and best wishes.

With weather conditions exploring the extrema through the days and nights my body has decided that I've had enough months feeling good and is going all pathetic and fevery presently. So, I'm sitting at home without the ability to concentrate on anything practical for more than a few minutes which gives the perfect excuse for watching some TED talks. This one by Henry Markram on building a model of the brain on a supercomputer was news to me in terms of the complexity that can be modeled on such a system and looking around the project's website it looks like an impressive endeavour.

which reminds me, through rather tenuous links, of this video by Dan Ariely on our buggy moral code which itself ties in nicely with work on universal moral grammar which makes you realise quite how basic some of our decision making skills are.

Anyway, a couple of random links. I may update more depending on the gradient of my descent.
With apologies on free-flow brain->blog input.

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.

Jupiter Moon conjunction

It's one of those days where I have a huge list of things to do but somehow nothing can be done in parallel and there's a lot of waiting around, never with quite enough time to get on with something else useful. I write this as I'm waiting for two programs to finish running and give me results for a paper I'm finally writing up having met up with a collaborator in Greece last week - of which more, perhaps, soon.

Anyway, after dinner with some friends last night I got home and saw the moon in near conjunction with Jupiter. I took a few shots and put two of them together to make the following, where Ganymede, Io and Calista were easily seen with the 300mm lens.

The Milky Way over Milos

I haven't taken any landscape shots since I arrived here in Milos. Everywhere is stunning by the times we've been out of lectures the light hasn't been that interesting. However, last night after dinner I took myself round to a secluded corner a few minutes walk from the hotel, set up the tripod and took an hour's worth of photos of the spectacular sky, the milky way slicing it in two and Jupiter lighting up a good part of it. In this photo Jupiter is the bright light in the top left.

In this photo you can clearly see the Lagoon nebula just above the horizon in the band of the milky way.

The colour balance is a bit wonky in this panorama so I'll try and replace this when I have time after my talk on Friday:

The first two photos were taken with a Canon 17-85 at 17mm, f/5 and around 60 seconds exposure at ISO 1600. The last photo is a panorama of six photos taken with a Canon 50mm at f/1.8 for 30 second exposures at ISO 400.

Milos on the fly

All is well here in Milos. I spent an enjoyable 24 hours in Athens, caught up with a friend I used to share a flat with in England, gourged myself on feta, moussaka, sun-dried tomatoes and baklava, caught a glimpse of the Acropolis, panicked about my talk, finished a bunch of calculations which have been dragging on and attempted to get some sleep before heading out here on the boat.

The island is beautiful but I haven't had any time yet to explore, this is the double-edged sword of being on a beautiful island with your collaborators! Still, the talks so far are not bad, and the coffee time discussions are proving useful (I've well and truly fallen off the coffee abstinence wagon). I haven't had a moment to take any photos yet but I plan on heading out to a peak to catch the sunset if I can tonight.

The next few days will doubtless fly by, then I have a couple of days in Athens, before I head back to Spain where I have to dive straight on with projects and finally getting one of my papers written up...

Off to greece

I haven't had a moment to think about my trip to Athens followed by Milos, starting tomorrow. It's been a very enjoyable but utterly chaotic week with lots of work getting done along with some time spent turning 30, and little sleep.

I'll see if I can update from Greece but it looks like that's going to be non-stop too. I hope that everyone else is managing life at a more reasonable pace...

Islas Cíes (With thanks to Daniel for the correction)

It's been a decent 13 hour work day so far and it seems like the week is going to continue in this fashion. With two projects to finish off, a talk which I desperately need to write for Milos next week, a friend and visitor (one and the same) turning up on Wednesday, a precarious pile of papers which I need to catch up with before the conference and a dozen other things which absolutely have to be done in and out of work, it looks like it's going to be a busy one.

Sunday saw a trip to the Islas Cíes which I'll post up if I have any time in the next couple of weeks. The Isla is one of Galicia's greatest treasures and the Galicians are very proud of pointing out that it was once voted the best beach in the world in a Guardian list a few years ago. The water is beautifully clear, the sand is truly some of the finest I've ever walked on and the forested hills covering the island are stunning, but any beach which backs onto such East Atlantic waters is going to have some problems in the water temperature department - I managed nothing more than a five minute swim. Anyway, definitely worth a trip across on the ferry from Vigo if you're in town.

A little light and colour

It's been a non-stop week with a depressing number of hours spent simplifying a pair of equations - finally to good effect, but such mindless work is pretty tiresome.

The weekend has also been pretty non-stop but I'm taking a couple of hours this morning to catch up on a little Chinese. I've had some great couchsurfers from the States this week including a photographer who has passed on some great photoshop hints and tips.

I like to follow the position of the sunsets through the year, the position of the moon in the sky through the month and the planets as they pass through the constellations. I find that having scraps of this knowledge mean that wherever I am I feel quite settled because I can orient to these phenomena. We've been having some great sunsets for the last week and the position of the sun right now casts a shadow from the hills in the distance across the slopes to the South with some spectacular sunbeams. This was taken last week as dusk set in.

When my friends were out from England last week we went up to the church on the hill at Pontedeume, a lovely fishing town with some wonderful windy streets through the old town on the slopes. The walk up to the top of the  hill is a good few km of stunning views as the bays below pan out. On the way down we passed some felled trees, and the colours in the early evening were particularly vibrant.

Next week a good swathe of the department is out of office at a meeting but I'll be busy preparing for the conference in Milos towards the end of the month. I'll be talking on a paper we wrote earlier in the year and have to remind myself of a fair few subtleties which have faded in the mean time.

so, until next time...

Random hints and tips

On Chinese, pinyin and spaced repetition

I've been spending the morning inputting some example sentences into Anki (by far the best flashcard program I've found - freeware, very well supported and, most importantly, built from the ground up on a spaced repetition algorithm). Doing this is always a bit hit and miss but I've found a useful series of steps which may be useful for some people.

For example sentences, you can't go far wrong using Chinesepod. The particular example I've been looking for today are sentences using the word 发生 (fāshēng - to happen). Searching in the glossary on Chinesepod you will find a list of around 20 examples which include this character combination - see here. This is all well and good but the pinyin (pronunciation of the hanzi) can only be found by hovering over the characters which makes it hard to copy the sentences directly into Anki without looking up any tone marks you don't know one by one. Perhaps the action of writing the pinyin may be worthwhile but I find writing tonemarks such a hassle that I'd rather spend the time in other ways (US extended keyboard on Mac: Option key + (a,e,v,`)+o=(ō,ó,ǒ,ò)).

The most efficient way I've discovered for getting pinyin directly is simply by copying the characters from the Chinesepod page and pasting it into the popupchinese adsotrans page and hey presto, instant pinyin. Copy this and paste it along with the hanzi and the meaning into Anki.

Update from the creator of Anki (see comments):

...there should be no need to generate the pinyin in another program. Install basic chinese support or the pinyin toolkit plugin in Anki (file>download), and Anki will insert the pinyin automatically

As an additional note I'd always wondered about the placement of tonemarks in pinyin which nobody had managed to quite explain to me. In fact the rules are simple, if not apparently terribly logical, and can be found here, where it says:

* A and e trump all other vowels and always take the tone mark. There are no Mandarin syllables in Hanyu Pinyin that contain both a and e.
* In the combination ou, o takes the mark.
* In all other cases, the final vowel takes the mark.

See the discussion here on Sinosplice with regards to spaced repetition software where several people, including myself mentioned the potential benefits of using SRS on Chinesepod.

Random addition: see here for a review of Chineseteachers.com on Laowai Chinese. This looks like a potentially very useful resource.

On video lectures and time saving

It's been a long time since I mentioned the use of video lectures, but right now I'm going through a couple of courses online which I've found from itunes university (Berkeley, along with many other institutions now place many video and audio lectures online, making my gym time doubly useful!)

This is a great resource, but one of the particular lecturers I've been watching speaks and writes far too slowly for my liking. I'm watching the video in VLC and can increase the speed to about twice the normal rate while still being able to follow along quite happily. The only problem with this is the chipmunk effect by which on speeding up the voice, the tone is raised. A quick look around gives a solution to this too. If you go into the preferences of VLC and click on all in the bottom right you will get an advanced menu. In this menu, go to Audio:Filters and click the button marked "Audio tempo scaler synched with rate. This will activate a plugin called Scaletempo which brings the tone of the voice back down to the original while allowing fast playback.

These lectures (guide for the lectures here) by John Conway on the free will theorem are a lot of fun.

On Research

I've spent the last four days simplifying a series of equations by hand from around 200 lines of mathematica code down to around 20. Some day I'm going to set up a supervised neural network which will learn how to simplify equations a whole lot better than the current Mathematica algorithms can! Thankfully although this has been a painful few days of tedium the result is that all the numerical instabilities have vanished from my calculations and as I sit here (unless there has been another powercut) my code is churning out meson masses in a model I've been working on for a good few months.

In the next couple of weeks I have to write a talk on our latest paper which has just been accepted for publication, and get a little further through my To Read pile sitting precariously at home. September holds so far a trip to Milos to a conference which looks to be packed with people and talks (eight hours a day!), including my own.

Enough, lots to be getting on with but a couple of photos to finish both taken from my window zoomed in with a 300mm Canon lens.

The wind turbines in the sunset

And the moon with Arcturus:

Perseid redux

It was only a week after taking it to the shop that I got my computer back, fixed and with new memory. Only last night did I have a chance to look at my photos from the Perseid meteor shower and to my surprise I discovered a lone meteor in one of my photos - I was expecting nothing. It can only really be seen on the larger size, in the top left, rising almost vertically. This shot was from a 73 second exposure and so the star detail isn't bad, and Andromeda can be seen quite clearly about 5 o'clock from the centre (click on the photo to see the notes).

The best view, photographically speaking was certainly the rising moon which came up a deeper red than I've ever seen it before, an incredible sight, looking down at the horizon at a lower altitude than we were:

Anyway, four friends are about to turn up from England one of them acting as my tea mule, and we shall be spending the weekend out exploring while the good weather here continues.

Txalaparta in Quintana

On Thursday night I went to a truly remarkable concert, part of the season of music and events which are going on every day in Santiago at the moment. This concert was in the Plaza de Quintana, the main square at the back of the cathedral and in my opinion a much more pleasant space than the main square at the front.

The Txalaparta is a Basque instrument, played by two people who act as one. The instrument comes in a variety of forms, but in essence it's a large xylophone, played with wooden sticks and where the players play alternating notes (or alternating pairs, etc.). The players on this occasion were two of the most famous, Igor and Harkaitz, this time accompanied by Aziza Brahim a woman with a voice like the desert.

They came with two txalapartas, one wooden and one of stone, though accompanying the players were videos of their recent tour where they have been going around the world constructing txalapartas of all manner of materials, including ice. The trailor for this video can be seen here and is well worth a watch:

The speed at which the musicians play and the perfect synchronisation are truly remarkable and with the accompanying voice  of Aziza Brahim and the setting with the cathedral to the right and the rising walls of the nunnery to the left it was a powerful evening. (bad quality due to high ISO, sorry).

These guys seem to be touring most of the time and I'd highly recomment trying to see them if they're in town.