Category Archives: travel

Oh Vienna!

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l-2048-1536-e513c70e-9db7-4c90-a4b6-4317082eb9ec.jpegVienna. (Yes, the 80s song’s refrain did ring in my head as I arrived. No, I still have no clue what the lyrics mean.)

I am at the Erwin Schrodinger Institute (named after one of the co-discoverers of the modern Quantum theory upon which so much of our science and technology depends, in case you were wondering – he with the cat) for a while. There is a workshop here on the study of aspects of nuclear physics using holographic methods from string theory, a topic I’ve told you quite a bit about before. This is week one, and there are some longer survey talks that have been put on to set the scene and get everyone on the same page. It is an excellent way to start a workshop. As a bonus, present are some of my old friends from my postdoc days who I last saw in Madrid earlier this year, Karl Landsteiner (one of the organizers) and Esperanza Lopez, (you may recall me chatting a bit about those days in an earlier post), and, as icing on the cake, to my surprise Rob Myers, a friend and collaborator from even further back, is here too.

It is not just about old friends and colleagues, but new ones too. I’ve met and re-met […] Click to continue reading this post →

Come On LA!

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p-2048-1536-5f4d380e-a365-44ad-9eb7-fc7a9f2c2bf3.jpegPerhaps ironically, since I tune into BBC Radio 4 every day when in Los Angeles, I’ve not been listening to it or any other UK radio or news source while here in London at all. So imagine my pleasant surprise on Thursday when I came across what clearly looked like a docking station for bikes (as opposed to super-fancy bike racks, which I thought it was at first)! Sure enough, once I got closer I confirmed it – a bike sharing scheme was starting in London. By the next day I saw some more stations on my walks, and a truck driving along full of the bikes, presumably going to load up the stations. As it turned out, I learned later that the scheme started that very next day, and today I saw several people out riding on them!

I am a little disappointed about one thing. I wanted to try them out and be out there seeing the streets of the city from one of these bikes instead of on foot (as I have been doing a lot in the last several days), but guess what? […] Click to continue reading this post →

The Scary Stairs

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l-2048-1536-655079d2-52f2-4383-962d-ae6e85ebb910.jpegThese stairs have a lot of significance for me. They are at Dartmouth House, just North of Piccadilly, in London’s Mayfair district. There you will find the home of the English-Speaking Union. The ESU is a charity that has an interesting history, all based on promoting friendship, communion and understanding amongst the English-Speaking nations and people of the world. This might seem an odd thing to build an organization on, but it might make more sense if you read the history. In any case, there are so many organizations of all sorts doing things, and in the scheme of things this is as good a reason as any to bring people together. The ESU administers a number of grants, fellowships, and scholarships, among other things, and one of them is the Lindemann fellowship. It is a one year postdoctoral stipend that you can get fresh out of your PhD, and it is designed to give young people a taste of America. It is highly competitive (only a couple are given out each year), and the final decision is made on the basis of an interview. You come up these stairs, all nervous and under stress since it is probably the first major interview upon which your career might depend, and the surrounding fancy parts of London may have helped make it all weigh a bit on your mind. You wait at the top of the stairs near the piano and listen for your name to be called and then you are ushered into the room and put in front of the interview panel.

I know this since I was here in 1992, being interviewed. I had set my sights on […] Click to continue reading this post →

Pub Breakfast

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p-2048-1536-3e449aa4-72a9-4dcd-bac1-d73bb46ae5c3.jpegI find myself in the odd situation of being in a pub in London well before 9:00am, having breakfast. No, things have not got so bad that I’m resorting to alcohol so early in the day, you’ll be relieved (I hope) to hear. (Things are good, on balance. Thanks for asking.) It is just that I took a rather strangely timed flight over from Los Angeles that meant that I was flying during peak waking hours in my body’s internal clock, and then arriving at 6:30am London time. This meant that I did not do my usual trick of getting at least some sleep on the flight…. So I find myself in London bright and early – way too early to check into my hotel. I’m groggy and hungry. Happily I found a pub […] Click to continue reading this post →

Tzintzuntzan

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yacata_1(Top prize for the best name on last month’s trip.) This is the name of an existing town as well as the nearby archeological site, the subject of this post. On the Sunday I referred to in a previous post, several of the School went off on a bus to do some sightseeing West of Morelia. This is one of the places to which we went. I learned a bit about the pre-Columbian mesoamerican civilization, the P’urhépecha (or Purépecha), whose capital was Tzintzuntzan (place of the hummingbirds). The structures in my photos (click for larger view) are called Yácatas, which are on a plateau overlooking the lake Pátzcuaro. […] Click to continue reading this post →

Morelia Cathedral

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Morelia is a beautiful city. One of the things that strikes you is the high concentration of architectural features that are either churches or related to churches (convents, chapels, etc) in the core of the city. The queen of these is the cathedral, which was across the street from my hotel (and gave it its name). Here it is during the day. The photograph was taken quite early in the morning to take advantage of the pleasant light (click for larger view):

morelia_cathedral_day

It has fountains and gardens on both sides of it, and so acts as an all important […] Click to continue reading this post →

Riverside Fun

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(Note: Written yesterday afternoon at 6:00pm.) Well, that was fun! I am on my way back from UC Riverside where I visited to give a colloquium. I met a number of faculty that I had not seen since I was last there (talking at a DPF APS meeting in 2004) and people seemed to like the talk (similar to the ones I gave last Fall in LA and in Vancouver), even though I was a bit rusty in my talk-delivery, being deep in sabbatical mode, you understand. I wallowed too much in the experimental physics part of the talk and so had to rush the ending bits where I bring in aspects of string theory to the game. I hope people were not too confused. I invited people to send me email for more information/explanation if they wanted to, since I had to leave immediately after my talk.

You might be wondering why I am typing while I’m driving on the highway. Isn’t that bad? I could respond that texting while driving is illegal but blogging while driving is perfectly fine (along with things like eating, shaving, applying makeup, and a host of other things you see people doing in cars, some of which I won’t mention as this is a family blog). However I won’t make such a silly response since of course I am not driving. I took the train. Yes, I’m weird. It’s a very fine double-decker (actually there […] Click to continue reading this post →

A Return

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gladioliI find myself back in Los Angeles for a bit, putting Walkabout mode on pause. Perhaps to do my laundry, perhaps to chair the committee of the upcoming Ph.D. defense of my student, Tameem, perhaps to be able to sit outside in the early morning sun in a T-shirt and blog over breakfast.

The garden is full of weeds and flowers, and all is well with the world, albeit a bit blurry due to my jetlag.

Anyway, a few random things to note:

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mourning_dovesAnother Spring is here, in full force. I once again snort in exasperated laughter at the bizarre claim so very many people make about Los Angeles (Southern California more generally) not having seasons, as I marvel at all the many signs of it screaming for attention. As a random example, I’m observing some mourning doves eyeing me up from nearby as they try to decide whether I’m a threat to their potential nesting sites that they are checking out. Seems that at least one pair is rather impressed with my cluster of strelitzia nicolai and want to move in. I want to tell them that I’m not the problem, but the fact that they’d be in plain sight of the crows/rooks/ravens/winged-Nazgul that pass by here a lot will be. I’ve seen them strike nests in those trees from previous years and scoop up a tasty warm meal.

* * *

Eight hours of jetlag means only one thing: […] Click to continue reading this post →

Not Entirely Alone, II

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It has been a pleasure to see the large number of bikes in use in London, and particularly pleasing that it is a wide range of types of people using them as well. bikes_londonThere are many things about London that make it feel even more comfortable to me than ever (high prices of everything not being one of them) and the heavy bike use has to be one of them. Things in that department continue to improve over in my home city of Los Angeles, although I think it’ll still be a bit of time before you get bunches of cyclists routinely clustered at the lights waiting for the green, as in the photo on the right.

brompton_londonAlso great to see, sending a shiver of pleasure down my spine each time I’ll admit, has been the huge number of Bromptons in use in London. (See photo left.) I know it is true statistically that they are among the most popular single type of bike here (of any type, folding or non-folding) but it is still great that there are so very many sightings of them as you walk along the street especially at peak times. That’s something that really still has not taken off in LA. I’ve seen fewer than a handful of Bromptons in almost seven years on the streets here, relatively few folding bikes in total, and maybe only twice have I seen someone else using them in combination with the subway (and I remain the only person I’ve ever seen bringing them on to the bus). It […] Click to continue reading this post →

Slower

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I’d take the slower train a lot.

They’re discussing a newly announced long term plan to build a new rail network in the UK that will slice huge chunks of time out of the long distance travel times between London and points North. There are many reasons why this is good news (and some bad, since there’s going to be impact on parts of the country side – this is not upgrade of existing rail lines), and these include the benefits that will result from people choosing rail over cars, and even planes, the possible further decentralization of the country (although I doubt this – I think the overall change in that regard might well be neutral. It might in fact have the opposite effect), and so on and so forth.

The national discussion that has been taking place has been interesting, of course, but I’m not hearing enough about one aspect: That travelling from point A to point B as fast as technology allows is not always the best option. I don’t think that the UK is a very big place, frankly, and I’ve got to the point where I think that the long journeys that I sometimes do on either corridor (West or East) have improved quite a bit over the years to the extent where they are about as fast as I want them to be. virgin_trainI care more about them leaving and arriving on time than I do them getting there much more quickly. Yes, I know that some people have urgent business in London and need to get there fast from Glasgow or Preston or Newcastle…. but would the extra 45 or even 60 minutes really make that much difference? Well, sure it might for some, and I do not mean to remake the world […] Click to continue reading this post →

Road Benefits

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I’ve been on the road for a while now (see the last several posts, e.g. here), and it has been good for me. Why? Well, I think that it has been good to get out of some of the routines that I normally find myself in, and have a change of perspective. This feeds my thoughts about things, whether it be work-related, play, or personal life. So being in a mode where I’m living out of a suitcase and moving from location to location helps me simplify somewhat. Work has been good. Some aspects have not been as efficient as they might have been were I in my home office or in my office at USC, but efficiency is not really the point. There’s plenty of time for that later, and in travelling mode, the value of the high quality reflection about the work I’m doing or an approach I’m going to take on the project I’m working on is something I’d not trade for the equivalent time sitting in my office being highly efficient at some task.

So where am I? Well, I’m a month into hardcore sabbatical time (recall that the first […] Click to continue reading this post →

Twisted Bridge

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twisted_bridge_covent_garden_1The Walkabout returns me to London for a short while before I head North. While wandering around Covent Garden, I spotted this lovely bit of geometry suspended between two buildings in an alleyway. It is a bridge, but with a twist.

twisted_bridge_covent_garden_2 Upon getting home and starting a post to share it with you, I see that it is called the Bridge of Aspiration, and it connects the Royal Opera House with the Royal Ballet School. More here, where you can see that the interior is quite stunning.

-cvj Click to continue reading this post →

Dessert Coffees

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three_coffeesThese are not really my cup of tea (at least not first choice), so to speak, but they are very pretty.

While working at the countertop of a coffee bar at Mercado San Miguel, in Madrid, (drinking my usual café cortado) I watched the fellow at the counter making them for some customers.

It was a rather elaborate process, and quite fascinating to watch. It might seem odd […] Click to continue reading this post →