Visiting Friends

These are the cool friends I hang out with.

Ryan: Our marriage really didn't recharge our relationship like I hoped it would.
Kayte: I know. We should have a baby.

California's been awesome. I got a great view of the whole Bay area from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab today. Tomorrow I head back to Missouri.

Going on Tour

I'm hitting the road. Wish me luck.

19 March - 22 March: Santa Clara, CA
22 March - 23 March: Saratoga, CA
23 March - 24 March: Berkeley, CA
24 March - 25 March: Oakland, CA
25 March - 26 March: St. Louis, MO
26 March - 27 March: Columbia, MO
27 March - 31 March: Des Moines, IA; Graham, MO; who knows?
1 April - 6 April: Pasadena, CA
7 April: Oxford

Reading below level

When I was a kid I'd always flip to the back of my books to feel warm and fuzzy about the fact that it claimed to be for older students. I think I've peaked and will never have those warm fuzzy feelings again. From the latest two books I've been reading:

"This introduction to the theory of elementary particles is intended primarily for advanced undergraduates who are majoring in physics."

"This book is aimed at final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students of both chemistry and of physics."

Arguably I'm basically at level, not really below. Still I can tell that I'm not going to last much longer in this fight.

Walking

Among the more peculiar British ideas is the notion that aimlessly walking around the countryside is a leisure activity. Thanks to some ridiculous Common Law traditions, there is an enormous network of public footpaths criss-crossing virtually every field. So basically it's like hiking in the US except without the wilderness and with quite a lot of sheep poop.


A little websearching informed me that I could join in the national pastime with the Oxford Walking Club on their outing to the Cotswolds (pretty hills ~30 miles from Oxford). We met at 9 am at the train station, rode to Moreton-in-Marsh, then started our walk. To make a long story short, I learned two important things:

1. Moreton-in-Marsh is appropriately named.
2. The weather really does suck.

To elaborate on the latter we had sun, pouring rain, more sun, a driving thunderstorm, a little snow, then more sun. Next time I'm certainly bringing my rain pants (trousers). We finished off the roughly 15 mile trek with a sprint to just barely catch the train.

We got to walk across our fair share of these muddy plowed fields.

Sunny Lunch Break

I got back to Oxford just in time to turn the pages at an excellent concert given by Clara, Nadine Levin, and Aaron Mertz. They played Mendelssohn's Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 49. To say I was impressed would be a bit of an understatement. I had plenty of trouble just keeping up with the music to know when to turn the pages. It's a good thing they insisted that I show up and practice once last week.

Patent Markets?

The latest issue of Science Magazine has a short paper from a Caltech prof suggesting that winner take all patent systems (like ours) do not encourage innovation to the same degree that a market system would. The rough thinking is that scientists are not particularly motivated to work on the really really hard problems because they assume there is probably someone better who will beat them to the prize. If they could get a stake in their partial solution, the market would be flooded with more scientists tackling the big money issues, or so the theory goes. The results really aren't all that surprising, but the researchers did some cool little social science experiments (probably on my friends) to demonstrate. Unfortunately, the devil's probably in the details. It's hard to imagine dealing with the technicalities of moving to a market-based patent system.

Blue Screen

 

This isn't exactly what I like to wake up to. It seems to be stable for now. My only recent install was cygwin, and I can't imagine that the problem is stemming from that. Perhaps some of my hardware if flaking out.

Sunday Ride Through the Countryside

I've been too wimpy to ride my bike much through the winter. I recently discovered just how out of shape I'd become when I started playing for my college's club Ultimate Frisbee team. Since the weather has been getting nicer I decided it was time to get back in the saddle.

I went out solo with a hand drawn map (no printer in my room). It was pretty brilliant, but actually worked ok. I only had to get off my bike a few times to figure out where I was. Eventually I ended up in some little village called Islip, which was gorgeous in a very quaint way (no photos unfortunately). I tried to turn my trip into a loop, but I ran into a highway and figured it was a little wiser to just backtrack for today. I really should go out with the cycling club or some other group that knows the roads.