Complex

So where am I and what am I doing? I’m in chilly Cambridge. The one in the UK. It is super cold over here. When we landed in Heathrow at lunchtime yesterday it was below freezing, and the thick cloud of the London sky was right down to the tops of the airport terminals. Everybody seemed to be talking about how cold it was. My wandering in central London for a few hours dragging my suitcase (before heading to Kings Cross and the train to Cambridge) was quite a bit uncomfortable – at least until I realized that a key mission should be to find on Oxford Street a branch of Marks and Spencer’s (now called M&S it seems… interestingly across the street from an H&M, and not so far from where the doomed C&A store used to be…) and buy some long thermal underwear. A bit elderly, perhaps, but very snug and warm against the icy winds and snow flurries, so I don’t care. (Yes, that probably falls under the category of “oversharing”, one of the words of the year 2008….)

icam board of governers meeting

One of the various governance boards I managed to accept to be on last year (despite trying hard to try to say “no” more last year) was that of ICAM, the Institute for Complex Adaptive Matter. For the first time in ICAM’s ten year history, its […] Click to continue reading this post

Not All Academic

I just have to say…Slumdog Millionaire is indeed a fantastic film. In case you were wondering if you should go…. just go. It is well written, acted, and beautifully photographed and directed. I’m pleasantly surprised that Danny Boyle could make a film that feels quite so authentic (while at the same time being essentially a fairy tale) as an Indian film. Quite splendid.

Speaking of excellent films of 2008, and turning to a more academic context, I’d like to urge you to take a second look at The Visitor, if you’ve not yet seen it. It’s nice, from time to time, to see films where the principal characters are academics, and this one does a very good job at having a good feel to it – in the sense that the lead (played wonderfully by Richard Jenkins) felt believable as a professor going through a strange time in his life, and then finding himself increasingly falling into an unfamiliar world. It is one of my favourite films of the year, and it seems that few people I know have even heard of it.

While on the subject of 2008 films featuring academics, I’d like to mention Smart People. I really did not like it at all. It is not that most of the principal characters […] Click to continue reading this post