Ahhh….London. All of a sudden, here I am in South London. It is early in the morning, and everyone is still asleep. I’m sitting here with an excellent cup of tea (title of this post refers to this other post) and a plate of Jacob’s cream crackers (since I’m desperately hungry and it was the only thing I could find without disturbing my host’s kitchen cupboards) and looking at lovely cloud patterns through the window, and some beautiful shafts of morning sunlight from time to time. And I’m listening to the birds…. and some seriously loud snoring from upstairs.

Would not have predicted that I’d be here at this time. Tuesday saw me doing hectic things at work back in LA, as usual. Then I decided. I called the airline, got a seat, and that afternoon (after a mad dash across town, making it to the gate one minute before the flight closed) saw me in the air, headed to London.

And here I am. Purpose of trip? Just to be there for my sister, Carol, who yesterday was giving birth to her first child. All went well. Hurrah! We are an Uncle, again.

What else shall I do while here? Well, I’ve got jetlag, my laptop, and a wireless connection and I’ve three more papers to be working on, using this convenient setup – one came out last week; I’ll be telling you about that physics very soon – and I’ve got several other writing projects to work on…. and I will probably be helping out with things like shopping and other errands from time to time.

And then, when I can get away, I think I’ll go to some old haunts to drink it all in, such as South Kensington, Bloomsbury, and Soho. I’ll go to a John Lewis to buy some household items like one or two more pieces of the Denby Greenwich dining set and a set of placemats and coasters, have a look in some museums and bookshops, and -oh yes- I’ll definitely buy some essential food items to take back with me: Green and Black’s chocolates, Maldon Sea Salt, good English Breakfast tea, etc, etc. (Must also remember to get some Hendrick’s gin on the way back through Heathrow.) See here for a previous haul my mum brought me when she visited last.

Sure, I could get all that latter stuff (but not the gin) from one of the English shops in Santa Monica. But it is such an effort to go all the way over to the West Side. If I’m going to go all the way over there, might as well go all the way to London.

Time for another cup of tea.

-cvj

Wanna smell like dirty socks? Old fashioned folks may opt to forego doing their laundry, or wear weeks-old clothes from a gym locker. But the in crowd has a new option: a perfume based on the aroma of Stilton cheese! Yep, kid you not, the Stilton Cheese Makers Association commissioned an aromatics firm to create Eau de Stilton. It is part of their Stick on the Stilton 2006 campaign, to encourage people to eat more Stilton cheese. The perfume is described as featuring a

symphony of natural base notes including Yarrow, Angelica seed, Clary Sage and Valerian

And the manufacturer claims the scent is more “earthy and fruity” and not like “old socks.” A Stilton association spokesman was quoted as saying:

Blue Stilton cheese has a very distinctive mellow aroma and our perfumer was able to capture the key essence of that scent and recreate it in an unusual but highly wearable perfume

A rather brave female employee of the manufacturer tried out the product and noted

I’ve had the perfume on all day and none of the men complained.

I don’t know about you, but on the rare occasion I sport perfume, I’m looking for a little more than “nobody complained.” I wonder if it makes people hungry? Perhaps a new form of aromatherapy – a perfume that makes you eat cheese?

The cheesemakers are approaching a British model/actress Cat Deeley to hawk the product, with the theme The Cat that got the Cheese (groan…). For those cheese-lovers out there , the perfume will be available on the official Stilton cheese website above. Personally, I’m holding out for Eau d’Epoisse – if you’re going to smell like dirty socks, you might as well go all the way!

That’s the debate that sprung up in the comment thread of a recent post. We’ve all seen the boxed beverage labeled as wine sitting on retailer shelves, but the issue is whether it actually qualifies as wine. CV readers decided that an experiment needed to be performed to settle the issue. This is a science blog, afterall. Being a theorist, I already had my favorite model to describe the outcome of this experiment – namely, wine does not come in boxes. So I was disqualified from participating in the analysis.

Luckily, one brave CV reader, Elliot, stepped up to the challenge. Here are the results, in his own words:

Before I share the results of the wine tasting experiment with boxed wine, I should do a bit of level setting on the experimental apparatus. (me)

I am by no means a wine expert. However I have developed (over many years) a sense for what I like and what I don’t. I exclusively drink red wines mostly Merlot and Cabernet from Calif. I like some reds from France as well. My favorite grocery store selection is Clos DuBois vineyards. I tend to like stuff in that price range and up, where and if the wine is in the $5-$10 range, I really don’t care for it that much.

With that said, I went to Wild Oats and got a “box” of French Rabbit Cabernet.

Bottom Line: It was horrible. I wouldn’t give it to my dog.

Now there was another “wine in a box” choice appropriately named Black Box wine. My gut feel was that it might be better but the smallest container was the 3000 ml or 4xbottles. So I backed away.

Thank you Elliot for settling this question! My theory is confirmed – wine does not come in boxes!

I was talking with a friend over dinner last night about Death Valley (she’s leaving for a trip there soon) and this reminded me of the fact that I was supposed to do a few more posts on my recent “off-planet” trip to the same place. So here goes:

Why Do I Need All That Other Stuff Day.

Right now you’re thinking, “Why do I need all that other stuff?”. It’s the feeling you get (for a while) when you’re out in the desert, just you and the tent, and the stuff on the picnic table. You’re cooking asparagus to go with your red pepper and avocado salad, to have as a side with your delicious stewed chicken (with a bit of red wine in the sauce) on a bed of couscous. You’re feeling content with the world (the sandstorm of the night before that filled every crevice with sand while you were trying to put up your tent in the middle of it is just a distant memory), and the sun will soon set, beautifully, behind the mountains to the West.

Ahead of you to come that evening is some quality thinking on a full belly, some dozing by a crackling campfire, the murmur of other campers in the (you hope) distance, the small chunk of dark chocolate you’ll break off the bar you brought…. and that single slow-burning shot of the 15 year old Dalwhinnie that you always treat yourself to later in the tent when on a camping trip, before eventually blowing out the candle lamp and sleeping.

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I was at a particularly good dinner party on Saturday night over on the West Side. It had a little under a dozen people, from professionals in academia and surrounds (such as relativist Kip Thorne of Caltech, or Legal scholar and writer/broadcaster Jonathan Kirsch) to professionals in entertainment (such as writer/performer Julia Sweeney), and journalism (such as South African Journalist and Activist Zubeida Jaffer) and several other fields…. and a good time was had by all. I only had to explain string theory and the whole of particle physics three times (to three separate groups; and I was glad for the opportunity to do so) so I managed to get some food and wine down. I’m not sure if my biggest moment was convincing the razor-sharp Julia Sweeney that maybe she does not hate string theory quite so much any more, or whether it was just finding ourselves enthusiastically in agreement over public transport issues in LA (i.e., it exists, if only people would use it more! Well, you’ve heard me on this topic a lot…..)…this is a big deal to me since a lot of people never want to talk about this matter. We also spoke a lot about getting more science into the entertainment/media realm as well (you’ve heard me on that topic a lot too) a subject we agreed was worth pursuing…

It turned out that a couple at the party could not use their tickets for the Sunday afternoon concert at the Disney Hall, and they gave them to me. This was rather nice since I’d been thinking that it would have been nice to go to the concert. All I had to do was find someone in the short time available (Sunday morning; concert was at 2:00pm) to take with me to use the extra ticket. This was a challenge (combination of it being a sleep-in day with the time change, and me not being terribly flush with contacts who I can call on for that purpose at short notice…..people my age often come in bound states, and/or they’ve planned to do stuff on the precious Sunday afternoons that you only get once a week) but I succeeded. At 2:00pm, we were in our seats, waiting for the first half:

The concert was the last in the Los Angeles Philharmoic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” series. It was excellent, (although I beg to differ with the “minimalist” moniker for those particular pieces). The whole concert was conducted by John Adams, and the first part was a Phillip Glass piece (or set of pieces; selected scenes from his opera Akhnaten, in fact), while the part after the intermission was John Adams’ own Harmonielehre. It was an afternoon of wonderful music, overall. I particularly loved the opera (even with the rather silly words in places), which was beautifully orchestrated with a small configuration of the orchestra (it was in fuller configuration later for the second piece).

There was a great dramatic effect that the layout of the hall lends itself to very well. A person can stand right in the center of the wonderful explosion of wood that is the Organ (see above photo) and look out onto the assembled audience, and they look rather commanding from up there. Well, they had the actress Holland Taylor go up there, splendidly dressed and dramatically lit, to read the parts of the Narrator. She has a quite commanding voice, and so it worked very well indeed.

Ok, I admit that I did have a silly moment when I could not help but distract myself a bit when I heard things like this:
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So for the first time ever, I stepped into our fancy new Molecular Biology building (it’s been finished for a year or so now….). I was expecting to be accosted by security the moment I walked in, because, I don’t really expect that they’d let us poor theoretical physicists walk around in such splendid surroundings! Luckily, the first person I saw as I walked in was Mike Waterman (he who helped host the reading of our play last month), whose Computational Biology group is now also in this building. So all was ok.

Why was I there? Well, it’s been an incredibly long day (all day committee meeting retreat in a hotel boardroom in downtown LA) and now it’s Friday night…. and so that means fun, of course! Seriously, I went back to campus for a short while and ran into my colleagues Gene Bickers (condensed matter physics) and Leonard Adleman (biology, see below), carrying a blue cask. They turned out to be on their way back to Leonard’s lab (he’s both a Computational Biologist and a Molecular Biologist) to make ice-cream using liquid nitrogen! Better yet, they invited me along to have a look and try some! (Above is Leonard and his daughter Stephanie.)

So, remember our last cooking time together when I made beef lo mien? Well, it’s time for desert…. So, pour in the ice-cream mix, which one of the experimenters (Pablo) had prepared earlier (his secret recipe, perhaps):

Pour out some liquid nitrogen (boiling point is 77 K = -196 °C = -321 °F) into a handy container for accurate pouring….

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Two things.

(1) So on my wanderings through the Hollywood Farmer’s market yesterday (see right an earlier picture of the sort of loot you can get there), I decided to stop at my favourite tamale stand for lunch. While eating the tamale sitting on the curb, I met a very interesting person, Ysanne Spevack, (who was also sitting on the curb, chowing down on some excellent jerk chicken and fried plantains from the stand opposite) who’s an expert on the organic food industry, a mine of information about it and generally fun to talk to. See the amazing website that she edits and helps write, or her eight books, for more information about organic food. Excellent!

(2) Well, curbside eating turned into tea in a nearby cafe to talk further (it’s not often someone actually wants to [join me in] listen to me droning on and on and on about public transport and bikes, gardening and drought-tolerant plant varieties, etc) and then we were joined by a friend of hers. Turns out she’s a model. The reason that is interesting is because (more…)

Oh. So you thought I’d stopped thinking and talking about Taiwan, right? Sorry… no! (See the archives, say under “food and drink“, if you don’t know to what I’m referring.)

Another great thing I enjoyed while there is the fruit. There’s great fruit everywhere. Reminds me a lot of part of my childhood for lots of reasons.

Here’s an arrangement of some type of very fragrant citrus fruit that was in a reastuarant in Hsinchu. They had several of these arrangements around the place, and it smelled divine!

(I went there with my dear friends and colleagues Chong-Sun Chu (Durham), Keh-Fei Liu (Kentucky) and Tu-Nan Chang (USC), who are all based in non-Taiwan institutions (although Tu-Nan is directing the National Center for Theoretical Sciences I told you about earlier.)

Here’s an arrangement of fire-dragon fruit brought to the table at the end of a banquet-style meal at an excellent tradiational-style restaurant (see below) in Hsinchu. Just a wonderful fruit, with gorgeous patterning and colouring, don’t you think? And delicious!

(It was quite a splendid restaurant (as was the other one). It is particularly famous for its traditional layout as well as the food. The layout (shot of entrance below right) includes full-blown streams of water running through the restaurant, with (more…)

Having spent a long day thinking about Physics, fourteen of the weary panel members went for dinner at the fine restaurant “Fire” in downtown Dublin. After a lovely dinner, with excellent conversation, we trekked back through the cold and rain (quite lovely
actually) to our hotel, to find that the lobby was alive with activity! A fellow wearing whites and a chef’s hat came up to us and offered us hot chocolate -with whipped cream and sprinkles! How could we say no? We sat for a while in the fun atmosphere of the lobby (I think maybe two or three conferences had collided nicely to chill out in the lobby, spilling out of the bar, etc)

I took a few snaps. [Sorry they're a bit dark.... wanted them spontaneous and hate to use flash.... did not have time to re-expose as well as I wanted to avoid being fooled by extraneous lighting]. Here’s Astrophysicist Luca Amendola (Roma), and Mathematical Physicist Anne Taormina (Durham):

… and Christina Lacey (USC – the other one…University of South Carolina).

Christina, planning to go exploring the area in and around Dublin after her panel work, put her head together with area Astrophysicist (always wanted to say that), Anthony Murphy (N.U.I., Maynooth) to consult over detailed maps on the local geography.

Then off to my room to blog and then to bed …. Yay!

-cvj

So on Friday afternoon during the rain, and after dashing home from work to do a hurried packing of a bag, I made a dash for the airport. It was quite a nerve-wracking trip because the rain meant that two of the three freeways I needed to use were not moving very well (in fact, the middle one was almost stationary for a while), and after losing a lot of time there, calling my airline and finding out that the flight was of course going to leave bang on time, I got to the check-in desk (after sitting on a frustratingly slow bus from the parking lot that dutifully stopped at six other terminals before mine) with -1 minutes to go before the flight was officially closed. There were no other flights out that day, and so it would have been a disaster to miss the flight. As it was, some combination of (1) my asking on the phone that a note be put in the record of my flight that I was on my way, and (2) the presence of two other (unapologetically late) annoying Europeans besides me holding up the line, I got onto the ten hour flight to London.

So after a quick stop in London to say hello to my sister, have a look at Bromptons, Routemaster buses, etc…..here I am in Dublin, Ireland….one of the main places where you can get the best pints of Guinness on the planet. I’m using the wireless access provided by the head offices of one of Ireland’s main funding agencies, which gives you a clue as to the cover reason for my being here….. I’m part of a panel reviewing the grants for funding. We sit in a room with a long table over two days and deliberate solemnly over proposals from a huge range of physics areas. We all wrote reviews of selected proposals earlier in the year, and now we get to read each other’s reviews, argue a bit over the physics and other relevant details, and come up with our recommendations. It’s actually a lot of fun, since I just love reading about physics from all sorts of areas, whether related to my own area, or not. Both experts in the particular fields and non-experts get to make intelligent comments (there’s lots of give and take) on all proposals, and so one gets to learn a lot about what’s going on in the big wide world of physics, while making a valuable contribution to the scientific community as a whole.

It’s just another of those things that we do as part of our job as academics plugged into an international community (and on which we report to you from time to time).

The other perks? Well……. later tonight, I’m going to sit down with a pint of Guinness, properly poured (i.e., slowly), for a change, with a perfect creamy head and full body. Oh yes….. It makes the jet-lag I’ll have at both ends of the trip (I have to jump back on a plane pretty soon for a ten hour trip back in order to get back to my classes, etc), the missing of the Oscars, all worth it.

-cvj