Match Point

I currently work within a 5 minutes walk from Hyde Park, which -contrary to what one would expect- is not my favorite lunch spot. Very few people have heard of Mount Street gardens, an authentic paradise in the heart of the city. This quiet place (initially a burial ground) is sheltered between red-brick buildings, making it nicely warmer during winter. Curiously enough, the gardens can be seen for a few seconds in a Woody Allen production.

Add comment May 31st, 2006

A good friend’s wedding

Cris and Oscar got married on March 25th, 2006. One of the best parts of the wedding was, with no doubt, the soundtrack. Although we knew both the bride and groom are geeks, we were not expecting to hear tunes from Kill Bill during the banquet… Hurray for the married couple!

Add comment May 30th, 2006

T4 at 31ºC

Add comment May 29th, 2006

Lost in dimensions

The heterotic string consists of a closed string that has two types of vibrations, clockwise and counterclockwise, which are treated differently. The clockwise vibrations live in a ten-dimensional space. The counterclockwise live in a 26-dimensional space, of which 16 dimensions have been compactified. (We recall that in Kaluza’s original five-dimensional, the fifth dimension was compactified by being wrapped up into a circle.)

[Michio Kaku on the structure of Universe]

Add comment May 28th, 2006

How did you make it here

Not only have you been lucky enough to be attached since time immemorial to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been extremely - make that miraculously - fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, a period of time older than the Earth’s mountains and rivers and oceans, every one of your forebears on both sides has been attractive enough to find a mate, healthy enough to reproduce, and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to live long enough to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stuck fast, untimely wounded or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result - eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly - in you.

[Bill Bryson]

Add comment May 21st, 2006