There's A Hole In The Sky...

Well, the conference in Edinburgh was OK I guess, but I got the overall impression that the four invited speakers were just having some kind of conversation between themselves at times. There is no way that their talks could be realistically understood by people like myself who are new to the subject. Given that it was given the title of being a "workshop" it's a little disappointing that such a high level of prior knowledge was assumed.

Ah well, at least I got to spend some time with my friend, had my first taste of Indian cuisine and saw the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. I watched The Illusionist (which was better than I thought it would be), wrote a little of my novel on the way up and played a few games of Scrabble.

And I also played Portal for the first time. I was talking to my friend's housemate and I mentioned to him that I had wanted to play that for a bit, and he said, "Well, I'll go fire the computer up then."

Half an hour later I had a big silly smile on my face, and that night I had bizarre dreams of jumping around on platforms suspended over a partially deserted/abandoned city, chasing people who were in front of me and who never turned around. (slightly sinister was the feeling that I didn't want them to turn and face me, as if there was something "wrong" about them)

I'll leave you with the trailer for Portal, and hopefully, even if you're not that into games, you will appreciate why it is such an exciting game conceptually.

Normal service will resume tomorrow. Now I have to go home and mark about forty homeworks and then plot out the second half of my NaNoWriMo novel...

Odds and Sods

I've gone a little bit Police mad of late. I find myself listening to their greatest hits album a lot, especially a few tracks that I didn't know of before I went to see them in Cardiff last month. Previously I probably would have said that my favourite track of theirs was Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, but over the last week or so I've come to really adore King Of Pain. One thing I've asked Santa for this year is "Lyrics" - a new book by Sting where he talks about the ideas and inspirations for every song he's written.

(note to noisms: hopefully this will be more engaging than simply going over "themes, motifs and the hero's journey" à la George Lucas...)

Anyways, because my mp3 player has become a little unreliable in terms of battery life (I've had it for two years now), I've decided to leave it at home while I'm away this weekend, and so all the music will be in my head while I write. I hope that this will suffice.

I'm not going to Edinburgh just to sit in a hotel and write like JK Rowling did for the final Harry Potter though, oh no, this is business first and foremost, the business of maths! Well, sort of. I'm going to a two day workshop - two half days at that - on Khovanov Homology (wow, Wikipedia really does have articles on everything), which is quite interesting but at the same time quite hard.

Things like Khovanov Homology make me wonder if problems in knot theory can be solved simply by saying "Let's devise something even more complicated to set up and that will finally give us a true invariant, even though this approach hasn't actually achieved something in the last hundred and fifty years or so," but that's mostly when I'm just cheesed off a bit with maths and I think I'm talking to myself with this last line so I'll stop there.

(hmm. Decision: after National Novel Writing Month I am going to sit down and write a blog entry explaining what it is I actually do)

I'm waffling: forgive me. I always get a little jittery before I travel.

More soon by email.

EDIT: I'm thinking about getting a new mp3 player, downsizing, and the model that I'm umming and ahhing over is this Creative Zen Stone Plus. The reviews seem mostly good, but if anyone knows someone who has had special problems with one, or if you know of a particularly good mp3 player (around the 2-4GB range, £50/$100 at most) then please let me know!