Journey Notes

What a record! While I was updating the WordPress version, I had a good deal of time to kill as the backup files went to my hard drive and the updated files then overwrote it all on the web site – anyway, this album, about the nine (I think) underworlds of Norse mythology, is superb.

All the way from when I first heard about Therion, I was not particularly excited about the idea of sitting through a concept album about the various -gårds and -heims, but then I’ve already been following Thorgal Ägirsson into the underworld and back many years ago. So: the music is very tastefully done, with quite some variety, and manages to create strong, and changing, atmosphere. That is rare even in symphonic metal. Therion is one of those bands (more like a solo project really) whose music is not easily accessible at first and actually gets better as time goes on.

“Secret of the Runes” features beautiful melodies, the Therion trademark choirs and operatic solo singing, some of the most beautiful guitar solos I’ve heard in my life – sparingly applied to great effect – and lyrics in (at least) English, Swedish, and German – probably old Norse somewhere as well. What an interesting piece of work! I’ll have to get the CD I think, sit down with it in front of the stereo, and turn it a little louder.

There is also a bonus track that deserves to called thus: “Summernight City”, originally by that other talented Swedish band, ABBA. Always liked it – makes me think of drifting through Stockholm all Midsummer night (if the weather were good and the bars didn’t close at midnight), and being, as the lyrics say, “loose and fancy free”. Five days till summer solstice here in Sydney, and I do not want to sleep!

Just did another backup and update – WordPress Version 2.7 “Coltrane” has just come out. This looks like quite a step, and quite a change. We’ll see if it actually saves time – which is, and will be, my biggest concern. But at least, apparently this is the last non-automatic update. We shall see.

As I advance through the years, and see and learn, I don’t often get enthusiastic about politicians any more. Disturbingly, witty cynicism is not open to me anymore either, as I’m already far enough along to see that all we’ll ever need of that is neatly packaged once and for all in Oscar Wilde’s work.

Still, Barack Obama has done it, and wowed me. How many men (or women, for that matter), having got this far, have enough good sense to know when they don’t know? How many politicians will seriously listen to scientists?

I have been following, with some interest, the progress of Obama’s Cabinet assembly.  I had thought, from various hearsay statements, that Obama didn’t understand the energy issues – and perhaps that is true, but he seems willing to acknowledge there may be more to it than what he knows. That sort of attitude is rare in politics, religion, and a lot of other endeavours where having a view is mistaken for having a clue.

And thus, the (over?)promising President-elect has tentatively appointed  a certain scientist (I read it here first – Achtung Deutsch!) decorated by peers with nothing less than a Nobel Prize in Physics, to head the Department of Energy. Meet Steven Chu:

The photos are from the 2005 Congress of the Australian Institute of Physics, where Professor Chu had a plenary talk in the morning and used the opportunity to tell us a few really important things. Nothing that I didn’t know, mind you, but it’s not like anyone’s ever going to listen to me.

I am not sure Obama is going to like what Chu is about to tell him (at least I’m confident he’ll grasp it), and I’m sure the creation of green industries and efforts towards higher energy efficiency will be met with fierce resistance from those who have made America what it is today.

But hey, voters have said “let’s do things differently here”/”screw the Neocons”/”better have a Democratic President if I end up on welfare”, elected a black man with a name of Middle Eastern appearance (congratulations! This is still possible only in America, even if a perfectly timed serial bank implosion probably helps) – and it looks like Obama is not about to let them down immediately. This first recession of many, as we adapt to fossil fuels running out, has shaken loose so many things that perhaps there is a chance to move a few mountains.

Good luck to Professor Chu. I have heard him speak – he is a very thoughtful and mild-mannered man, who sometimes gives his well-thought-out answers after 20 seconds of silence. You would think his failure in Washington is guaranteed – but see above about cynicism. I know that being a physicist isn’t enough, but perhaps America, of all places, can demonstrate that green is good, and for business too.

From 29th November to 5th December I was at the 18th congress of the Australian Institute of Physics in Adelaide, and this was the first time I got to see the city after Thomas, Claudia and myself had only driven through in late 2002, on the way to the airport, and then I had to get on a plane back to Sydney. This time, I had planned this as something like an early summer escape (seeing as it can’t seem to stop raining for long in Sydney), but I had also prepared an article for the conference proceedings and a talk for the program – along the lines of this.

Turns out it was a pretty busy conference – 8:30 in the morning till 7:30 in the evening almost every day! This is the sort of conference that gets your head spinning after four or five days. I’m still not complaining, because the poster sessions were a lot of fun (and they took place on three out of the five days, and came with food and drink), the plenary talks in the mornings were mostly interesting, and it was relatively easy to switch between the seven parallel sessions, because everything was in one building.  To take advantage of this, though, you had to use the elevator rather than the stairs, which is still a little unlike me.

The only thing that didn’t work out very well was the computer support for the presentations – does anybody actually like Office 2007? Does anybody know how to use it?  Certainly, my Powerpoint presentation (made with OpenOffice 3 and Powerpoint 97, mostly at home) didn’t run very well on the test computer that was set up at the speakers’ preparation centre. So I fixed the movies, and the animations (took the entire lunch break) – then it’s Wednesday, the time for my talk arrives, and what do I find in the lecture theatre?  Office 2003 and Windows 2000.  Almost needless to say, the movie did not run on the first attempt, but at least everything else worked okay. After the talk it occurred to me that when the lecture theatre has two screens, one should use the mouse, not a laser pointer, to point.

On Thursday, I had to chair a session, which was a challenge, because initially I wasn’t too familiar with the subjects of the presentations.  I had tried to read up a bit on the techniques and work of the group that provided four out of the five talks in “my” session, so that at least I would be able to ask a question or two to jumpstart a discussion after talks – but that turned out to be quite unnecessary as the discussions started themselves rather nicely; in fact I had to cut some of them short. As a reward for my extra preparation work though, I now know a little better what a frequency comb is, and I find that quite useful and exciting.  It’s inconceivable that this would have been discovered without someone puttering for hours and hours in the lab, because this is really quite an improbable instrument! Unfortunately, a Nobel Prize has already been given for that.  And in the frequency-comb labs, these inner sancta of 15-significant-digit accuracy, it’s still common practice to start the pulse laser by tapping a mirror with a screwdriver!

But enough of the talk already! I wanted to show you some pictures from my wanderings in the sparse spare time I had, and let’s do that in a separate album. The parks, campus and river parts that I saw of Adelaide, are rather pretty – but six years ago we also saw some bleak suburbs. There are statues everywhere, and war memorials, and churches. The city has a good, pleasant vibe to it – but then the grass is always greener (or yellower, in the case of Adelaide) on the other side of your flight.