Even though I've only left London for a few months after spending the past 4 years there, stopping by for 2 days on my way home for the Christmas break was a big shock from the sedate environs of Princeton.

Apart from the crowds in the West End, it was a change to hear the cacophony of different languages being spoken around me by the potpourri of nationalities. The graduate students in Princeton are a fairly diverse bunch, but the university as a whole is generally populated by rich young WASP undergrads, so it was invigorating to sit on the Tube with a Japanese couple to my left while to my right several Russians held an animated discussion.

I haven't noticed this before, but it seems that the white Englishman is increasingly becoming an endangered species in London. Staying with my friend Jia Hong in the East End, the area was crammed with dingy kebab joints and Pakistani grocery shops, and I'm certain that I did not see a single English person in the area while I was there. The only white people I saw were conversing in some East European language I didn't recognise.

Going back to UCL was a surreal experience. It seemed only like yesterday that I was trudging through the corridors, rushing from one lecture to the next, yet this time I was an outsider.

At a stairwell, I had the pleasant surprise of bumping into Prof. David Miller. My first encounter with him was through the UCL Chamber Music Club, as he was organising a chamber concert that I wanted to perform in back in my first year in UCL. That was my first public performance in London, and I also had the opportunity of hearing his fine baritone voice later in the concert. He later taught my 2nd year E&M class, and while teaching it he was the first lecturer to spot my potential, and the next couple of years he was the professor I went to for advice and encouragement.

In the middle of last year (2005), I agreed to accompany him on my guitar on some Dowland songs that he wanted to sing, but in September he got a stroke which damaged half of his brain functionality. I was very upset by this, more so when I saw how his ebullient and cheerful self had been changed by the stroke. However, I was in the chaos of my final year, and regrettably I didn't get in touch with him apart from a couple of emails and phone calls.

When I saw him this time round, he seemed to be in much better shape. He could smile and recall that I'm in Princeton, which was more than he could do before I left London. He isn't quite his old self yet, but definitely he's made a lot of progress. My only regret is that I never did manage to accompany him in the songs.

I'm listening to a fantastic recording by Xuefei Yang, a great guitarist whom I first met and listened to some 4 years ago in Singapore. She's based in London, so while I was there I had a couple more opportunities to see her play, and she also by chance happened to be an old housemate of my pianist friend Bobby Chen.

She's got a reputation as one of the best classical guitarists in the world today, and listening to her now I am reminded of what it means to be a true musician.

Many scientists and mathematicians are also musicians. Einstein himself was a violinist of no small talent. An anecdote has it that a music critic, unaware that Einstein's fame comes from being a physicist, wrote after hearing Einstein play: "While his playing is excellent, but he does not deserve world fame; there are many others who play just as well". When I was an undergraduate in UCL, I took part in the informal chamber music club run by faculty and students; I was constantly surprised how many of the performers were from the physics department, or were otherwise scientists. So much for the cold and prosaic nature of scientists.

Before I entered university, I had an argument with my parents because I wanted to go into music. In retrospect, it wasn't a good idea because my playing level then was nowhere as good as I imagined it (a little exposure can sometimes go a long way towards deflating one's ego), but my love for music didn't fade even though my parents squashed the idea of paying for me to study music. In the first two years of university, I was practising my guitar so much that I did little else apart from physics. My nights were spent in a caress with my guitar, as I pushed my uncooperative fingers to make music. My memory holds many different emotions from those days: frustration from being unable to create beauty, pain from making my fingers do things they weren't born to do, ecstasy from those few moments when everything came together and I was the alpha and omega of my personal world of music.

I was aware of the sacrifices I was making, and there were times when I questioned if it was worthwhile. Yet, despite the social exclusion and frustrations of making music, I kept going back to my guitar. Paradoxically, the more I played the more I discovered my limitations; at the same time, I was discovering my potential in physics and astronomy. I knew that my career ahead probably lies in science. My love of music did not diminish, but instead of playing myself I started to listen to more music, which was something I could do at the same time as my academic work. I never really stopped playing, but there were weeks at a time when I didn't touch my guitar, and my old repertoire started falling away faster than I could learn new music. This forced me to change my focus towards perfecting a few pieces, rather than try to memorise large amounts of music. This allowed me to continue growing as a musician, as I started to listen more to my own playing, and to control the music with my will instead of letting my limited technique dictate the direction of the music.

*To be continued*

Princeton is a great university, but there is one aspect of it I hate with a passion: it's official colour.

Orange. Ugh.

Astronomy images are generally stunning, but at a talk recently I saw a picture that completely took my breath away. At first glance I thought it was an impression by a particularly good artist, but it turns out that nature is more than poetic enough to provide this image.

This is a mosaic of some images taken by the Cassini spacecraft which is currently in orbit around Saturn. Cassini happened to pass right behind Saturn, which completely eclipsed the Sun at a distance of 2.2 million km from the spacecraft.

The sunlight spilling past the Saturn's disk has illuminated its rings beautifully in a glow of pastel colours, revealing faint inner and outer rings which are normally invisible. Most poetically, within the left side of the rings, one can glimpse the pale blue dot that we call our home, almost insignificant in the splendour of the cosmos.

I had a very interesting (not necessarily in a good way) experience with one of my homeworks, which was to construct a simple theoretical model for a red giant. First of all, it was due about 2 weeks ago, but Jeremy (the prof) is so smart that he won't have any trouble marking it at any time (most people try to mark homeworks all in one go to get into the mindset). In any case, the deadlines are only 'suggestions' because no one really cares very much about the grade so long as the students are learning.

The reason I'm 2 weeks overdue is that the problem set is difficult, and I'm not the only one to discover this. I've spent several whole days trying to figure out the problem and I had to disregard some of the conditions set out by the question in order to solve the problem.

Then today I found out the probable reason why I was having so much trouble. Jeremy himself apparently hasn't bothered working out the answer for the question himself yet.

I've realised that I dislike term breaks, like the 4 day-weekend we had over Thanksgiving last week. Before coming to Princeton I was expecting to become a workaholic and work non-stop to keep up, and in the first couple of months here that's precisely what I tried to do (albeit not very well).

However, I've just discovered an interesting fact: so long as I pass my courses in the first two years, and squeeze out at least one paper out of the 3 or 4 research projects in that time, I can't actually get kicked out, and hopefully I will be able to pass my General Exams in the end of the 2nd year.

Having realised this a couple of weeks ago, my first response was to...slack off. I spent the entire Thanksgiving sitting in my room watching the entire Black Adder series, and I now feel tremendously guilty about the wasted time.

I'm now taking part in the Princeton Men's Volleyball Club, and the level is just right for me so it's fun to play, and also I'm joining a meditation group. I'm also trying to remind myself that I used to play the guitar, and so I'm trying to squeeze some practice time into my week as well.

I'm probably not working as hard as I could be, but if that's the price for keeping sane, I'd gladly take it.

I was told before coming to Princeton that life wouldn't be easy for me. Apart from the work load, there would also be the psychological pressure from being in an elite institution, I was told. Even having this in mind, it was hard to go from being the cream of crop at UCL to being mediocre at best in Princeton.

It seemed as if everyone knew more about everything, and in greater depth than I could. It doesn't help when I sometimes realise that I should actually know what people are talking about because I've studied it before, but just can't remember for the life of me. I'm friendly with the physics grad students here, but I often feel reluctant to socialise too much with them, partly because they often 'shop talk' about things happening specifically within their department, and partly because they spend a lot of time talking about physics. The former would exclude anyone who's not within the physics department, and the latter makes me feel excluded because my knowledge of theoretical physics is very shallow compared to them. In particular, a couple of the physicists irritate me because of their self-assurance (and dare I say arrogance?) when casually talking about stuff I know nothing about. I'm OK when people talk about far-out stuff in a cautious and speculative tone, but when they talk about it as if it's the law and that they know everything, it's very off-putting.

In due course, I had learned to take the attitude that I'm privileged to be in the company of such brilliant people, and that I have much to learn from them. The likes of Richard Feynmann were once in their shoes, and it's likely that more geniuses would emerged from the ranks of the Princeton physics grad students. If I had gone to somewhere less demanding, I would have still been among the better students, but I wouldn't know how far I am from the very best. There's the saying the greatest fool is he who does not know he's a fool, so I guess I am less of a fool here in Princeton.

I seem to be losing hair more than usual. Oh joy.

Last week was probably the darkest time of my life. It was the fall break, which meant that most students had gone home. Although not that many of the grad students actually went home (mostly because 40% of the grad students are foreign), meals were not served in the week, so the focal point for social interaction was removed. So there weren't that many people visibly around the grad college.

I was already feeling extremely stressed due to the pressures at work, so I planned to commit myself to studying virtually full-time during the break, which wasn't something I felt like doing but I nevertheless felt I had to push myself to do. With the loneliness and my unhappiness thrown into the mix, something just snapped.

By Tuesday, I was feeling utterly weary of life, and would have welcomed eternal sleep. I just couldn't get up in the mornings, and when I did, I couldn't make myself leave me room, not even to buy food. I was spending hours upon hours sitting listlessly in front of my laptop, and now I can't even remember what I was doing in front of the computer. I was already undergoing counselling, but with my next session schedule for 2 weeks later, I felt there was nowhere to turn.

Eventually I did go to the health centre to request an urgent appointment, and spoke to a counselor. It felt much better to be able to let things out, and I immediately regretted some of the things I had done when I hit bottom. The next few days, I began to force myself to shut out my negative emotions and get something done, although it was still difficult to motivate myself to do anything.

Classes restarted today, and things felt so much better with everyone back. I wouldn't say that I'm happy at the moment, but I hope I never reach the depths of last week ever again.

I've realised that I have really bad long-term memory, even when dealing with physics concepts. If I'm not constantly working with a given field, e.g. electromagnetism, I'd rapidly lose my intuition for it. I'm struggling these days because my brain isn't in 'physics mode', and lately I've realised that even back in UCL my mind wasn't always working. In fact, it would only work after the month or two of solid cramming that precedes my finals, which is why I always do well in finals.

It looks like I'll need to carry the cramming ethic (i.e. about 8 hours of studying per day) over to my daily routine here....

In my general relativity class, there is this Russian girl, Tatianna, who is from the Anna Kournikova/Maria Sharapova mould of Russian chicks. Blondes aren't my type, but I hear that when the semester first started, the physics students (the GR class is in the physics department) were drooling over her, in part because she was one of only 4 girls out of the incoming class of 24 physics students.

Pretty soon, however, it turned out that this girl is married.

And has a baby boy.

It seems that her husband is also a Russian physics student in the 3rd or 4th year, and is working with Ed Witten, one of the top theoretical physicists in the world. I was in a conversation last week with a bunch of physics students, and one was saying to the other, 'We'd better make our mark and accomplish everything we want to do within 20 years, because once their kid grows up and gets his PhD, there's nothing left for us to do.'

I actually got to meet little Sergei last week when his mum came over to the grad college for Friday night drinks. He tried to eat my hand.

I've been playing volleyball for UCL in my years there, except in the final year. I've had a lot of fun in volleyball, however it is sometimes frustrating because I didn't seem to be able to play to the best of my ability during games, and going to practices didn't seem to be improving my playing. In the final year, I was playing so badly that I felt I was being more of a liability than a help to my team, and in addition I just didn't have much time to play anymore, so I stopped playing.

I've also considered volleyball to be the most 'disposable' part of my life, i.e. it was the hobby which I was the least passionate about, even though being the perfectionist I still did my best to be good at it. I had assumed that after starting my PhD, volleyball would go on the chopping block as my time became more and more limited.

So I am surprised that nowadays I am playing volleyball more than anything else outside of my studies. After the torrid form I had experienece last year, it was a pleasant surprise to find that my passing is back to my old level (which is still not good enough), and I have rediscovered the joy s of throwing myself around the court to retrieve lose balls no one else can reach.

Volleyball probably isn't as good exercise as simply going to the gym, and I'm not as good at it as I am to playing guitar, but at this point in my life I feel the need to interact with people to avoid being drowned by unhappiness and self-pity.

I am not adverse to hard work. I'm not quite a workaholic since I'm inherently lazy, but I can put in the hours to get things done if that's what I have do. But there's something very wrong if I'm sitting in front of a homework for 5 hours and still have no clue how to do it.

This has been the case for ALL my homework in the past week, and I just don't know what to do. I can ask my classmates for help, but it doesn't change the fact that I can't actually do the work on my own.

I've never felt so stupid in my life.

Astronomy is such a small world that it can be a little unsettling at times. In Princeton's astro department, there is a tradition where the grad students invite a professor or notable person to come for lunch on Thursdays, imaginatively known as 'thunch'. This stemmed from the Tuesday faculty lunch at the Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) in Princeton, where following morning seminars the grad students are barred from joining the faculty members for lunch. In the 70s, some grad students here decided to introduce thunch, whereby only people without PhDs are allowed in apart from the guest.

Generally, the guests are distinguished visiting professors either at Princeton University or the IAS, but occasionally we get some famous names, like John Nash and Freeman Dyson.

In the past couple of weeks however, we have had the interesting experience of hosting thunch for guests who were ex-grad students here. Both of them, David Weinberg of Ohio State and Nick Gnedin of Fermilab, were students in the 80s and 90s, so they've had the same experience of attending thunch. I spoke to David Weinberg and told him briefly about my project on measuring the topology of cosmological reionisation. As I started to explain the method I'm using to measure the topology, he (politely) interrupted me and said, 'Yes, I know about that. I worked on that when I was a grad student'. I then realised that the main paper which described the methodology I'm using is Gott, Weinberg and Melott 1987. Rich Gott is still on the faculty here and I guessed prior to this that Weinberg must have been a grad student at the time, but I didn't really make the conscious connection between the student who had worked on the paper and the middle-aged professor at thunch until he told me.

Even more surreally, that paper which I'm using now was based on David Weinberg's very first semester in his first year as a grad student. It's funny how his first year project has spanned a couple of decades to become an integral part of MY first year project. I can only hope that my own semester projects will eventually have some longevity.

Life has been really difficult this past week. I'm taking two courses this term, 'Structure of Stars' and 'Introduction to Relativity', and there's a homework for each course every week. I seem to have to spend a day or two just reading through the material from the previous weeks' lectures before even starting on the homework, and then a few more days doing the homework. The problem with this is that I'm supposed to be doing research as well...it's Thursday evening and so far this week I've been doing nothing but homework, and THAT hasn't finished yet. I might be able to finish it if I work full-time this weekend.

I seem to be the slowest person in the department. A couple of my classmates are really smart and clever compared with me, which is fine with me apart from the fact that they don't seem to be as stuck with work as I am.

They have a phrase in Princeton, 'impostor syndrome', which is very apt to what I'm feeling right now. It's the feeling that somehow Princeton made a mistake in selecting me to come here, and that I've somehow managed to bluff my way to high grades in undergrad.

A warning from the manual of my new MacBook laptop:

"This computer is not intended for use in the operation of nuclear facilities, aircraft navigation or communication systems, or air traffic control machines, or for any other uses where the failure of computer systems could lead to death, personal injury, or severe environmental damage."

It's the first week of my semester, and I already think this is one of the most stressful periods of my life. I have hardly any leisure time at all, although I'm getting enough sleep (if only because that when I get back to my room I'm so exhausted that I fall asleep easily.

I am taking two classes this semester, Structure of Stars and Introduction to Relativity, as well as my semester project. I am finding it difficult to adjust to the academic system here. Back in the UK I could just goof off for most of the year and then cram for a month before the exams, whereas now I have to keep on top of my weekly homeworks, which being in Princeton are quite difficult. I generally have a low attention span, so it's difficult to make the odd hour or two to be productive towards my homework, whereas in London I could take a couple of hours to get warmed up when while cramming, and then put in a few more hours at high productivity.

I was warned some time ago that Princeton would be a high-pressure environment for me, and I have already found this to be true. This isn't because there is anyone breathing down my neck, but simply because I am constantly getting the feeling that I am the dumbest person in the building, and I have to work like crazy just to keep pace. On the bright side, it's making very humble indeed and forcing me to focus on the joy of learning. On the other hand, I wish the joy of learning didn't have to involve working on Friday nights.

It's only the first week, so hopefully I'll be able to get settled down into the routine ....

Our academic programme officially started on Thursday with our first class, which is on the Structure of Stars. The first lecture was on fairly basic stuff, most of which I already knew, so I can't say much about how it'll go. Apart from that, I'll be taking an class on relativity in the Physics department, and we also have a interesting seminar courses where we take turns presenting papers to the other students on current research topics.

I have also chosen to do my semester project with Renyue Cen, a Chinese lecturer working on cosmological simulations. It may seem somewhat of a coincidence that after working with Kinwah for 2 years in UCL, I'm now working with another person of Chinese origin, but honestly, I chose him because he had an interesting project and not because of his ethnicity. (I'll talk more about the project later...it's about the reionisation of the universe but I don't really know very much about it at the moment).

I always knew that Princeton would be a very challenging experience, and it was made clear by people I spoke to that graduate school will be tough, but it didn't quite hit home until I got settled in. There are about 20 graduate students in Peyton Hall (i.e. the astro department) at any time, and obviously I've already met the other 4 students of my intake, but apart from that, I think there's still a half-dozen students whom I haven't yet spoken to, and a couple of them whom I haven't even seen at all because they haven't emerged from their offices. And I've seen the words 'bleak' and 'difficult' used to describe the existence of graduate students here, so that's not too reassuring.

Anyway I'm currently excited to be starting work. I have no doubt that it will tough, but I came here to learn new things, and the challenges I'll face can only force me to learn more things.

At a reception given by the Dean of the Graduate School, I spotted John Nash getting himself a drink. Surprisingly, there wasn't anyone accosting or surrounding him as I had expected. A girl I was talking to said that a friend of hers had approached him for an autograph, and Nash declined and walked away.

I guess that while most celebrities like actors and singers are out to be famous as their raison d'etre, academic celebrities never asked for their fame. There are easier ways to get famous, like joining the Pop Idol auditions.

In the past couple of days, I have had conversations on the linguistic confusion in Montenegro, the political situation in Syria, the Argentinian accent, cosmology experiments, the experience of being in Beirut during the recent war, and carillon bells.

Princeton is shaping up to be really interesting.

So I'm in Princeton now. The flight here was miraculously without incident apart from a slight delay, and I even managed to get some sleep on the flight. These past couple of days, I have mostly been sitting through the international students' orientation where they talk us through the red tape and bureaucracy that we have to wade through, followed by actually carrying out these out. All this was necessary, but hardly inspiring.

My room is slightly small and I have to share one shower cubicle with 7 other people on my floor, which made me suspect that whoever designed the place figured that grad students don't shower. However, I do have the room to myself, and I have also been busy trying to get my hands on the things needed to make the place habitable.

Apart from that, I've been meeting a lot of the other graduate students, most of them international students since we all arrived early, but the American students are beginning to arrive as well. So far it's difficult to see with whom I will have lasting friendships and whom will become 'hi, bye' acquaintances, but only time will tell.

In the meantime, the graduate students in my department appear to have a work ethic that is intimidating (several of them were seen sporting T-shirts saying 'Sleep is for the weak'), but they do seem to be enjoying what they do immensely.

In the mean time, I still have a lot of personal stuff to sort out, but within a week I'll be working my socks off as well.

Many apologies for the long hiatus since my last update. My parents, my brother and I flew out here to London over 2 weeks ago, and since then we've been out to Paris and Switzerland, and I've only had intermittent and brief internet access. We returned to London last Tuesday, and my graduation was last Friday. The run-up to the graduation involved some measure of anxiety when we went to Netherhall to collect the tickets to the ceremony which were supposed to have been posted there. Despite rummaging through all the pigeonholes and old uncollected mail, it was nowhere to be seen. Fortunately, it transpired that there was no problem getting replacement tickets as I had my confirmation letter ready. My ceremony was in the afternoon, so in the morning I showed my family around the university, and when we were in the physics department we bumped into Dr. Furniss, the astronomy tutor. When he saw me he asked, 'Have you heard the good news?', and when I gave him a blank look he told me that I had won the Granville Prize for the top student in physics or astronomy in the entire University of London. It seems that there were only two candidates this year, I and the top student from Imperial College. Both of us had good academic results, but I won it based on my project work. When we got to the venue of the ceremony at Logan Hall near Russell Square, I left my family to get my robes. The outfit involved a robe, hood (which sat on the upper back) and mortarboard, and as I wore these over my suit, it wasn't long before I (and the other graduates) started sweltering in what was a warm summer day. The ceremony started off with a particularly cringe-inducing video extolling the virtues of UCL, narrated by someone with a voice like a breathless paedophile. The provost of the university himself couldn't be arsed to turn up for our ceremony so we had to settle for a vice-provost, although we were honoured with a pre-recorded speeck by the provost. After the obligatory speeches, we the graduates were herded up one by one for a handshake with the vice-provost. Yes, no scroll, no documents, just one stinking handshake to sign off 3 or 4 years of hard work. I got slightly more time on-stage on account of being in the dean's list and having won the Granville Prize, yet it was all of 10 seconds at most. Maybe for me, the undergraduate years are just a small phase in my academic life, and I was always in it for the learning and not the piece of paper at the end, but the entire process felt massively underwhelming. In any case, my family left flown back home a couple of days back, so at the moment I'm hanging around London getting my things sorted out and saying my farewells before I fly off to Princeton on Wednesday morning. I'll be talking more about my trip and Europe and putting up my pics, and of course I'll keep everyone updated on things when I get to Princeton.

Life here has degenerated into sitting in front of the computer and firing up some games, and then playing for hours at a stretch, much to my parents' displeasure. One thing about me is that I am unable to exercise self-discipline when it comes to computer games. Some people can manage to play for one hour a day, but for me it's all or nothing: if I play, I play non-stop, and the other alternative is to not play at all. When I'm at university, I obviously have to go the latter route, and I ensure that my laptop stays game-free, or else I would never get anything done.

As it is I'm not getting anything done at the moment. I hardly touch my guitar (an old guitar...I left my concert guitar in London), and a couple of books have remained unread....

I've been back since last Wednesday, and as usual it's taken a few days to readjust (or rather try to readjust) back to weather and the lifestyle back home. The weather rarely gets below 35 degree Celsius at home, and humidity is very high. Add to that the pollution exacerbated by smoke from Indonesian forest fires, and the result was my sinuses clogging up the moment I left the airport. As a friend once put it, I'm like a white person who happened to be born into a Malaysian Chinese family.

I have also applied for, and received, my US student visa within a couple of days of being back. The process was a lot quicker and easier than I initially thought. I had expected to have to show evidence of my links to Malaysia by showing bank statements and other documentation, and indeed while I was waiting my turn I did see several applicants being rejected on this basis. However, when it was my turn I was surprised that it took the lady at the counter only a couple of minutes to sort out my application, and I didn't get asked any questions either (I think the words 'Princeton' and 'full scholarship' was all they needed). Anyway, that's all sorted out now, although when I went to pick up my visa the next afternoon, there was a delay due to a protest outside the US embassy against the events in the Middle East (Malaysia does not have diplomatic relations with Israel, so they have to protest against the Americans by proxy).

I have a few friends whom are back (quite a few of my close friends are in fact abroad), and most of them are working, so for now I don't have much to do on my weekdays, although I'm planning to finish off the work on my first paper and start refreshing my memory on cosmology before I head off to start my PhD.

4 years in London, and it's always been more of a background to my university life than truly being a place. This was highlighted to me when a friend came to visit me a couple of weeks ago. I brought him to Tower Bridge and the Tower of London, and I was gawking along with him because it was the first time I'd been there as well.

It was somewhat embarrassing to never have seen most of the tourist sites in London, but I guess it's just to be expected for people who actually live here. I have a friend living in Hackney in East London who didn't know where Trafalgar Square, a major landmark here, is. Even worse, less than a minute's walk down the road from where I live is the Freud Museum, where Sigmund Freud lived the last year of his life, and despite having lived here for 3 years I've never bothered going in until yesterday (and even then I didn't really see the exhibits because I was too cheap to pay the admission fee).

I will be able to rectify all these when my family comes over for my graduation and I'll have to show them around the city, but I will definitely miss being a Londoner. Getting around town on the Tube and the double-decker buses, walking through streets filled with a polyglot of people from every corner of the world, the over-the-top monuments and buildings, and of course the pigeons.

I'm certain that I will be in London again many times in the future, but it just won't be the same as well actually living here.

I'm finally flying home next Tuesday, and I will be spending a month back in KL for a month before coming back to London with my family for my graduation and a bit of travelling. After my graduation, I will send off my family as they return home, before I fly off to the US on my own.

In the past week, I've been finally getting round to actually preparing for my trip home, by thinking about the logistics of travelling to the airport as well as what to pack. The latter is somewhat complicated as I have to figure out what I want to bring home and what to leave here as part of my US-bound luggage.

These preparations have brought about a strange sort of melancholy in me. A friend thought I was stressed out from the packing, but that's not true as I'm leaving the brunt of it to the eve of my departure.

My schedule for the upcoming trips have been fixed months ago, but it wasn't till I actually started preparing for it that the feeling of being a wanderer emerged from somewhere deep in my consciousness. I've known for years that my ambition has probably uprooted me permanently from my homeland, that for the foreseeable future I still have no idea where this whirlwind will leave me. However, this usually gets buried under the routine of daily life, and there it stays until a reminder of my state of flux, like a major trip, rears its head.

This time, there is additional pathos, as I draw to a close my time as an undergraduate in UCL. I'm heading to Princeton in September, and while I have spent a summer in Baltimore before, actually living and doing my PhD in the US will be a different thing. Also, even though I know that I will be spending the next 4-5 years there, I really don't know where I'll end up after that.

The last time I had the same feeling, I was about to fly to London for the first time as a fresh undergraduate. Now, that chapter of my life is drawing to an end, and going back home will allow me to reflect on things, although I suspect that more questions would be raised than answered.

Apologies for the long hiatus since I've updated. There were quite a few reasons why I haven't found time to post (including laziness), but the main reasons were the World Cup, my music (I've been taking lessons for the past couple of months, so need to keep up with my practise) and exercise. Also, I've been spending some time thinking about the itinerary for my family's trip to Europe when they come over for my graduation in September, and booking the train/plane fares and hotels that they need, which took up quite a lot of my time bargain hunting.

The other couple of things which happened was my trip to Liverpool to visit my high school friend Cher Pheng ('Ah Pheng'), and his reciprocal visit to London in the past weekend. Since I have such a backlog of things to talk about, I'll start with the trip to Liverpool.

Liverpool is about 5 hours coach ride from London, but my trip didn't start off very auspiciously when the engine on the coach refused to start. By the time the coach started, we were close to 20 minutes behind schedule, and in addition there seemed to be shitloads of congestion on the highway right outside London. I'm generally a seasoned traveller, but one thing I absolutely hate is stop-and-go traffic, which makes me totally nauseated. When we finally got out to the open road, there were a couple of Polish women right behind me who didn't seem capable of shutting up, and they jabbered away for at least 3 hours nonstop at the expense of any sleep I could have gotten.

As we swung into Liverpool well over 1.5hrs late, I was greeted by the charming vista of boarded up houses with graffiti festooned over their walls. Ah Pheng was already there waiting for me, and he first brought me to his house to dump my stuff. The buildings along the way were generally seedy and depressing, and when we walked by a sex advice centre he commented on the number of schoolgirls he'd seen going in there. He also mentioned seeing an advert on a bus which said 'Discover the benefits of work!', aimed at the 40% of Liverpudlians (otherwise known as 'Scousers') who were living on welfare. As we turned the corner round to his house, we saw a guy scraping some powder of some sort to give a teenage girl, and Ah Pheng whispered 'Don't look!'. It also transpired that the estate he lives in is just next to the estate where Anthony Walker, a black teenager, was killed last year for having a white girl friend in a high profile murder case. I'm used to living in more salubrious surroundings, so this raised my eyebrows at the very least.

The next morning, we ran out of ideas of what to eat (he rarely eats out), so we ended up in a Chinese buffet, after which he brought me to the pierside at the River Mersey, where the famous Royal Liver building is:
















(Left to right: Royal Liver Building, Cunard Building, Port of Liverpool Building.)

Those were nice buildings, but we have better in London (I'm becoming a good snobbish Londoner). We then went to the Maritime Museum near Albert Docks, which detailed the history of Liverpool as a merchant port. Indeed, it was the drying up of merchant shipping in the post-war period that led to Liverpool becoming a bit of a shithole.

The other thing that Liverpool is famous for, of course, is the Beatles. I'm not a Beatles fan in particular, but I did visit the 'Beatles Story', which is a rather tacky exhibition which offers us the chance to buy random Beatles merchandise afterwards., although I limited my foray to the non-paying sections. I did however visit the Cavern Club, where the Beatles got their first gig:



Liverpool did have a couple of nice churches and cathedrals though. In particular, I thought Liverpool's Anglican Cathedral was a fairly magnificent neo-Gothic building. These picture don't quite do justice to its looming presence at the top of a hill overlooking Liverpool:







Another interesting one is the Catholic Metropolitan Cathedral, which looks like something out of Lord of the Rings:



Finally, there was St. Luke's church. This church was bombed out during the 2nd World War, but they never did scrape together the funds to repair it, which I somehow find allegorical of Liverpool as a whole.




These pretty much sums up the tourist attractions offered by Liverpool, but the World Cup didn't stop while I was there, so we did catch a few matches while I was there. In particular, we were relieved that England beat Ecuador in the quarter finals, not because we supported England, but because as foreigners we might have been beaten up if England lost.

Yes, Liverpool is a haven for the species of young Briton known as the 'chav', dressed up in hoodie and bling, and usually found with a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other. We spent an afternoon sitting at the pierside while a bunch of young chavs who appeared to be no older than 14 were getting piss-drunk in public, and desecrating a couple of war memorials to dead sailors that were there.

As you probably guessed by now, I wasn't overly impressed by Liverpool, but I mostly enjoyed getting together with and old friend and catching up with old times, and I guess it was a chance to see another side of England as well.

I try to practise guitar in the auditorium at Netherhall, with its fantastic acoustics which allow me to hear every nuance of my playing. Today evening, I went over to the auditorium intending to practise, only to find that there was someone already there, practising on the piano (Netherhall often invites musicians from outside to practise and give concerts at our auditorium).

I was a bit annoyed because that meant I had to go elsewhere to practise, so I grudgingly picked up my guitar and equipment from where it was lying. The guy was playing Chopin's polonnaise from his Andante Spiniato and Grand Polonnaise, a piece which I'm familiar with (I love Chopin in general), and he was so involved and clearly enjoying his playing that he barely noticed my presence. He was playing very well, with excellent articulation and phrasing, although he played a couple of wrong notes here and there. However, I could tell that it was still a relatively new piece to him as he still had the music in front of him (if he had been playing it for some time he would have already had it memorised).

I wanted to hear him play, but it's generally impolite to sit in when someone's practising, so I went just outside the auditorium and propped the door open slightly to listen. The pianist was very clearly enjoying himself and I could hear the joy in his music, and I was drawn into it as well even though I was surreptitiously listening in from outside. I stood there for a good 10 minutes before he finished the Chopin and I finally left.

It was an interesting musical experience. I often find that I'm most receptive to music when it's unexpected, and this often comes from the many musicians who come to practise at Netherhall. In contrast, if I have to sit down to listen to a formal concert, I find my attention easily wavering.

Also, the pianist was playing ina joyful and carefree manner of someone thoroughly enjoying his music, which I rarely hear in concerts and recordings. The reason is simple: when one is playing for an audience or microphone, stage fright and the musician's own ego immediately becomes an obstacle. I feel it is when listening to someone playing in private, that one really gets to hear truly great music.

My summer so far can be summed up with 3 words: exercise, guitar and reading, and in roughly that order of priority. I've been scraping together enough discipline to exercise almost every day, either working out at the gym or going running. As far as running is concerned, I'm pretty pleased to be pushing myself past the 5km limit, and for the first time in a couple of years I can regularly run 7-8km without too much problems, although I'm aiming to improve this distance over the summer.

I'm also practising about 10 hours a week on my guitar, which is far more than I've done in at least half a year. In addition, I'm also going to start lessons next Tuesday with a teacher, again something I haven't had in ages. My old teacher, Carlos, doesn't seem to be in London very much now, so I've booked myself some lessons with Graham Devine, a guitarist whom I've heard before on a recording (which I enjoyed). I'm currently learning some new pieces I've wanted to work on for some time, and also polishing some pieces currently in my repertoire.

As for reading, I have about 2 books that are unfinished (one of them a Chinese 'wuxia' martial arts novel), and about 5 other books which are untouched so far, but at the moment I don't seem to be in the mood to do very much reading, but I'll have to go through them sooner or later.

Apart from these, I'm spending my time quite leisurely. Normally, I would consider it a waste of time (!) to hang around with my friends chatting or watching movies, but I guess I can afford to do that this summer, although I'm starting to feel a slight urge to get back to science and learning again.....

An interesting picture that I took while I was walking near my uni, at Tavistock Sq.
In the foreground is a statue of Mohandas K. Gandhi seated in a meditative position. In the centre of the picture, in the background, is the British Medical Society building. In the morning of 7 July 2005, a no. 30 bus blew up in front of the BMS building, killing 13 people.

Such irony that this act of senseless murder occured in front of a monument who achieved the great feat of using pacifism and non-violence to bring independence to his country.

Having finished exams and my degree, suddenly I have lost the focus of the past 4 years of my life. I no longer have to head to the library to study, nor do I have to worry about work to be handed in.

So far, my time has mostly been occupied with sleep, with the epitome being the time when I took a nap at 4.30pm and woke up at 8.30pm (I wanted to wake up at 5.30pm but set my alarm for 1530...d'oh!). Apart from that, I've met up with some friends over the weekend to catch up, and celebrated a friend's birthday.

Another thing I've been catching up with is my music...I've hardly touched my guitar in the past couple of months, and this summer I intend to bring my playing back up to its peak. I'll be hanging around in London until mid-July. The original plan was for me to work on a couple of research papers with my supervisors, but I've decided to forget that and just relax. I do want to learn some maths and physics on my own, but that has to be at my own leisure.

Of course, I'm really looking forward to the World Cup next month, and it helps that I can actually watch it during normal hours while I'm here, rather than having to stay up late at night as I would have to do if I were back home in KL.

Total randomness of the day: I was in the supermarket just now and I saw a bucket of water for cleaning the floor. What caught my attention was the fact that it was a kosher bucket of water. I kid you not.

(The joys of camera phones)

Sometimes, when I feel that no one cares about me, the only solution to this is to go out and care about someone else, whether it's a friend I haven't heard from in some time, or a homeless person I'm helping to deliver food to. I'm not sure where I heard this, but when there's no love in your life, just go out and create love, and there will be love (obviously this is 'love' in the general sense, not the romantic sense) .

Sounds cliched, but it works.

Anyway I just had what is hopefully my last paper exam I'll ever take today. It feels slightly strange to not have to try and force myself to hit the books all the time anymore.

It's possible that I have mentioned this before, but the residence I'm staying in, Netherhall House, is actually run by Opus Dei. Yes, THE Opus Dei which are the bad guys in The Da Vinci Code (I haven't actually read the book myself). For those of you who have been living under a rock, they are a conservative Catholic organisation which has a tradition of being highly secretive, has been lambasted as a cult by their critics.

In the run-up to the release of the movie at the end of this week, there has been huge media coverage of the organisation. In part, it is a public relations coup by the OD upper echelons to use the publicity from the book to promote itself. For example, their website has had their visitor count increased over a hundred-fold since the book came out. I wouldn't say much more about OD as whole, since there's much more material out there (books, websites etc), although it runs the full spectrum in terms of veracity.

As far as my own experience is concerned, I knew that Netherhall was run by OD when I first came to take a look, but I didn't really know anything about the organisation. The first hint of weirdness was that there was a bunch of old single men living in an adjoining building who seemed to be doing something religious all the time, whether it was mass or prayer meetings. The other hint was the fact that even for a male student residence, there were some strange rules regarding women. We have to leave our rooms at 10.30 am so that the 'cleaning staff' can clean the living areas. What makes this strange is that there is TOTAL isolation between us and the cleaning staff, to the extent that there is an elaborate system of doors to ensure that there is absolutely no contact.

In general though, the OD members here are nice people, although they have pretty conservative views on social issues. No one has tried to convert me, although I have known people who were converted while living here as students, so it's probably just the fact that they knew I'm too much of a hard-core atheist to start with.

Back to the Da Vinci Code, the publicity that OD is getting is really astounding. We've had at least 2 camera crews over here filming the place in the past week (one of them from New Zealand!), and there have been articles in all the major newspapers about OD in the past week. A couple of the students here have been interviewed, although I doubt the OD people will want the likes of me to be interviewed in an article about OD!

In any case I'd rather wait for my own moment of fame instead of trying to get 15 seconds of it off someone else...

4 papers down, one to go. Just had my particle physics paper this morning, and my final paper will be on next Thursday, so a bit of time to prepare.

So far the exams have really been going well. I must done only about 50% of the preparation I did in previous years, but so far the papers I've done seemed pretty easy, especially since my last-minute preparation has consisted mostly of playing PS2 the night before my exams.

At least 3 of the papers 'feel' like 90+% papers, which should be sufficient to ensure that I finish top in class.

Mission accomplished I guess, although I want to ensure I do well in my last paper as well.

In the past couple of weeks, there has been some drama in my student residence (Netherhall), concerning this guy whom we'll call 'B'.

B in the same department and same year as I am (he does physics, but we only share a couple of classes), and he's been slightly antisocial and weird since I first known him, but his behaviour has been deteriorating in recent weeks. B has shown signs of jealousy of me in the past, e.g. by telling people that I get good grades only because I take easy courses, and I haven't been very compromising with him either whenever he tries to show off by babbling random pseudo-physics nonsense to try and impress people.

But recently he has been become increasingly weirder...since I'm not on good terms with him, I have had little direct contact with him. I've heard from many different people about his antics, but here are a few choice ones:

1. The first sign of his decline was a couple of weeks ago, when he told a friend of mine during dinner that 'Princeton is shit'. It's one thing to be jealous of me getting to study there, but he has to be near the edge to make such a ludicrous statement.

2. My Spanish friend Pedro was once on the Underground with his girlfriend when B happened to be on the same train and spotted them. He went over to them and sat next to them without saying anything, and he was staring at them for the entire journey. When Pedro said 'Hi B', he didn't respond. Later that day, when Pedro came into our library downstairs, B was there. B saw him and started chanting under his breath 'Fucking Spanish, fucking Spanish, fucking Spanish...'

3. B is half-German, and last week he started telling my Nigerian friend, Chema, about how blacks were inferior and Aryans are the superior race. Chema was surprised and retorted that as a 'mongrel' race B would have been one of the first to be sent to the concentration camps. Naturally, this didn't sit too well with B and he stormed off.

4. Amer is one of my best friends here, and we've both been familiar with B's antics for some time. A couple of days ago Amer was chatting with another friend, Reuven, about girls when B came along and sat near them. Amer felt uncomfortable and left shortly afterwards, after which B started asking Reuven detailed questions about the girls from the prior conversation which obviosly irritated Reuven. Suddenly B changed tack and asked Reuven: 'What has Amer been saying about me behind my back?' (B has never spoken to Reuven before this). Reuven was shocked and said (truthfully) that they never talk about B He refused to believed this and kept insisting, and Reuven just said they don't talk about him. B then said 'You're lying' and walked away.

All this happened within 2 weeks ago. I suspect that he is cracking under the pressure of exam pressure and his deep jealousy of me, but he's really started to act completely weird. To make things more interesting, someone spotted him walking around at night carrying a knife. Maybe he was just going to cut some food, but at night....?

Some days ago, he moved out of Netherhall. Apparently he told the director that some of us were bullying him (including the chaplain !), and he was afraid that someone might try to rape him!

I don't know where he is living now, but he seems like he's losing it (assuming he hasn't lost it already). Many of us have tried to help him, but when he doesn't want to accept our efforts, there's nothing more we can do.

There are 'friends' who only ever contact me when they need something from me. Whenever I get a phone call or text message from these people, it's usually when they need something, whether to borrow my notes, asking for my help with homework or to ask for advice.

Don't get me wrong, I would always help people if I can, even if the person asking isn't on good terms with me. But it'll be nice if I get some sort of acknowledgement apart from a perfunctory 'Thanks', even if it's just an occasional text or e-mail saying hi.

As it is, I start to feel like I'm being used.

Mostly studying for my finals these days, which begin next Friday. Nothing much to talk about on that front apart from the fact that I am indeed making progress on my revision, although not as intense as in past years.

I actually managed to get some music squeezed into my schedule before my bedtimes, whereas in previous years my Easter break has been a time of musical abstinence. The interesting thing I find about music is that it makes the greatest impact when it's special. Playing for the first time in a month feels a lot more special than practising for the 6th time in a week (although playing merely once a month is hardly a recipe for advancement).

Hopefully during summer I won't be too distracted by the World Cup etc., and put in some time for disciplined practice on my guitar. I can feel the next breakthrough in my playing ability approaching, and a burst of intensive work should bring that about.

I've come to realise that the ego is the greatest obstacle to music-making.

At the most practical level, the existence of ego translates to stage-fright: when I realise that I'm going to be playing in front of an audience, there is the egoistic fear of making mistakes in front other people, or not playing at my best and causing people to think badly of me. Because of this, I start to focus too much on getting the right notes rather than on the overall musical and emotional content of the piece. The funny thing is that this often backfires: the more I think about what are the notes I have to play, the more likely I am to suffer a memory lapse. Even if no mistakes occur, the resulting performance would be mechanical and lifeless.

My best music is always produced when I'm playing on my own, without any feelings of self-consciousness or nervousness. Somehow, this just frees me to play the best music I ever make.

I love playing music for other people, but somehow this I get the feeling that my audience will never enjoy my music as much as I enjoy my own playing when I'm alone.

I've just about managed to get settled down into the schedule of cramming for my finals, which begin on the 28th of April and will be over by the 17th of May.

I had drawn up a comprehensive schedule for my revision before I visited the US a fortnight ago, but it was only several days after my return that I managed to shake off my jetlag and excitement (from the visit and the prospect of studying in Princeton) to hit the books. In previous years, I have hit the books the moment Easter Break started, so this time I'm about 10 days behind compared with back then.

There also the psychological effect of being aware that the results of this exam wouldn't be crucial to my future, since I already have the place at Princeton; however I should make sure that I finish top in my class (which is a rather important bit in anyone's CV), but on the other hand I don't have to push as hard as in years gone by.

Conversely, a couple of the courses I'm taking this year have turned out to be very interesting and fascinating (see one of my past posts on my other blog), so I want to make sure I understand the subtleties of these subjects if for no other reason than my own curiosity.

Perhaps these two effects will cancel out and I'll end up doing not very differently from my earlier years.

OK...the pics from my campus-scouting trip:

The single-carriage 'Dinky' train from Princeton Junction to the Princeton campus:



A couple of shots of 'downtown' Princeton.





The Nassau Hall, oldest building in Princeton (and one-time capital of the US!).




Peyton Hall, the astrophysics department building.




Some random shots of the Princeton campus:












And now Harvard:

Harvard Square:




The entrance to the promised land: gate to the main Harvard campus...



A couple of shots of Harvard Yard





The Widener Library



The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the largest concentration of PhDs in the world...over 300 under one roof!


Some shots of downtown Boston:

Boston Common, with the Massachusetts State House in the background


Boston Common, looking towards downtown



Boston Town Hall (I think)


Quincy market, with lots of seafood (yum!)


View of downtown


Boston seafront


Boston North End, the Italian quarter.


The Charles River and a beautiful day...


Paul Revere Mall


Beacon Hill

Purely for the record....

And it's official that UC Santa Cruz has rejected me!

From Princeton, I took the train to NY Penn Station where I caught a train to Boston (I'm rather proud to state that I spent all of 15 minutes above ground in NYC, to buy a mobile phone charger). The train journey was very nice because we were travelling through the New England countryside around sunset, and the scenery was like something out of a landscape painting.

By the time I got to Boston it was in the night, so I didn't go over to the Center for Astrophysics (CfA) at Harvard until the next morning. Whereas the astrophysics department in Princeton was enclosed in a fairly small building, the CfA in Harvard is huge. It's a 4-storey building holding over 300 PhD researchers (apparently the largest concentration of PhDs in the world!), although a lot of them work for the Smithsonian Observatory which isn't officially part of Harvard.

Just like at Princeton, it was arranged for me to meet up with some of the professors. There were not that many professors at Harvard who were doing cosmology, and I got to talk to 4 of them. The rest of the professors I talked to were in X-ray astrophysics, which I considered rather strange since I specifically stated in my application that I was interested in cosmology for my PhD even though the bulk of my prior research was in X-ray work.

The cosmology profs at Harvard were doing some interesting work, but I felt that they were less enthusiastic about me than Princeton, and some of the current grad students there told me that some of them were difficult to work with. Speaking of the grad students, I managed to speak to quite a few of them, and they were asked to bring me out for lunch and dinner, and to show me around town. They bought me my meals, which the department would later reimburse them for (in fact the department would pay for the students as well, which made them quite happy to come).

Boston is very close to Harvard, less than 10 minutes away by subway. It is a pretty nice and pleasant city, not too big, and I was fortunate enough to come just at the beginning of spring where the weather was nice and sunny. Most of the tourist attractions seem to stem for the historical significance of the city during the Revolutionary Wars, which wasn't as interesting for me as it would be for American visitors, but I did enjoy having decent seafood for my meals.

In the end, however, I decided to choose Princeton. In pure academic reputation, both Harvard and Princeton were probably just about equal, but I preferred the small size of the Princeton department which meant I would be able to know everyone there, whereas I would just get lost in Harvard CfA. Also, in Princeton I would be close to their world-class physics department as well as the Institute of Advanced Studies, Einstein's old stomping ground, which would enrich my education.

Apparently there were 5 students this year who were admission into both Princeton and Harvard, and 4 of them have decided to go to Harvard. I must be say that I found my trip to Harvard/Boston particularly enjoyable, and I enjoyed the company of their students. The Princeton students were nice as well, but I didn't get to hang out with them much apart from one dinner. Indeed, if I was looking for a place where I would have fun and enjoy life, I would probably have chosen Harvard assuming they're equal in academic factors.

A ridiculously important decision in my life, but at least I got to take a look personally before I made my choice. Check back in a few days to see the pics from my trip.

I've been treated like a prince in Princeton. I'm writing this in my hotel room on my final night here, but it's been a very eventful journey so far.

The flight here was one of the worst I have ever taken. I was flying BA a.k.a. ''Bloody Awful' from Shitrow Terminal 4, and surprise surprise, we took off an hour late. I may have accumulated about 3 round-the-world-trip worth of air-miles over the past few years,but for the 1st time in my life I was treated to an aborted landing. The plane was about 10 feet above the runway at Newark when the pilot hit full throttle and pulled up, so we had to go around for another approach. On terra firma, I was pulled aside at immigration for additional processing, simply because Malaysia is apparently a terrorist nation according to the forever-brilliant US authorities. So when I finally got nto Princeton at 2.30pm, it was about 3 hours later than I had intended.

Princeton itself is a nice, if small, colonial town, and I won't describe it more because pics will be up when I get back to London. When I got into the astrophysics department, Charlotte the student admin offered to go out and get me a sandwich. Embarrassed and shy, I tried to refuse but she insisted. I was taken to meet Jim Stone the graduate admissions chairman, and he told me about their programme. I attended a talk by a professor from UPenn which the rest of the department attended as well, which was interesting because it was about cosmology, my field of interest, although I didn't understand all of it. In the evening, I had dinner with the visiting professor, a Princeton professor and several students.

Most of today was occupied with meeting wth literally half of their faculty (the department here is very small, only about 15 professors). I met them individually for about 30 minutes each, and we discussed both my interests and their research (as it turns out, mostly the latter). Some of these guys literally wrote the book on their respective fields, and I was impressed that they cared enough about getting good students that they spared time for me, even if I may not end up working for them, or indeed not choose Princeton at all.Everyone was nice and friendly, but it was immediately obvious they really are world experts at what they do. A couple of them had interesting characters as well. Robert Lupton is a pony-tailed Englishman who goes around barefoot (yes, barefoot!), and has not lost his dry English sense of humour despite several decades here. Another was Rich Gott, who has intense eyes (as in there is a glint in them) and spent our meeting telling weird stories in addition to giving an impassioned extolation of Princeton's virtues. i later learned from the grad students that he has been known to rant at students for 5 hours nonstop, and likes writing papers on topics like time-travel and aliens.

During the breaks in my schedule, I had the opportunity to mix with the students, and they brought me out for dinner as well. They told me about the student life here as well as telling the not-so-good things here, which shows that they were being frank.They were a nice bunch and I got on well with them.

I'm off to Boston tomorrow to visit Harvard, and it'll be interesting to see how that place contrasts with Princeton.

Yesterday evening, I took out my guitar for Mikhail the Romanian guy to take a look (see previous post). He's been playing since he was 10, but hasn't played for the past 2 years. In fact, he doesn't even keep long nails anymore.

After I played him a couple of pieces (I'm a bit rusty as well as I haven't been practising regularly in some time), I handed him the guitar for him to try. The moment he started playing I could tell that he's a very good guitarist, even if he's really rusty, more so than I am.

He played parts of a couple of pieces (as he forgot them halfway through), then to my surprised he started to play Bach's D minor Chaconne (a properly played version can be heard here), one of the most difficult (both technically and musically) pieces in the classical guitar repertoire. He was playing quite hesitantly and with mistakes, but considering that he hasn't played for a couple of years, it was pretty damn impressive.

Before I continue, I should admit that I'm usually a lousy listener; I have fallen asleep at concerts before, and even when I don't chances are my mind will get distracted and I don't fully appreciate the music. However, with this guy playing the piece in front of me, even if in a rusty way, I found myself following every note and internalising the music. While his playing was imperfect, this was the first time I truly saw the beauty of the Chaconne even though I've heard it many times.

Later in the night, I put on a recording of the Chaconne to try and recapture the beauty again, but it just seemed flat and lifeless.

This just goes to show that music is ultimately a means of communication: I had never spoken to a Romanian before, and yet this stranger could open my eyes to a beauty that I could never perceive before.

I'll be in the US for the rest of this week, so there won't be any new posts till I get back!

I was having lunch in the dining room today, and I sat in front of a new person I've never seen before. We started off a conversation, and I learned that he was Mikhail (sp?) from Romania, and that he was around in London for a job interview.

After a pause in the conversation, he suddenly asked me, 'Are you a guitar player?'. I was surprised and more than a bit discomfitted, and replied in the affirmative. I asked him how he knew, and he said that he noticed my right-hand fingernails were long.

It's kind of like a secret sign for a mysterious brotherhood, that 'brothers' can recognise each other even when they don't know each other.

Fact of the day: there is apparently a Chinatown in Lagos, Nigeria!

Term is over. I've finished my last term of lectures at UCL.

Today was the last day, and I went into college just to hand in the two copies of my project report. The project itself has been fairly dull and boring, mostly involving writing code and debugging it. My supervisor wasn't around for nearly half of the duration, and he said that getting the project done effectively on my own would boost my self-confidence. It didn't really boost my confidence because it mostly involved things which I knew I was good at, i.e. plain simple getting-things-done and problem-solving skills.

My self-doubts about my mathematical abilities were only exacerbated because most of the background science on the project were beyond my abilities; while I didn't really need to know about those things, the fact that it's there and I can't understand it makes me feel uneasy. I guess it's part of the scientist side of me that feels uncomfortable if there are any stones that have been left unturned.

I was feeling bored and frustrated by project over the past couple of months, and the writing of the report in the last fortnight was just totally uninspired. I just couldn't really be bothered with it anymore, although admittedly there were other distractions which were putting me off it. Last year, I had finished writing the report 3 days in advance of the deadline; this time, I finished writing it 11pm last night, and it was due today.

I'm very glad that project is over and done with. I don't think I'll get great marks for it, so I need to knuckle down and cram for my finals in May. Before I start cramming however, there will be a brief interlude to the US from next Tuesday till Sunday.

These days, when it seems as if I'm ahead of things, I start getting lazy and slacking off rather than going for the kill and finishing it off. It's a bad habit.

I gave an after-dinner talk on cosmology to the residents of my hall on Monday. This was actually only the second time I had given a science talk to a 'lay' audience, the first time being some two years ago in '04, when I gave a talk to some students at my old high-school. In fact, the PowerPoint presentation I used on Monday was modified and refined from the high-school talk. I have given many more talks since the one in 2004, and the experience led me to shorten the talk (my rule of thumb is 1.5 minute per slide) and remove all the custom animations (i.e. having to click to bring out individual sentences). I also made some clarifications and corrections to the material based on the extra two years of knowledge I had gained.

The run-up to the talk wasn't ideal.... most of the Circle, Hammersmith and Metropolitan line was down due to signal failure, and I only got back to Netherhall from uni at around 7.15pm when the talk was supposed to be at 7.30. After forcing down my dinner, I went down to the coffee lounge with my laptop only to find that no one had bothered to set up the projector and screen.

After these technical difficulties were resolved, I finally got going. The audience was fairly good, with about 30 people in the room from my rough estimate. I started off with a historical overview of humankind's view of the cosmos, from the early beliefs about a geocentric universe
of the Sun and other bodies orbiting the Earth, through Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo's discoveries which shed light on the actual arrangement of the Solar System.

I then fast-forwarded to the early 20th century to describe the next great change in our understanding of the cosmos: Hubble's discovery that our galaxy was not unique, and his subsequent discovery of the expansion of the universe. This was followed with a brief description of the nature of this expansion, and then about the cosmic microwave background which wrapped up the talk.

When I finished, I got quite a few sensible questions from the audience, which was gratifying because it meant that my talk wasn't totally beyond them.

The presentation itself was a good one, but I felt that my delivery was rather bad. Considering that I used to be a debater for my high-school, I felt that my talk was quite disjointed and inarticulate. Several times I confused myself in trying to explain things without resorting to technical terms, which disrupted the flow. I think that in the future, I need to use cue-cards to ensure that I deliver everything I intend to say, and to keep my mind focused.

After the talk was over, I got some thank-yous and congratulations from my fellow residents. One positive comment was: 'I didn't understand everything you said, but more than I normally would'. It was clear that the subject matter of my talk was fascinating to laypeople, and that the structure of my talk was at least good enough to keep their interest. However, I think that my verbal delivery needs to be polished to give more eloquence and articulation.

When I go back to Malaysia during summer, I will try to arrange a few talks in some schools. I've managed to hold the attentions of a group of grown adults, so we'll see how successful I am in trying to reach out to teenagers.

Andres Segovia apparently once said: 'If you practise music for more than 3 hours a day, you will not be unhappy'.

I think he's right.

Last night I decided to join some of my friends to help hand out food to homeless people in Holborn. I'm rather ashamed to say that it must have been a year since I've done any volunteer or charity work, but it's a sad fact that most of the intervening time I've been too busy to even contemplate doing such work, let along go out and do it.

After dinner around 7pm, Jason, Reuven, Alvaro and I went over to Holborn close to LSE. We were originally supposed to first go to Bond St. to help pack the food, but we were a bit late so we were told to go straight to Holborn where it would be distributed. We got there at around half-past, and although the food van wasn't due to arrive until 8pm, there was already a crowd of homeless people milling about. I must say I felt vaguely uncomfortable, as usually one sees homeless people in ones or twos but not a whole crowd of them. It might also be something to do with the fact that homeless people tend not to put personal hygiene very high on the priority list.

In any case, we waited in the chilly evening air until the van arrived. The moment the van arrived, the homeless people started crowding the vehicle as the organisers (not very successfully) tried to get the crowd into a queue. I joined in to hand out the sandwiches and miscellaneous items (which were obviously products about to go off and donated by supermarkets). There was something vaguely resembling a queue by now, but still there were people trying to cut in, and it was disruptive when people requested for specific things ('Do you have a bacon sandwich' etc). The behaviour of the people were rather varied....some of them were polite and thanked us, while others were demanding and brusque. I can understand that their life isn't very peachy, but surely it can't be too difficult to at least try and be a bit more civillised (to be fair, some of them were probably not in full control of their mental faculties).

I particularly felt for a guy in a wheel-chair who could not join in the crush... by the time the crowd had thinned out enough for him to get food, there were only bread-rolls left. Still, he seemed very grateful for what we could give him, which made me wish even more that we had more to give.

I was treated to a show of bureaucratic 'logic' today. I went to apply for a visa for my 5-day trip to the US at the end of this month (which incidentally went quite well, as I only waited a bit more than 2 hours, mostly indoors, compared with 3 1/2 hours shivering outside 2 years ago).

The last time I went to US was for my STScI internship in Baltimore back in '04, and I had all the supporting documentation and forms from STScI to support my visa application. The internship was supposed to be 10 weeks, and the embassy granted me a visa which lasted about 5 months. This time, I am travelling to the US for 5 days, and the embassy officer informed me that he was granting me a visa for the duration of......1 year.

I would like to remind all and sundry that my other blog is regularly updated as well, and I'm rather tired of double-posting material from there over here (this blog is only intended for people who know me personally, and I intend on making this dichotomy more clear from now on in my posts). So my opinions on science and physics would go into that blog, while more personal stuff remains here.

I am not a morning person, period. Back when I was in school, I waking up at 6.30am was a daily struggle. For my parents, on the other hand, it was a natural thing to do. My father wakes up every day at 7am to practise Tai Chi, and my mother wakes up around that time as well. I, on the other had, could rarely get up before noon if there is no particular reason to.

In the middle of night, on the other hand, my brain activity seems to fire up. I enjoy studying in the peace and quiet of the night, with no distractions to bother me. I took this to a rather weird extreme during the Easter break of my first year in uni, when I was studying late at night and waking up rather late in the day as well, with the additional caveat that I started sleeping and waking up later every day. After a couple of weeks, I had reached the point of going to bed at 9am and waking up at 4pm (!). This was rather disorienting, if for no reason other than the fact that I had no idea what meals I should be taking, and eventually I did fall ill from this, I suspect from a combination of this punishing studying regime and the spring flu spreading around.

Nowadays, I have reached a fairly happy compromise of going to bed at about 2am, and waking up before 10 to study. In Netherhall, we are required to vacate our rooms at around 10.15am for cleaning to be done, so I'm forced to get up no matter how lazy I'm feeling.

This few weeks ahead are going to be nasty, however. I have my research project dateline coming up in 3 weeks, and I submit my project report of about 10,000 words by the 24th, and a major headache is that the code I'm working with is still buggy, and the run-time of the code itself is extremely slow. I actually enjoys studying the material I'm learning in my lectures now, however I cannot afford to let my project slip up. I may have no real competitors for top student in my department, but standards have to be maintained...

I found this website which shows the descriptions of scientists, by a group of 11 year olds before and after visiting Fermilab, one of the top particle physics facilities in the US. The difference in perception is quite interesting...

I particularly liked this girl's description AFTER visiting the lab:

Before:

You can see them as a mad scientist with hair standing straight up and a mean wicked laugh. . . . I see them with rubber gloves and safety goggles on. I see them in a chemistry lab surrounded by beakers, graduated cylinders and tables filled with experimental materials.

After:

Scientists love their jobs. They wake up in the morning and are excited to come to work. . . . When you are a scientist, you come to work ready to explore and learn new things. Things that may change the world someday. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.

Over the past few weeks, I've been very impressed with the way that American universities try to get their best talent. As of now, I have had 6 PhD offers, and for several times I've had people call me me up to try and convince me to go there. The only universities which haven't called were Chicago and Stanford; with Chicago someone from the faculty did email me personally, and they set a few of their graduate students to email me to answer my queries and convince me. Stanford takes 60 students for their Physics department (which was what I applied to there, instead of astrophysics/astronomy in other places), and it's not surprising that that they can contact such a crowd except for the most exceptional students (and my application wouldn't stand out as far as pure physics is concerned).

Their financial muscle is very obvious as well, from the fact that all of them offered to pay enough travel expenses for me to fly over for a look if I wanted to. I will be flying over to a couple of East Coast universities to take a look, but even the Californian universities are offering for pay for me to go over to visit, which is tempting if not for the fact that it's going to be in the midst of my pre-finals cramming.

I'm not in general a brilliant person. I usually can follow the material in my studies, but often I do have to think about things for some time before I understand it. My strength as scientist, in fact, comes from the fact that I am very good at making connections between things which are on the surface unrelated. Let me illustrate with an example, which happened to me recently.

When I was in first year student halls, there was this guy called Chris with whom I occasionally sat with at dinner. He was a nice and friendly bloke, but I wouldn't really have regarded him as a friend. He was however unusual in studying classics (i.e. Greek and Latin studies, that sort of stuff), and apparently is unbeatable in chess.

In my present halls, over 2 years later, there is this student called Alex from I occasionally say hi to, but don't really talk to since he's very quiet and doesn't talk much, and I've been too busy to really get to know many of the newer residents. However, in a small hall like Netherhall, you learn things about people even if you don't talk to him. I overheard him mentioning to someone that he's from Norwich, and I sometimes saw him playing chess with people in the lounge.

One day, some of synapses just snapped together, and during after-dinner coffee I turned to Alex and asked him, 'Do you by any chance have a brother called Chris?'. He gave me a weird look and slowly said yes. 'Is he by any chance currently doing a Master's in classics in Durham?'. Now he looked slightly alarmed as he said yes again. I then told him that I used to stay in the same halls as his brother in first year. In some part of the brain I must still have remembered that Chris is from Norwich, and I must have made the connection that both their surnames were the same. As I started to look for connections, I noticed that they both had a vaguely similar appearance, and seeing Alex play chess just sealed the case shut.

I'm not sure how much this talent will come into use in my future scientific career, but I suspect that I don't make the grade, I'll just go and become a police detective, I guess....

It's not an easy question when people ask me, 'So what is it you're studying in university?'. The official answer is that I'm currently in my final year of an MSci course in Physics with Space Science. The complication starts with the type of degree: people in UK would probably know what an MSci is, but for those who aren't from the UK, the MSci is basically a 4-year science qualification (the engineering equivalent is MEng) designed to try and match European undergraduate degrees, which typically take 5 years and is far more advanced than the British 3-year BSc.

My course is basically 75% physics with the rest being covered by the umbrella description 'space science', which involves space exploration of the solar system and the immediate near-Earth environment. My space science courses embraced both the science as well as the technical engineering and instrumental aspects involved in the subject, so I've learnt quite a bit of spacecraft engineering as well.

I chose this subject because I wanted to go into planetary exploration, but after a year or two in university, my interest turned gradually towards physics and astronomy. Indeed, my summer research experiences since 2nd year have all been in astrophysics, and my term projects in uni have been on astrophysics as well. And so it was that my PhD applications were all in astrophysics.

However, in the past year or so, my interests have yet again made a subtle shift. I've become interested in the early universe, in the era between the Big Bang and the formation of the earliest galaxies. This involves astronomical observations of the cosmic microwave background, but I have been fascinated by the interpretation of the data and the knowledge we can learn about the earliest epochs of the universe. This involves a lot of fundamental physics and mathematics... indeed, this field is the stomping ground of a lot of theoretical physicists. I'm hoping to be able to enter this field, but my undergraduate courses have sacrificed some mathematics and theoretical physics in order to concentrate on engineering and space science, so I have to try and make up for my deficiencies while in graduate school.

There are many exciting fields in physics and astronomy, but I get shivers down my spine whenever I think about the earliest stages of the universe, when it was just cooling down from the violence of the Big Bang, and before the earliest galaxies coagulated from the pristine elements. I hope I have what it takes to be part of the effort to understand this magnificent subject....

Things have been rather confusing in the past week. If I was asked a week ago, I would say that I have more or less decided on Princeton as my choice of university. However, I then started thinking specifically about professors with whom I would want to do my project with. I was looking for professors who are doing theoretical work on the Early Universe, and who are relatively young (and thus upwardly mobile). I thus identified A. in Harvard and K. in Princeton whom both fit these criteria. In fact I was truly impressed with the number of citations they both had considering their young age, and their work was very exciting.

Now, I've discovered that K. is leaving Princeton and is thus unavailable to me, but A. said that he might be taking students in the next few years. So the plot rather thickens as far as my decision is concerned. Princeton has an excellent cosmology programme, but K. seemed to be the only person doing theoretical work on the Early Universe.

Another thing I've discovered is from the eventual careers of graduates in Harvard and Princeton. Both departments have a list of the fates of students who did their PhDs there, and while in general it's not very easy to get academic positions in the top universities even for Harvard/Princeton PhDs, Princeton seems to produce more top academics than Harvard.

So the basic message is that in most aspects Princeton is the better choice, apart from the very crucial fact that I have already identified a Harvard prof I would very much like to work with. This really complicates the decision-making, so I've decided (pun intended) the best way to make the choice would be to visit the respective campuses, so I'm going to make a 5-day whistle-stop tour of Princeton and Harvard in late March....