katsmeat

On Tuesday, I was in Cambridge for the first time in about eight months - Mathworks were running a Matlab symposium at the Cavendish Laboratory, the Department of Physics. It was free to attend and there literally was free lunch, who could possibly say no? I attended two boring and pointless talks (one of which was from Mathwork's UK Head), one sort-of OK talk, and two fascinating and usefull ones. Both of these were given by this woman, which implies I really, really ought to start reading her blog.

In these things, the lecturers tend to have a small stockpile of branded merchendise, to hand out as a pat on the head to any audience member who asks a good question, answers a lecturer's question or points out a mistake. And I got one! A Mathworks USB stick!

My thought process when this happened went something along the lines of... "OMG! Did I really just answer that? I'm so clever! I'm utterly briliant! And here's the bloke walking over to hand me the USB stick. Now politely say thank-you, smile modestly on the outside, grin like a maniac on the inside...

And it's a 1Gb. Oh, wow. Thanks. Jeez, have you had a box of these sitting forgotten at the bottom of a cupboard since 2005?"

So yes, my gratitude seems to last like snow under a flamethrower.

The Cavendish is interesting - incandescently prestigous (29 Nobels according to Wikipedia) yet the buildings look remarkably shabby (they're big on damp-stained ceiling tiles and peeling paint). One gets the impression of buildings built cheaply in 1960-something, that have been since continually chopped, altered and added-to as requirements change. Each time done as quickly and cheaply as possible. There's an vague air of "we don't care about appearances, because we don't have to care about apearances."

There are, however, lots of interesting glass cases, filled with aparatus used by varous exceptionally_famous phycists. I assume these were the things the Science Museum didn't want when they were clearing out the person in question's office or lab after death or retirement. They have the nice tradition of having a rows of annual, group photos of the department's research students. Impressively, I was familiar with about 1 in 20 of the names - Cockcroft, Walton, Blackett, Thompson, Watson, Crick, Bragg, Rutherford. If I didn't know the person, I was at least aware of the name in connection with some rule, law or equation.

After it was over, I took a quick wander through the town, mainly popping through those bookshops that are still open, but not buying anything. Then home.

Our shiny new AR future...

( currently feeling very, very Luddite )

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

Oooohhh....

For once, the job centre came up with useful results - a couple of numerical modelling gigs with the British Antarctic Survey in Cam, doing stuff with ice shelves.

I'll ignore that 50%-of-jobs-come-through-personal-networking-and-5%-come-from-replying-to-ads statistic. Which seems to imply that because I've only have a piece of paper, as opposed to a favour-owing bosum buddy in the BAS, I'm screwed before I even start.

Hey ho and all that. At least my quite totally awesuumm Velma Zombie Apocalypse T shirt arrived today.

Tracks and intensities of all tropical storms...

http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Tropical_Storm_Map_png

< loves this >

Hurricane insurance in South America is clearly the business to be in.

I spent Christmas Day playing with Hugin - a panorama stitcher; it works quite well.
See under cut for a panorma I took on the Athabasca glacier in Summer 07. It needs a lot of tweaking for the exposure, but I have more important things to be doing right now.

Although you don't quite have the full effect of being there unless, by a staggering coincidence, you have your computer set up in front of a powerful wind machine, connected to as industrial-sized air-chiller. For the freezing Katabatic wind, permanently blowing downhill into the valley.



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Breakfast this morning..

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/make_cake_in_a_mug.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

Well is does work, sort-of. If a touch chewie.

I just had the thought that, allowing for inflation, the cost per Gb of a 1G USB stick is significantly cheaper than blank CD/R's, when I first started buying them.

Cloudy last night, so no lunar eclipse. :-(

In other news, this Wikipedia category suggests that some Warhammer 40,000 fanboys really ought to get out more.

Can I just say that anybody who isn't subscribed to the podcast of In Our Time on Radio 4 - the only current broadcast I can think of that assumed its audience has a brain - should be ashamed of themselves.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/iot/

Though one night when I was in France, I fell asleep listening to it on my Palm and had a strange dream about encountering a crashing bore who just would not shut up about Socrates.

So I'm following the_local_echo and auntysarah into the exciting world of ambush-predator pets.

There's some work being done on the house right now, so last Monday I had to buy a bag of cement. At the check out, they had some Dionaea muscipula available so of course I had to get one as well.

I bought one ages ago, but it quickly died. Plenty of sunlight and plenty of Brita-filtered water (they hate chlorine and minerals) means this one is currently thriving. Though I'm disappointed it's not caught any bugs yet. I even left it all afternoon on the window-sill of the downstairs loo with the door shut, when a fly got in there.


UPDATE - Googling shows that Brita filters don't cut the mustard and I'll need a supply of rainwater/distilled water