Crush them if they come

A conversation at our weekly research group meeting today:

Student 1: I feel this is a key topic in planetary formation at the moment.
Student 2: I think Jones' group are working on it, I heard him give a talk recently where he mentioned this research.
Supervisor: Hmm, perhaps we should pursue this area.
Student 2: ..... you think we could do it & publish before Jones writes up his paper?!
Supervisor: Well, once an idea is out there it's anyone's game.

[There is a short moment of stunned silence.]

Postdoc (c'est moi!): ..... you're feeling incredibly competitive today.
Supervisor: Ah. I wonder what I had for breakfast. I should have it again.

[As a disclaimer, I've actually forgotten which group we were discussing, so no Jonses were harmed in the making of this group meeting.]

Things that go 'meow' in the night

"Meow."

"Tallis! It's 2 am! I need to sleep!"

"... Meow."

"Ugh."

Fine. I flick the light on and look around for the wicked feline. Her voice comes from underneath me so, with a groan, I tilt myself off my mattress to look under the bed. No cat. Has she got caught up in the suitcases? I push them around a bit. Still no cat. Huh.

"Tallis?"

"Meow!"

The noise comes from directly underneath me and ... in fact ... I can feel her.

She's in the box spring.

WTF?

"Oh you are totally on your own."

The light goes out.


Epilogue:

♪ If you could see that I'm the one who understands you .... ♫

"Ummmhuu," I glance bleary eyed at the radio only to be headbutted by a furry mallet.

"Meow!"

"Oh you escaped, I see?"

"Meow."

"... that was a 'fuck you', wasn't it?"

"Meow."

It's just not an English sport at all!

Cross-country skis differ from their downhill counterparts in that the boot clips to the ski at just the toe, leaving your heel free to move. This makes moving along the flat infinitely easer but at the cost of less control on turns and descents (surprise!). It also allows you to go over the top of your skis. Basic physics will tell you this. As will actually doing it.

I will offer one guess for the way this Physicist found that out.

At this point, a rather pathetic tantrum is thrown in which the neck and upper body are kept still out of necessity.

Having absorbed (rather literally) these vital scientific attributes, I headed further down the trail and paused to call back to a friend that the next decent did not look too bad. In fact, there was probably a 27.6% chance of our survival (it was she who had suggested that us beginners should go on a medium/difficult labelled run). At this point, I was informed by another skier that:

"It's just not an English sport at all! Not at all! I should know; I lived there for 15 years!"

I know most people do this easily, but I have to confess that I'm always impressed when people pin point an accent from just a handful of words. I truly can't do it and therefore happily assume that everyone sounds like me. This probably comes from a relic teenage disorder of desiring to be the same. However, I proudly drew myself up, tried to cover the evidence of my recent accident and informed the woman that, due to the sudden snowfall in the UK and repeated reruns of the movie "The day after tomorrow", the Government had sent civilians to Canada to wrestle polar bears and learn how to ski. They were then to become politicians.

On that note, this diplomat scooted off down the slope, only to take a wrong turn and have to do the latter half of the trail again at double speed to ensure she caught the bus back to Toronto.

In other news, I received my official socialised health care card today. I wonder if that was a hint.

Headline news

As America tunes to the State of the Union address (or American Idol, depending), Britain's most famous broadsheet, The Times, is sending its reporters out to shop in their pyjamas.

It started when a woman in Cardiff was thrown out of Tesco (a major supermarket chain in the UK) for shopping in the a fore mentioned nightwear. She told reporters:

"We was only popping in for a pack of fags. If we were doing a proper full shop, then obviously we would have went in clothes."

Well, obviously.

Tesco claimed that such attire might offend the other shoppers so, to test out this theory in the most scientific way possible, a Times reporter was dispatched to roam the streets of London in his PJs. In order to ensure a small exploration of the parameter space, he first donned a £750 velvet dressing gown and £125 pyjamas before moving on to a more normal £20 ensemble. Apparently, no one batted an eyelid.

Ultimately, the only question later raised was the one traditionally asked to kilted Scots; what are you wearing underneath? In response, the report notes:

"Suffice it to say The Times prefers not to take risks unnecessarily."

Substitute for snow cones

Yesterday, I went into the supermarket to buy the ingredients needed for a chili. Walking into the fresh vegetable stands in search of two large green bell peppers, I found it littered with signs warning that Florida had frozen and therefore there would soon be no vegetables or fruit in the whole of Canada. The suggestion seemed to be that such items could be substituted by snow cones.

Well, ok, what the sign actually said was that, in the case of no vegetables, customers should check out the frozen food aisle, but since this largely consisted of ice cream and snow cones I maintain that my paraphrasing is accurate.

I bought four bell peppers and left.

Under such a misfortune as this, one cannot see too little of one's neighbours

I first read Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice when I was thirteen. I now realise this was far too young to really appreciate the main point of the book: that being that Fitzwilliam Darcy is surely the hottest man in fiction. He is proud, mysterious, rude and angry at himself for being in love with a completely unsuitable girl with an utterly unfiltered mouth. In fact, if Austen wrote the novel now, Darcy would surely be a vampire.

This discovery came in the wake of finding free audio books for download (e.g. here). Admittedly, the readers vary in quality but I was suitably entertained while waiting for my code to crash. The latter, incidentally, is less likely to run smoothly than Lydia become a sensible girl.

If anyone reading this is bemoaning the fact they found this English classic too stilted to get through, I'm led to believe that adding zombies to it helps the situation.

You three at the front ... look like a galaxy

On Monday I am giving a colloquia at the Origins Institute at McMaster. This research seminar series is interesting since the audience are all scientists, but from a wide range of areas. So, for instance, I can happily assume I can talk in some depth about the hydrodynamics equations my code is using, but might have to remind them what a galaxy is.

There is one other small challenge I am dealing with; my laptop had hard-drive failure over Christmas and my new one ... is in Alaska. However, it was previously in China so we're making progress. Nevertheless, China, Alaska or even the sorting office in Toronto will be no use to me come Monday and I still have to write the talk, so borrowing someone elses is also problematic. I believe this gives me two choices:

1. A blackboard talk .... on computational astrophysics. I'll simply have to draw my simulation results. The key movie for my talk consists of a galaxy evolving for 300 million years with one image taken every million years. So I will sketch, tell my audience to hold that thought and then draw the image corresponding to a million years later. Or perhaps I could have a gigantic flip chart with a huge mechanical thumb to flick through the pages for the audience to see.

2. The option my supervisor suggested was that of interpretative dance. In fact, this colloquium is compulsory for students studying at the Origins Insitute, so I could enlist them in this endevour:

"You, over there, you are part of a spiral arm! Try and curve your spine a little more ..... right, now you've undergone gravitational fragmentation. Curl up. Oh please! GRAVITY IS ACTING BABY! Tighter. Try and become a point mass ..... Okay, now you've formed a star. At least try and glow...."

However you look at it, it is going to be awesome.

Night stalker

Silently the many legged stalker advances on the inert human form, buried deep beneath the bedclothes. The initial attack strategy of head-butts and a vibrating voice produce no motion. Phase two is engaged whereby a limb is inserted between neck and pillow to bop sleeping human on the nose. In horror, she discovers the invasive front foot is trapped! Caught in a devious counter attack that proves sleep was merely an optimistic faint. The only solution is to try and follow after the restrained appendage, burrowing face and shoulders into the widening gap between bed and body. In a sudden movement, the stalker is scooped into the air, only to be placed down on the bed and used as a furry purry pillow. What could have caused such extreme repercussions? Could it be her assault or the timing of 5 am in the morning? Ahh, it's good to be back.

I have returned to Canada, dug out car, collected cat and -- in some crazy sense of competition -- the UK has now filled up with more snow than we have here. What's with that?

Let it snow

Snow! Here in the UK, who would have guessed it? Naturally, no one (despite the fact that it usually occurs at some point during any twelve month period). Therefore, hundreds of people are stranded at airports, in their cars, department stores and, possibly most oddly, the channel tunnel which you would naively think would be unaffected by the weather.

Since living in NYC and now Canada, it's fairly hilarious watching the country dissolve in chaos from a few inches of frozen water. That said, it'd doubtless be rather less entertaining if I weren't safely at home with a hot mug of tea. The problem I guess comes from the rarity of such conditions making it impractical for the Government to purchase serious snow equipment for a single use a year, although the BBC have now printed an article on how to grit a road, in case anyone was up for a change of career. Given the STFC's science proposal for the next five years funding, it's not without appeal.

Meanwhile, I'm attempting to demonstrate the benefits of gluttony to our ailing family cat who, at twenty, has decided food is for "them young things". It's not quite as I would have it, but I suspect when I reach the equivalent age in human years, I won't give a damn either.

Raclette

Melt a pile of Swiss cheese, pour it over new potatoes with added pickles, gherkins, tomatoes and bacon, have a baby wave a bread roll at you and you have a great Swiss meal! It is possible that the small child is not strictly necessary for raclette, but with only a single data point it's hard to be sure.

Regardless of the necessary trimmings, I ate too much cheese. I don't even regret it and it'll set off the too-much-chocolate I intend to eat next week at home. I did, however, almost miss out on the entire experience by struggling to find my cousin at Zurich station. Damn those giant Christmas trees and pretty market stalls that were set up in my line of sight! Outrageous.

In other news, apparently the UK has stopped funding Astronomy. Sad but ... OK, not totally true ... but the STFC (Science & Technology Facilities Council) announced a pile of project cuts in their five year outline. Fortunately, I'm totally into being a Hobo, so I'm just going to continue my plan to use Astronomy to work in every country that'll have me and pretend it's because of the economic situation. Yes.

Where are you from?

It's a standard question that pretty much everyone asks, especially in academia where people move around a great deal:

Where are you from?

Yet, because young researchers do indeed change jobs frequently, it's not a question with an easy answer. For instance, do they mean "where are you from ..?" as in your current main residence when not visiting this institute? Or "where are you from ..?" as in the institute you were at before starting your current job? Or "where are you from..?"; the city your parents now live in and where you might refer to as home? Or "where are you from..?"; the place you spent most of your childhood and where you accumulated your accent?

For me, the answers span three continents which makes is a tad hard to produce a single all-purpose answer unless I was to say "Earth" and I'd rather hope that much was obvious (though don't always bank on it - I do work in Physics).

Of course, I ask this question myself as often as I receive it and while having this debate with someone in the same position (who I had indeed just addressed the question to) I came to the conclusion that what I was really asking him was:

Where would you be deported to if the government discovered astronomy was actually a cover for drug smuggling?

(You see X-rays from space do you? I think it's time to you sobered up, young man!)

I would hasten to add however, that it is purely coincidental that my answer to the above question is also where I am going for Christmas. Not deported, folks, not deported. There really is a universe in my computer that I built from cubes resembling virtual Lego bricks. (I think I win for being paid to believe that.)

Swiss complex

There is something about Zurich that makes me feel slightly inferior to the Swiss. Perhaps it is the perfectly clean and efficient tram service or the way that everyone, from professors to shop keepers, speaks accentless English. Maybe it is the beautiful buildings, the mountains or the giant metal cowbells that hang around bovine necks just like in the picture postcards. It could be the sparkling clear lakes or the fact that the Astronomy department has both foosball and ping pong tables that have never been stolen in a drunken student revelry.

Not that the nation does not have its idiosyncrasies. Many citizens extol the virtues of mountain air, good cheese and fresh bread and then proceed to smoke like a chimney. It is an eye opener and a mouth (and nose) closer.

I am currently sitting in the newly renovated apartment I have rented for two weeks. Aimed at visiting academics, it is opposite the University of Zurich's campus and comes with everything you need; bed, TV, stove ... and an incredibly complex coffee machine. Like the rice cooker in my apartment in Japan, the Swiss seem to have clear opinions of what is absolutely essential for survival.

Amusingly, I was repeatedly taken aback to be addressed in German as I mooched around the town centre. Ah, that's right! It's a foreign country with buttons on objects you would rather were kept simple, but it's not Japan and all Europeans look the same.

Licensed to drive

I have an Ontario driving license!

[Extended intermission for lengthy, if disappointingly choreographed, dance routine to be performed]

To my amazement, the response to my desperate inquiry revealed that while no road tests were being performed during the strike, a few select centres in Ontario were doing license exchanges. I was pointed towards a website which declared my nearest open test centre was about an hour's drive away and to be prepared for a very long wait, no guarantee of service and maybe swine 'flu. So, armed with a book, a laptop and a box of tissues, I headed off to the town next door to discover the queue ... was outside. Was it really so long that the whole waiting room had filled up before 10:30 am? Actually no... it transpired that this was a rather bizarre way of punishing people who were been served during the strike. We will see you .... but you have to stand outside in the Canadian early-winter looking through the windows at our heated, empty waiting room. Maybe the union found it upsetting they could not see all the frustration they were causing so decided to design an exhibit.

The wait was about an hour; allegedly I had picked a good day since I was told inside that the previous week had seen lines four to five hours long. Oddly, I did not have to sit a drive test (which is fortunate given the strike) or even a written one; I just had to relinquish one of my driving licenses (I hold both USA and UK). Since my US one was expired, I thought this was a good swap. Admittedly, it might have been better to offer up my British license since it had more years on it, but I also doubted the promise that I could switch my Canadian license back to a UK one when I left. "Mutual exchange" or not, I would not put it past my own country to make me sit their notoriously difficult drive test again just for the dry laughs that define my culture.

I left with a piece of dot-matrix paper in my wallet and a photo-card in the mail. Hurray!

I still need insurance. I called a few places and the results were ugly. Perhaps I could hire a good looking Chippendale driver instead.

Incidentally, my new phone can send photos it takes directly to an online scrap book attached to my account. I find that kinda clever.

Ice, ice baby

So my moving boxes are now largely empty. The resulting horizontal filing system has been upgraded in almost every room and a clear path to the door is visible in the remaining areas. It was time to get down to the real reason I came to Canada; the ice hockey.

Thursday night I joined my department's twice weekly pick-up game. That's right; the Physics department has a hockey team. I swear they also do research in my field.

This week, we were somewhat short on players. In fact, we had no bench[*]. So my first time back on the ice after almost a year resulted in some body complaints: "You're doing this again?! .... And ... you're not getting off the ice ... at all .... seriously?!"

By the end of the hour, I had remembered how to skate and even regained the use of my legs just in time for Saturday's match with my new city-based hockey league.

Ironically, I was put on a team called "the Canadians" (named after the NHL Montreal team) and was told upon arriving at the rink that I would be in changing room 5. This is changing room 5 .... out of 24.

The "Mohawk 4 Pad Arena" is something out of a Florida hockey player's dreams. Yep, you heard me, "4 pad"; four NHL sized ice rinks sitting side by side like quadruplets with multi-coloured fleas. The fleas in question were the hockey players who were in full swing on each rink when I arrived... and when I left at 1 am after eating in the bar that sits upstairs overlooking the games.

From what I could see, there was no mention of figure skating or family sessions. This was a rink with a single purpose .... x 4. Did I mention the Walmart here is packed full of hockey equipment? Or that I was planning on giving up my apartment and moving to the rink? 

[*] For non-hockey enthusiasts, the bench is where the players not currently on the ice sit. You rotate in shifts, with each player usually being on the ice for a couple of minutes hard skating before changing.

There's a moment you know ... you're fucked.

There are really only so many 0C morning starts you can take before the "Sunshine state" number plate on your car (complete with a large picture of an orange) starts to grind. It also served as a fruity reminder that at the end of the month I would no longer be covered by my American insurance policy and the car had to be registered in Ontario. I therefore gathered together all the scribbly scraps of paper Customs had given me and scooted to the licenses office.

A cheerful woman greeted me at the counter, told me I had all the paper work I needed and I just had to get Ontario car insurance. Well, that sounded very easy and reasonable! Man, I love Canada.

I then called my bank, who I knew also did auto insurance, and explained what I wanted. No problem! They could definitely insure me providing I had an Ontario driving license. I always appreciate how helpful everyone is here.

So I called the driving license authority who told me ...

Screw you. We're on strike.

.... Huh?

Yep. Since August. This automated message will now come to an end.

Okay, I admit it was actually a web page and it did not in fact read "screw you", but the paraphrasing is nevertheless accurate. You know the fuzzy warm feeling you get when you just know everything will work out? Not feeling it, people. Not feeling it at all.

Excuse me, I need to go and buy bus tickets.

The problem with agreeing with yourself

Ha Ha Ha

Laughter ... did someone just tell me a joke? Maybe I heard an a particular piece of music? Or perhaps I am an insane screwed up individual who is on a rollercoaster?

The origins of why people laugh was discussed in a lecture I attended today. The speaker proposed that we laugh when there is a contrast between what two parts of our brain are telling us. He offered this joke as an example:

Two fish are in a tank ... one says "so how do you drive this thing?"

Initially, a part of your brain called the amygdala acts first. It controls emotional reactions and produces confusion, a negative sensation. There is a tiny delay and then cortex reacts, understands the pun, and cancels out the bad sensation the amygdala produces. As a result of this delay and contrast, we laugh.

In the case of humorous music, a tune will deviate from what we expect causing a negative emotion from the amygdala (since the brain's job is to predict the future correctly) but then the cortex kicks in to remind us it's just music, there is no threat, so again we laugh.

Finally, we were offered the comparison of two people on a rollercoaster, one of whom is enjoying it and another sane person who is not. As the foolish idiots who embarked on this ride of doom riders go up and down and upside down, both their amygdala produce an emotion akin to "Holy crap, we're going to die". In the case of the person who loves the ride, the cortex cancels this out a moment later, knowing rashly and with very little evidence that there is no real danger. The person bursts out laughing. For the second individual (a.k.a. yours truly), the amygdala says:

"Holy crap, we're going to die"

and then the cortex follows it with:

"Damn right."

This person is not laughing. No.

A letter to your future self

Due to luggage weight limits on my flight back from Japan, I sent two large boxes and a poster tube to my work address in Canada via sea mail. At first, this seemed liked a great plan. I placed all the heavy books and CDs in the boxes, keeping the lighter clothes in the suitcases with breakable objects wrapped snugly within them. It was only after I'd dropped the parcels off at the post office did it occur to me that, if they were lost, I would be missing almost all the manga I had bought in Japan which was fairly irreplaceable (from this side of the world at least).

At this point, one of my friends decided to post about how she had lost half her sea mail items.

I started plotting ways in which I could return to Japan.

This week though, amazingly, incredibly both boxes and the poster arrived! I was expecting it to take about three months but it has only taken one. In fact it was perfectly timed, since I only arrived in Canada last week. Oddly, the new box I bought gained a split down the side whereas the slightly damp box I rescued from outside a 7/11 supermarket near my apartment is just fine. Even more oddly, a post office somewhere along its journey mended the split box by putting straps around it. I am filled with love for the human race.

Now I have an office full of pornographic doujinshi manga and all my text books are still at home. I'm trying to decide if this is a problem.

Lugholes

Overheard conversation between two graduate students before the start of journal club this week:

Student 1: I've been asked to give a show with the planetarium and to make it romantic.

Student 2: Romantic?!

Student 1: Yeah ... they said they didn't want any of that dry academic stuff but something fun and romantic.

Student 2: Oh...

Student 1: .... it's for two people.

Student 2: ... that could get awkward.

Hello, can you make me look like this anime character?

"Well, aren't you the most exciting thing I've seen all week, no all month?"

Complimentary, yes. The first thing you'd like to hear coming out of your hair dresser's mouth? Not so much.

I had been wanting to cut my hair short for quite some time. The prospect of spending four months in Japan stayed my hand (or rather my scissors) since none of my imaginings of how that salon experience would go with my Japanese language skills ended well. So, aflush with the excitement of being able to talk to every street vendor in town (except my new phone voice message system that inexplicably came up in French, but that's another story), I headed to the nearest hair dressers and made an appointment for this weekend.

When you desire a fairly drastic cut, it is always a good idea to give your hair stylist a picture, rather than a few random arm waves. Digging through old photos, I found one of myself from a number of years back with the cut I wished to revert to. The picture was a clear, face-on shot but I couldn't find an accompanying image of the back of my head. Hunting through magazines in the local supermarket only offered me Angelina Jolie (hair too long) or Brad Pitt (facial hair too long) and I was on the brink of giving up (generally; such magazines have that effect), when I glanced down at my key chain. Attached to the bunch of shiny new keys I'd accumulated in the last week, was a small model of one of my favourite Japanese anime characters (Eiji from Tenipuri) and a picture of another (Atobe, from the same series). Both were sporting basically the same hair-do I required. Well ... it was a bit unconventional, but hey if it works ... So along with the photo, I presented both Atobe and Eiji for inspection and preyed to the heavens above that the stylist wasn't a secret Japanese manga fan.

At that point, said stylist started to have far too much fun. We went through a whole range of different styles simply because she wanted to "try things out" as we went down in length. It was during this that the topmost comment made an appearance and I hoped she would remember to stop before we got too carried away.

Fortunately, she did. I now have a funky short hair do .... just in time for the winter. But hey, it's easier to cram under a woolly hat.

Balls of ice

This morning's walk to work was bright and clear. Blue skies and warm in a 2-sweaters-and-a-jacket kind of way. As I approached campus, the skies suddenly darkened and it started to pour.

Ha! You think you've got me, Mother Nature, but I am prepared! After all, I have just been living in Florida where no summer day is complete without a spontaneous twenty minute tidal wave.

I pulled up the hood of my coat and looked heavenwards .... to receive a face full of icy hail stones.

Oh right. That would be the difference from Florida.

A few minutes later and the skies cleared to an innocent blue again and I limped off towards my department. While not particularly wet, I was covered with ice chips and my nose hurt from its shrapnel bombardment.  

Okay fine. I admit it. I wasn't prepared for this.