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....

The past couple of weeks have been a strange, almost surreal, experience. As mentioned ago, I had the most pleasant shock of my life when I received a PhD offer from Princeton, and followed the next day by Chicago. Since, then, the offers have come in, to the extent that everytime I see some of my Indian friends in halls who ask me, 'Any more news??', I do indeed have more news. A week after Princeton and Chicago, it was Harvard with an offer, and in the past couple of days they have really started to tumble in... Cornell 2 days ago, and today Stanford.

I have never felt so confident about myself in my entire life. Before university, my life has always been marked by under-achievement. I was always considered a bright kid, but in school I've had better things to do than to do my homework and pay attention to classes. Reading books, playing computer games and watching TV were more interesting and fun, to the extent that I scarcely remember doing any homework or studying for exams during primary school. Yet, I've always had the competitive streak, to be better than others, and without the inclination to actually work for it.

I was bright enough to do pretty well, but never to the level I (unfairly) expected. Nevertheless, as I grew, I gradually began to work harder as my goal in life became more defined during adolescence. Still, I could never find the 'killer' touch to absolutely be the best at what I was doing. There were always people better than me.

Although this desire for glory died down as I began to build up my self-esteem, it always seemed that I could never completely achieve goals that I set for myself. For example, I was satisfied with my results in university, but part of me was irritated that someone else always managed to beat me, which took the wind out of my sails somewhat.

My hard work in university was intent on preparing myself with the knowledge needed to carry out a scientific career, while at the same time ensuring that when the time came to apply for graduate school, my record would be good enough to ensure that I get admitted into a good university. Obviously, just one offer from a good university would be enough for me to get a good boost into an academic career, but I mentally set myself an insane goal: to apply for the top universities in the world, and get offers from them. I pushed myself in this pursuit, and pushed myself to the edge of depression.

It was my New Year's resolution to detach my ego from my ambitions in life, and to work hard in science not out of self-glorification, but out of curiosity and love of knowledge. And somehow, after I stopped trying to boost my ego, I finally managed to do something that was absolutely unexpected.

It's been a lot of euphoria and excitement in the past week after getting my offer, and it's been somewhat expensive as well, as I've had to buy dinner for my friends....but there's been something more sobering as well.

In September last year, Prof Miller, one of my favourite professors, suffered a stroke. I didn't realise this, apart from the fact that he wasn't replying to my emails (he is a baritone, and I was supposed to accompany him sometime in the future). I was later emailed by another supervisor about this bad news.

I called him soon after, and I was pleasantly surprised that he could still manage to pick up his phone, which I couldn't take for granted considering that he's recovering from a stroke. He was talking quite slowly, but was still lucid and conversant. I was very happy to talk to him again, and he was still very concerned about my PhD applications, and was endeavouring to fill in an online reference letter form which I had requested him to do before I knew he'd had a stroke. He told me he was having difficulty with filling in the form from his impairment, but he was determined to fill it in for me.

I later saw him at the chamber music club recital where I was performing. He was more stiff and expressionless than before, and he mentioned that functioning with half a brain wasn't as good as functioning with a full brain. At the time, I was rushing to prepare for my recital, so I didn't get to talk much to him (I played terribly, by the way...). I was observing him listening to the other performers, and it was to my great relief that he still seemed to be able to enjoy the music.

In a later phone conversation, I learned that he had partial loss of motor function to the left side of his body, and that he was suffering from short-term memory loss. He was still very eager to talk about music, and he could still talk about the Bach that I played at the recital. He's trying to regain his singing ability which he'd momentarily lost after the stroke, and he asked me when we could next rehearse the songs.

It's quite a busy time for me these days, with my project and studies, but I think I will find some time to learn the music to accompany him.

On Wednesday evening, I was doing the telephone rota at my residence, trying to read a mathematics textbook to while away the time. Suddenly, the phone rang, and when I picked it up a man speaking in a Spanish accent asked, 'May I speak to Alvaro Tintore?'. Our telephone system involves the person on rota transferring the calls to the telephones in each floor, and if the person isn't expecting the call or isn't in his room, it can be rather of a needle-in-haystack affair to find the person in question.

I couldn't Alvaro after ringing his room and office (he's the hall secretary), so I wandered over to the chapel to see if he was there. As I was walking over, my mobile rang. The screen said 'Unknown caller'. This usually only happens when people call me from abroad, and it was very early morning back home in Malaysia, so I was wondering if there was some urgency back home.

I picked up a phone, and a distinctively American voice asked 'Is this Khee Gan Lee?' . Still wandering about the basement of Netherhall trying to look for Alvaro with (presumably) his father on the line at the reception, my heart stopped. 'This is Professor Jeremy Goodman at Princeton University, and I'm pleased to tell you that we have voted to nominate you to receive a PhD offer'. I was speechless as I listened to him tell me this, and I was still pacing up and down the hall ostensibly in search of Alvaro. He spoke to me for a couple of minutes, and all the while my faculties for speech have been reduced to stuttering 'Yes'. After he put down the phone, I walked back to the reception and picked up the caller from Spain, and told him to call back later as I couldn't get Alvaro.

I was in total shock after this. I had expected to get a few offers from the 7 universities I'm applying for, but Princeton was always 'for the heck of it', as they are the absolute elite with such a tiny department that they take only about 5 students worldwide each year. Even my supervisor had told me that he thought it was unlikely that I would be able to get into Princeton. In addition, I wasn't expecting to get any of my offers until at least late February or early March, so to get an offer from Princeton in early February was beyond stunning.

The next day, I opened my email and got an email from Chicago. 'I'm pleased to tell you that we are offering you admission into the Astronomy & Astrophysics department of the University of
Chicago. You are one of our very top candidates this year and hope you will accept this offer'. I had only submitted my Chicago application about 3 weeks ago, so they must really mean the bit about me being a top candidate to give me an offer with such haste.

One of friends commented that the past week must have been the happiest week of my life. That's probably exaggerating it a little, but nevertheless it definitely is a very happy culmination of the hard work of the past few years. These events have sparked off a lot of excitement in me, and I've been just been boiling with anticipation instead of doing my work.

I need to calm down and get back into my routine. If I'm going to go to somewhere like Princeton, I'll need to ensure that I'm adequately prepared before I start.

Been back for a couple of weeks already, and can't believe I have to head back to London on Thursday. It's incredible how time flies, although I've had a good rest. I've spent most of my time in front of the computer playing games, or watching TV. Not the way I usually choose to spend my spare time, but it certainly is an effective way to rapidly destress. Things with my parents have also been OK. Relations with my father turned chilly the last time I was back, and this time we managed to steer clear of conflict.

I didn't really think of a New Year's Resolution come to think of it, since I'm always trying to improve myself in some way, but I guess I'd take my supervisor's advice to decouple my self-esteem from other peoples' perception of me, and to derive my satisfaction from my love of science.

Speaking of science/work, I have a massive pile of work awaiting me when I get back. My term project, which was supposed to start last term, was essentially untouched, so I have to catch with the work, not to mention that I'll be taking 3 very nasty lecture courses. Also, random promises here and there to give talks, write articles, play recitals etc only serve to make my timetabling interesting.

This would probably serve to pile stress on me, but in a way, there's no more pressure on me. My PhD applications are already away, and whatever I do in UCL from now on will have little effect on my future career. My position in the top of the class is almost unassailable, so I can take some luxury to enjoy some of the things I'm learning.

Time to enjoy life.

The past few days have been spent in what one may call 'idle leisure', i.e. not doing any work at all, which is unusual for me.

Apart from an obsession with multi-player Pro Evolution Soccer 5 on one of my hall-mates' PS2, I've done some reading, reading the newspapers end-to-end, and I've also gotten around to reading Dickens' Great Expectations. I have never read Dickens before, mostly because I always thought that his portrayal of the Victorian era was rather gloomy (from what I know of his plots), as well as my instinctive aversion to anything popularly acclaimed. In fact, I started reading the book as a soporific, to help me sleep, but very quickly his wit and the humanity of his characters won me over. I also found his portrayal of children to be wonderfully charming and warm.

I've also lost control of my appetite in the past week. I have managed to lose a couple of kilograms in the past couple of months through my regime of running, volleyball, gym and not eating junk food, but lately I've thought 'what the hell...' and stuffed my face. So this afternoon, in guilt of the double-scoop Baskin Robbin's I had scoffed earlier, I decided to go out for a run, my first in a few weeks.

It was dark by then (6pm), and as usual I went out in just a long-sleeved t-shirt, shorts and gloves. I made good progress in the first couple of km, heading down towards Regent's Park, before start my ascent up Primrose Hill, looping back towards Netherhall. Primrose Hill, which overlooks central London, isn't very high, but nevertheless running up it is about 7 minutes of exertion which stretches into what seems like an eternity of pain (all you long-distance runners out there, bear with this beginner for a while...).

I've run up this slope many times, but this time the lights along the running path were broken, so it was dark near the top. As I trudged up the hill, a bitter sub-zero wind started blowing at me, just as I was pushing my muscles and lungs to carry me through. So there I was in a t-shirt as the biting wind made my whole body go numb, muscles and lungs straining while I couldn't see 5 feet in front of me thanks to the dark and my watering eyes (from the wind). Everything seemed unreal, and my consciousness started detaching from my body undergoing punishment. As I gritted my way through, every second seemed to last a lifetime, but finally I got down the other side of the hill, where the worst of the wind was blocked off by the rows of houses.

I usually only run about 4-5 km at a time, and yet everytime it's a struggle for me to keep going in the final km. I can't help but admire the runners who can run 42 km of a marathon; while they have superb stamina, nevertheless after about 20km they start aching, and the last few kilometres are always sustained through sheer willpower.

Apologies for my prolonged absence from this blog. The past month or so has been occupied with filling in forms for my PhD applications, and preparing myself for the two GRE exams (General and Physics) for US applications, which I had already taken.

The GRE Physics was held in LEEDS of all places, presumably because it was the geographical centre of the UK (they should have held it at geographical centre weighted by population, which would probably mean something like Watford in North London...). So I had to undertake the 5 hour coach journey northwards to Leeds, but fortunately Rachel, one of my classmates, was going as well. As the exam was on Saturday morning, we arrived in Leeds the night before and stayed at a B&B nearby. The place was OK, but for the fact that Leeds was unseasonably warm (warmer than London, in fact), and the room had heating I could not seem to turn off and a very tiny window. As a result, I was sweating like a horse, and couldn't get a wink of sleep all night.

Not a good preparation for what is probably the most important single exam of my life. Nevertheless, there was nothing to be done except to sit down and do the exam. The exam was 100 physics multiple-choice questions that had to be done in 170 minutes. A few of them are really easy high school stuff, but most of them involve some thought and calculations (NO calculator allowed), and quite a few are difficult. So one has to fast and accurate, which isn't particulary easy to pull off in state. It was so bad that my sleep-deprived brain thought that 1.5/2 was the same as 3/2. Nevertheless, I don't think I performed superbly, but it should still be an acceptable mark.

As we were boarding the coach home, Rachel boarded first and showed the driver the e-ticket for both of us. As I was getting on, I gestured at her and told him 'I'm with her'. He then replied with his Yorkshire burr, 'But are you sure she wants you to be with her?' and waved me on.

It's the last week of term, and I can't be arsed to do anything. Due to my applications, I have not done much of my project work, and it's menacing presence looms over my consciousness at all times. Also, my supervisor Kinwah gave me a major slagging off last week, the gist of which was that I may be the top student here, but I may become small fry if I do my Phd in a top university.

So I'm momentarily discouraged, and burnt out from working almost non-stop all year (I spent summer doing my two internships, as you may recall). I really need a break...

Just added a rant against an 'UNintelligent design' idiot on cosmicjourneys.blogspot.com .

Time flies despite my procrastination and sincerest belief that 'there's still a few months/weeks/days before my concert, so I can goof off now and not practise for my concert', and before I knew it, the concert was bang in my face. Even with the concert a couple of days away, I still managed to convince myself NOT to practise, as practising this close the concert can only me make me increasingly nervous as I run out of time to iron out my mistakes.

So, bang came Tuesday the 8th of November seemingly out of nowhere. I had honestly gone past the stage of caring what people would think of my playing, as other pressing concerns (e.g. PhD applications, exams etc) were foremost on my mind, so I wasn't concerned as I returned home from morning lectures, a scant few hours before the concert. Indeed, the foremost concern in my mind was whether I could manage to tie the bow-tie (the real deal, not a clip-on) that Hon Weng had lent me.

As Jane turned up, violin in hand, with her accompanyist to do some practising just a couple of hours before the concert was supposed to start at 7.30pm, I was trying not to strangle myself in my attempts to tie the bow around my neck. Neil P. was supposed to be the organiser for the concert, but it turned out he was only just returning from a trip to Mexico that very afternoon, and had turned over most of the detailed organisation to Alvaro and Eugene (our resident Singaporean working for a Malaysian concert...brilliant). However, both of them were a bit clueless about the demands on the ground, so I had to pick up the ball, making sure that all the four musicians were taken care of. I was running around trying to find someone to re-arrange the stage furniture between musicians (classical guitarists, violinists, and pianists have rather different requirements as to what they need on-stage), find a page-turner for Jane's accompanyist, sort out some dinner for them, etc etc. I did quite a lot of exercise running up and down (and in leather shoes, at that...) sorting these things out as the guests started to filter in.

At 15 minutes before my concert, I just about managed to get the tie around my neck, and get my fingers stretched just as the MC started his spiel (at that point, it was the first time I had touched my guitar all day, let alone practise). I was surprisingly calm. Normally, just before I have to play before in public, my fingers would go numb from stage fright, but this time the adrenaline rush of the organising work kept my nerves steady.

The first movement of my Bach, the Prelude, was almost perfect, which seldom occurs even in practice. The second movement, a heavy finger-busting Fugue, was less than perfect, but still I managed to play well with lots of feeling and passion, in contrast with my usual machine-like playing in public. However, I could not avoid succumbing to fatigue as the Fugue was that demanding, and the last Allegro movement was a bit of a mess. Nevertheless, I managed to avoid breaking my fingers in the process, and the progression of the music was at least uninterrupted overall. The final piece, Vals Venezolano no.3, went quite well overall, as well as could be expected considering that my fingers were burning with fatigue by then, and I used some declamation in my expressions which I think the audience liked.

So, my role finished, I could afford to kick back and heave a very large sigh of relief (and untie the thing choking my neck). Also, Eugene decided to take my photo after I had finished performing (in 6 years of playing I have only had 1 picture taken of me while playing the guitar).

The bow tie looks cooler untied. I'm grinning so widely, obviously because I have just had a millstone removed from around my neck.

From left to right, Bobby Chen (piano), Datuk Neville Green, Jane Ng (violin), yours truly, Foo Mei Yi (piano, and Neil Pickering.

So that's it. I'm not going to touch my guitar for at least a couple of weeks, and I can now let other things stress me out totally.

Pet peeve of the day: How long will it take for people to realise that optical mice do NOT require mousepads? In fact, with brightly coloured mousepads, the colours will in fact mess with the detector at the bottom of the mouse.

My concert is tomorrow... I have been practising the pieces for the concert almost exclusively for the past 4-5 months, and guess what? I'm not ready.

Part of the reason is that I often give myself excuses not to practise. Even in the past couple of weeks, I doubt I managed to put in 12-13 hours per week, which considering that I haven't even finished memorising the pieces until 3 weeks ago, isn't a very wise idea.

This laziness contradicts squarely with my perfectionism, which means that when I do practise, it's extremely frustrating. To be fair, it is only 3 or 4 awkward bars in the entire programme which have been giving me problems, but passing through those bars brings a huge amount of tension into my fingers, which is detrimental to the rest of the music. A large portion of my practise time has been devoted to trying to iron out those few kinks, but it just hasn't worked.

After this morning's practise, I'm just decided to give up any hopes of playing perfectly, or even expressing the music the way I want it to. It's going to be every musician's nightmare: to play a half-baked concert.

Some days ago, I met up with a few friends from my course last year who have now moved on to other things. Xinhui is now doing a Master's course in Physics in Oxford, while Raj is doing Material Science in Cambridge. Fahd and I were the two people still remaining in UCL. At one point, Fahd mentioned to me, 'You know, apparently a lot of people in our course now want to go on to Particle Physics because of Saakyan'. Dr. Saakyan is a Russian lecturer who taught us Nuclear & Particle Physics last year, and he was quite a good lecturer with a lot of clarity in his presentation. Fahd continued, '...and no one wants to do Solid-state Physics because of Horsfield and the others'. Dr. Horsfield (whom I later christened 'Horsface') was our lecturer for Solid-state Physics last year, and quite simply, the worst lecturer one could possibly have. 'The others' Fahd spoke of were the lecturers of the pre-requisite courses prior to solid-state physics, such as Thermal Physics and Statistical Thermodynamics... for which the lecturers ranged from deathly dull to OK-ish. If what Fahd said is true (about students in our year now tending towards particle physics), then the effect of undergraduate lecturers on the students cannot be underestimated. Quantum mechanics is arguably the most difficult subject for a physics undergraduate, but we have had excellent lecturers from 2nd year all the way to 4th year now. While I'm not particularly passionate about quantum mech, I now find the subject fairly interesting and enjoyable. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of students (those that decide to continue in physics, anyway) from UCL end up doing particle physics or quantum physics, and few decide to go into solid state physics.

Laziness has gotten the better of me lately. I have only 6 hours of lectures per week, and only have to go into uni two days per week. The rest of the time is supposed to be occupied by my project. However, I met my supervisor Kinwah on the first week of term, at which point he told me that he will be in China for a month, and promptly assigned me about half a graduate textbook to learn up and some other tasks.

So I'm without my project supervisor until early November, and 'merely' have to read up on about 60 pages of radiative transfer physics. This means that I have to force myself to sit down and actually study, which isn't something I can get up to this early in term. It's something to study a topic when it's in set out and nicely defined in a syllabus, and another thing when it's basically open-ended.

I haven't spent as much time as I should be doing the things I'm supposed to. I was aiming to work for at least 6 days a week, but in reality I'm managing something like 4 or 5. It doesn't help that my current top priority is applying for my PhD places, which involves filling in applications, writing personal statements and preparing for the American GRE tests. I reckon that when my supervisor gets back, I might get a bollocking from him over how little I've achieved, but once I get my applications sent off I'll be able to focus more on the project.

Last night I watched Downfall, the German movie released earlier this year portraying the last days of Hitler as the Nazi regime verges on collapsed. It was really great film...it pulls no punches in showing the violence and horror of those last days, but I found it completely absorbing in a macabre way. The acting was superb...at no point did I doubt that the actor Bruno Ganz was Hitler himself. After the film ended, I was deeply disturbed and everyone else who was watching it was, too. I wholeheartly recommend Downfall, but it's not for the faint-hearted.

An update to the other blog, with the final part of the story of my observing run in Oz.

I've been back in London for about a week. Hard to believe that not much more than 2 weeks ago, I was still in Sydney...in the intervening time, I've travelled halfway across the world via Kuala Lumpur. It wasn't that hard to settle back in London since I'm staying back in the same place as before, although the gray skies here are quite different from the Sun of Australia.

In the mean time, I'll just have a health nazi rant. I was in M&S the other day to pick up some lunch. I was looking at some of the salads on the shelves, and I realised one thing: there aren't actually very much vegetables in any of those salads. Instead, they mostly seemed to be filled with pasta of one sort or other. How can you have a salad with hardly any vegetables?!? And this is from a retailer that has a reputation as a 'healthy' food supplier.

In Australia, I was eating so much fruit and veg that I was almost overdosing on the stuff. One of the most popular drinks franchises in Sydney is called 'Boost', which sells fruit smoothies, and there are several fast-food chains which specialise in salads, real salads with vegetables, not nonsense with 80% pasta. Vegetables are also outrageously cheap in supermarkets...I often end up having to carry 10 kilos of food home.

In contrast, the nutritional deficiency of most peoples' diets here are just plain alarming. Most people seem to go through the day without a shred of green or fresh fruit passing through their mouth. Even 'vegetarian' options seem to be loaded with carbohydrates without anything really nutritious. When trying to buy my lunch, it seems to be a daily challenge to try to find a balanced meal without paying through my nose, which is why I often end up eating at Subway: it might be more expensive but at least they load the sandwich with lots of vegetables. A lot of people do not seem to realise that it is recommended to eat at least 5 portions of fruit and veg per day to avoid cancer, and when they DO get cancer, it's as if it was totally unexpected. This is a totally unscientific pure speculation, but I suspect that it might one day be able to show causal links between diet and cancer in the same way we know know the causal link between smoking and lung cancer.

It might seem strange that I would turn out to be a health nazi, since I have more of a reputation as a gourmand. However, anyone who is observant will notice that while I eat large amounts, the food is actually quite balanced. That's it for today...it's off to have some grapes and juice....

I just discovered a really amusing link, which translates English into moron-speak.

To quote Sir Winston Churchill...

We shaL go on 2 d nd, we shaL fite n France, we shaL fite on d seas & oceans, we shaL fite w grON confidNc & grON strength n d air, we shaL defend our islnd, wutevA d cost mA b, we shaL fite on d beaches, we shaL fite on d landing grounds, we shaL fite n d feLdz & n d st.z, we shaL fite n d hiLz; we shaL nevr surrender.

I think that was the sound of the English language finally raising a white flag...

I'm kinda annoyed because Blogger cut off my posting halfway through to do maintenance work, so I lost the stuff I was typing...shouldn't they save the damn thing first or something?

Anyway, as I was saying.....

Back to London, and a welcoming rain was drizzling down when I arrived. The flight was OK, apart from the fact that none of the inflight movies were appealing to me (Mr & Mrs Smith? No thanks). So I did a lot of reading... I had a couple of scientific papers that I had to read, and that was a bit going. Aside from that, I am reading a 'popular science' book on a mathematical problem called the Riemann hypothesis, which mathematicians have been trying to prove for over a century. I use quotation marks when referring to it as 'popular science' because it's not trivial... the author actually tries to explain matrix and eigenvalue theory, not to mention bits of complex analysis.

I won't try to explain what the Riemann hypothesis is about, but it's basically something to do with how prime numbers are distributed throughout the real integers. What was fascinating were the large sections devoted to portraying the mathematicians past and present who were working on the problem. Physics tends to attract a lot of obsessive types, and I've encountered some of them (some might even consider yours truly to be one such person), but the mathematicians described are truly nutcases. They tend to start being obsessed with maths from a very early age, whereas I didn't really get into physics until about 2nd year in uni (I started the physics degree with the intention of going into planetary exploration). I guess part of my intimidation with such types is the fact that my own maths ability is my Achilles' heel, but still....

I also finally got round to writing my personal statement for my PhD applications. I'll be applying mostly to US universities, as I can only apply to one UK university. This is because I can only specify one institution for the Queen's Overseas Research Scholarship which is essentially my only source of funding in the UK, so I'll probably be choosing Cambridge, which is a reasonably safe choice. As for US universities, in rough order of preference: Stanford, Princeton ("Might be hard for you to get in", Kinwah said), Caltech, Chicago ("Good chance of getting in"), Harvard ("Pity...I know one of the admissions tutors but he's retiring this year"), Cornell ("Quite good chance..."), and as a backup, the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I'm essentially going to pick any of the US universities (apart from UC Santa Cruz) over Cambridge, because US PhDs take 5-6 years on average compared with 3 years for a UK PhD, and I think I need those extra years to work on my abovementioned weakness in maths.

Notice that apart from Chicago, all my US choices are either on the US Northeast or California....

Back for 3 days so far, and will be jetting off to London tomorrow at noon. Within 30 minutes of being picked up by my family at the airport, I had managed to get into a massive argument with my dad, and at this point we're still hardly talking to each other, although he seems to be pretty happy to order me around nevertheless.

Significantly, my mum didn't blame me for the situation, so I think I'm definitely not in the wrong. She also mentioned that dad used to have huge arguments with my grandfather whenever they disagreed (when the latter was still alive; he passed away months before I was born). Like father, like son....

I've also updated my other blog with a piece about my work in Sydney....

My second last day at work in the AAO. I'll be flying back to KL this coming Saturday (24th Sept), and then off to London in the following Wednesday (28th) . The new term actually starts on Monday the 26th, so I'll be missing a few days of classes, boo-hoo.

I must say that I generally had fun here. Work was hectic because I was trying to cram 3 months' research into 2, and it was a bit lonely after Sam and Pablo finished their time here. But Sydney is a fantastic city, and I wouldn't hesitate to live here (whether I would work here however, is a different matter). It's in fact my favourite city after Paris, and it has the great virtue that it isn't filled with French people!

It's not going to be easy to go back to the dreary weather and disgusting food that awaits me in London, but c'est la vie. Not to mention the fact that I have a shitload of work and things to do once I get back. A dozen PhD applications need to be filled out, and Kinwah will be cracking his whip to make sure I don't slip up in his project.

My sister is coming into Sydney tomorrow (Friday), and I was going to take the day off to show her around, but then she just messaged me saying that we should only meet up in the evening because she wanted to spent the day shopping.

Girls.

I'm about perform the most significant act in my life since I decided to do physics: I am going to change my name. In scientific circles at least, from now on I will officially be known as Khee-Gan Lee, with a hyphen to make it loud and clear which part of my name is my given name.

I can understand it when people get my name confused...even native Chinese speakers or Malaysians can get confused, as 'Gan' is a common surname as well, so that do not know whether Lee or Gan is my surname. However, it's with Westerners that my name truly gets mangled. People calling me 'Khee' I can live with, people thinking 'Lee' is my given name I can also live with, but when my article comes out in a magazine (Astronomy & Geophysics) with 'Gan Lee' in bold at the top corner in the pages, that's the final straw!

So if I let my first published article(s) be K.G. Lee et al. 2005, I would put up with about 40 years of my name being mangled beyond comprehension, so it'll be K.-G. Lee et al. 2005 to avoid this. Hmm...maybe I should have discussed this with my parents, although I don't imagine it's that big an issue. It's just hyphen after all.

Speaking of K.-G. Lee et al 2005, the MSSL paper was originally slated to be my first, but my supervisor is busy with his PhD student's thesis and wouldn't be free till the end of the month, so it'll only be finished when I get back to London. Fortunately, I have a second K.-G. Lee paper coming up (K.-G. Lee & J. Bland-Hawthorn 2005 actually, as it's just me and my supervisor here at AAO), although this is in an Australian journal which is a bit less impact, but with a bit more work we could probably follow it up in an American journal after I leave, albeit with the author names reversed.

I have changed the signature on all my e-mail addresses from Descartes' famous "Cogito, ergo sum"("I think, therefore I am") quote to a new, less well-known, one:

"Audaces, fortuna juvat"

This is a phrase which means "Fortune favours the bold", by the Roman writer Virgil.

I chose this to reflect that much of what I have achieved so far in life has been down to a readiness to do what I feel is necessary despite what people think. Some of it might seem relatively trivial, like asking questions in class even if it makes other people think that I'm an arrogant twat, but in retrospect this is a habit which has made lecturers notice me when they wouldn't otherwise have. When applying for the STScI internship in Baltimore last year, I asked Dr. Mark Cropper, one of my first year lecturers, to write me a reference letter. I never knew what he said about me as he sent it directly to STScI, but someone else later told me that Dr. Cropper regards me as one of the best students he has ever encountered, and this is based solely on the questions I asked in his class. Prof. Miller, another lecturer I'm friendly with, specifically advised me to continue asking questions regardless of what other people think because it helps me develop my own perception of science.

Another little fact which I don't tell many people about: before I entered university, I was briefly working as a professional guitarist both teaching and performing. At that point, I was 19 years old, and it had only been four years since I started learning the guitar, yet I managed to con my way into a job at a music school (I got fired after a few months, not because I was crap, but that's another story...). Even more outrageously, I phoned up every single 4-star hotel in town to ask if they needed a lounge guitarist (I was humble enough to realise that I should get some experience before trying for a job at a 5-star hotel), and surprisingly enough, the Swiss Garden Hotel decided to give me a shot, paying me RM1,500 to play for 12 hours a week (RM1,500 is probably equivalent to US$1000 in spending power, based on the price of McDonalds'). Unfortunately, I had to leave for university after a month on that job, but it was a memorable experience, and I'm not sure too many teenagers have had the experience of playing classical guitar in hotel, dressed in a suit and bow-tie:


(Eek...my technique was SO bad back then...)

Up to now, I've had quite a few jobs up to now ('job' defined as something which has earned me money): musician, reporter, researcher, writer, and I think every single one of them was because of "Audaces fortuna juvat"

It's 11.10pm now and I'm sitting in the office, having just managed to debug my code and set it running...and I was supposed to rest this evening. Admittedly, I spent a couple of hours in the local shopping centre running some errands, and have had dinner (and watched an episode of The Simpsons) so it hasn't been nonstop work all day.

Still, I have less than 3 weeks left in Sydney, and I'm rushing to finish as much of my project (which, incidentally, I haven't gotten around to explaining yet) as possible before I have to go. Joss, my supervisor, is really friendly and cheerful at times, but through email his tone becomes rather brusque and harsh, which is somewhat confusing. He has also been putting subtle pressure on me by referring to my project as 'very important work', which thus far is a brilliant strategy because I'm so sensitive to criticism.

And my MSSL paper still hasn't been completed yet (I guess I should get round to explaining about it some day as well). It's like trying to kill a hydra...everytime I finish part of it, something else crops up that demands doing, or parts of it demands re-doing. I wrote the first draft in early June, and it has always looked like being a week from completion for the past couple of months. I hope dearly that I can finish it off by this weekend, but the jury is still out whether I will.

Am currently listening to Beethoven's 'Hammerklavier' Piano Sonata for about the 5th time today...music has been the thing that's been keeping me sane, but the pressure to prepare for my upcoming recital isn't too welcome.

But it'll be worthwhile in the end.

I just received the programme for my upcoming recital in November (the formatting got a bit screwed up in the conversion to PDF, but it should give the general gist of things). It's going to be a blast, so everyone who's anywhere near London is cordially invited, of course.

To make sure that it's actually a blast and not a bomb (heh), I've been practising like crazy. It's not to reassuring that 9 weeks before the recital I still have about 3 pages of the Bach left to memorise, let along bring to performance level. My part of the programme is about 15 non-stop minutes of virtuoso music without any easy stuff in between for my fingers to rest, so I really have to make sure that everything is completely secure, as any insecurity will lead to tension, which in turn will tire me out really quickly.

As for work here, I can't believe that I only have 3 more weeks left in Sydney, but at least it looks like my project is making some progress, although whether I can manage to actually squeeze a publishable paper out of this remains to be seen.

Pablo has already left, and Sam is leaving this Thursday, so after that I'll be the only sucker here till I go. It's gonna be a bit lonely and depressing, but on the bright (kind of) side I can manage my time more effectively as I won't have anyone to hang out with.

Why is that people who have the least to say usually are the most talkative?

Sam and I were supposed to go watch an Australian Rules Football match in downtown Sydney today afternoon. He was the one who suggested it, so I let him do the planning. We were supposed to meet at the lounge at noon before setting off, and when I got there he was already waiting.

He seemed slightly discomfitted when he saw me. He said, "Uhh...I have slightly bad news...I just found out that the match today is an away game." Apparently, he had not picked up on the fact that the location of the match at Melbourne Cricket Ground probably meant it was not in Sydney.

We went into town anyway and spent the entire day walking a huge circle around the city centre, walking to Macquarie Point where we had spectacular views of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House, moving on to Hyde Park passing through the dodgy Kings Cross area (best shop sign ever: "THE LOVE MACHINE"), before walking back through Oxford St. before ending up at the Town Hall where we started. My legs were just worn out by the evening.

A couple of days ago, as I was wiping my spectacles in my morning, the damn thing broke off right at the bridge connecting the two lens, leaving me holding the one half on each hand. I did not bring any spare glasses nor contact lenses, so the prospect of spending a couple of days being effectively blind was not very palatable.

However, I fell on my figurative feet, as the AAO has an engineering department, so I brought my spectacles to them, and one particular technician, Stan, kindly spent an hour welding my specs together with a blowtorch(!). My glasses now look as if it's been through a flame thrower (which it effectively has), but at least it's essentially back in business.

While he was fixing my frame, he mentioned that he once worked as a jeweller (!!). His surname is Miziarski and he speaks with a strong East-European accent, implying he's very likely Jewish. It's such a stereotype, the Jewish jeweller...

When I was up in Siding Spring, holed up in the telescope control room, I spent a lot of time around Kinwah, my supervisor. He was my secondary supervisor for my research project last year, so I had to meet him regularly (I had commented some time ago on his propensity to just sit there lecturing me for hours while I sat there nodding), but having to hang around with him for 15 hours a day was a totally different proposition.

He is a remarkably perceptive person (he has an unfinished PhD in educational psychology), and extremely blunt if he has something to say to me. On the coach journey to Coona, he suddenly commented, 'You seem as if you have something to prove most of the time...'.

Which is true.

I've spent most of the past few years being haunted by the spectre of failure, and pushing myself into an insane workrate. It's a complex motivation with many facets, driven in part by the memories of being a perennial underachiever in school, a thirst for glory and fame, and other psychological baggage. I've pushed myself this far, so it's just a means to a good end, isn't it? However...

'If you carry on like this for too long you'll get a nervous breakdown sooner or later', Kinwah said, 'and if you care so much about what people think about you, as you progress in your career you'll meet much smarter people...'. He says that if I put all my motivation into making people think I'm smart etc., I will crash the moment I meet true geniuses in my career.

The only way out is for me to put all my motivation into a love for science. So far, I've tried taking his advice, but it's not easy to make the transition. I'm the laziest git I know by far, and the laziness has been winning in the past few days. It's not that I don't love science, but sometimes when dealing with boring and tedious work, it difficult to call up the wonder and joy of discovery.

Thought of the day: I've been dealing a lot with the solar spectrum (more on that some other day), which involved working with some old data catalogues dating back to the 1940s and '50s. These are thick and heavy tomes encasing reams of arcane data, which are literally pages and pages of numbers. Back before the days before computers, it must have been an incredibly tedious and slow process to create the catalogues by hand. Yet there were people who devoted their entire careers to such unglamorous work.

What could have driven them?

I've just updated my other blog with the article which won me the first prize in the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS)'s Science Writing competition.

I have realised that my blog must have seemed rather schizophrenic lately, with my opinions and anecdotes on various issues mixed in with some personal rants. So, I'm creating a separate blog, where I put my thoughts on science and other 'professional' stuff. It's here.

Some of you also know I like to write science articles for the general public, and I hope to regularly post such pieces on the blog. Everytime I update that site, I will mention it in this blog, so regular readers have no need to bookmark both blogs.

It might have come to your notice that I had dropped out of notice for around a week last month. This was because I was out in the outback doing some observations on a telescope.

The AAO has 2 telescopes in Siding Spring out in the country, but as I'm doing a theoretical project, I wasn't really expecting to get to do any actual observations.
However, it turns out that my supervisor from UCL in London is coming down to Australia for an observing run on the Australian National University 2.3m telescope which is also based in Siding Spring, so I took off for 5 days from work to support this observation.

Siding Spring is right on the edge of the Warrumbungle National Park (I love Aussie names!) in NSW, and the nearest town is Coonabarabran, about 600km from Sydney. It was a 8 hour train/bus ride, first through the Blue Mountains, and then through cattle country. The only towns we passed by weren't so much sleepy as comatose.

Finally, we got to Coona:



From Coona, we get a taxi up to Siding Spring, which is a mountain about 1000m high. We see a sign warning us not to disturb the local wildlife...



The first thing we see when we approach Siding Spring is the dome of the 3.9m diameter Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) looping over us...



A closer view of the AAT dome...



Close-by, a couple of scientifically-minded wallabies have also come on observing runs:



I'm officially an employee of the AAO, so I get a desk inside the dome. However, the actual telescope is off-limits to everyone apart from technical staff and observers, so I couldn't go close-up to the telescope. I got this shot from the tourist gallery. The telescope is on an equatorial mount, which means that the mounting is actually inclined at the same angle as the latitude of its position, which facilitates star-tracking, as you only need to track along one axis of the telescope:



Just for reference, here is a picture of the AAT nicked off the net...


And a royal touch...



The telescope we'll be using is the ANU 2.3m reflector, which is in an 'alt-az' mounting, which is similar to a naval gun mounting. It's more difficult to track stars because u have to simultaneously adjust both axes at once. The entire building rotates with the telescope, and it's really cool as everything rattles and shakes as the telescope slews to acquire a new target...the big disadvantage is that they can't attack any plumbing to the dome, so the toilet is right at the base on the far side of this picture. The control room is about at the 2nd storey of the dome. To get from the control room to the main entrances means passing through the telescope...during observations, the light-spillage and thermal air drafts caused by this is unacceptable, so to take a piss, I have to walk out though the external door and walk down the metal stairs, all in pitch dark and freezing night wind...



There are about 8 telescopes at Siding Spring...from L-R: ANU 15-inch, ANU 2.3m, ANU 40-inch, AAO 1.2 Schmidt, 2m Faulkes, and the 3.9m AAT. A couple of other smaller telescopes are not visible here.




Siding Spring was chosen because there's hardly anyone within the horizon, and because it's high (by Aussie standards anyway). The mountains in the background of this view are about 100 miles away. At night, it's basically pitch-black all the way out to the horizon.



The surrounding areas are mostly national parks, and Siding Spring is the highest point nearby, so there were some spectacular views...





That's all for now...will be back on another day with more pics of the actual observations...

We had a coffee meeting this morning... I came in a bit late and the Director of the AAO was talking about some projects in progress in the Gemini Observatory. It went something like this, 'Well, the proposals for Gemini is that there is a competition between HERNIA and PERVS, so they'll need to split their efforts...'

What? HERNIA? PERVS? One thing which I noticed about astronomers is this: they like to contrive really silly acronyms for things. I found this website called DOOFAS (Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms).

Here are some of my favourites:

2D-FRUTTI: 2-D Photon Counting System (I swear, I didn't make this up)
ANIS: All Neutrino Interaction Simulation (LOL!)
BAD: Balmer-Absorption-Dominated (Nuclei)
BICEP: Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization (feel the burn)
CANGAROO: Collaboration between Australian and Nippon for a Gamma Ray Observatory in the Outback (krazy!)
COLA: Compact Objects in Low power Agns
GOD: Gravity One Dimension (The paper was entitled `The likelihood of GODs' existence'...)
HIS/HERS: High Intensity Spectrograph / High Energy Range Spectrometer
HO-BAGS: Hubble Observatory BAckground Galaxy Survey
HOEs: Holographic Optical Elements
MACHO: MAssive Compact Halo Objects
MIRACLE: Mid-InfraRed Array Camera of Least Effort
OWL: Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (so big, it's ridiculous)
PIG: Partially Ionized Globule
PINOCCHIO: PINpointing Orbit-Crossing Collapsed HIerarchial Objects (Egad!)
POOPSY: Phase One Observing Proposal SYstem
SAURON: Spectroscopic Areal Unit for Research on Optical Nebulae (mmmm, nerdy)
SMIRFS: Sub Millimeter InfraRed Fiber-feed System (or something)
SPIFFI: SPectrometer for Infrared Faint Field Imaging
T-RECS: Thermal REgion Camera System
YORIC: Yet another Optimal Resolution Image Constructor (Alas...)

These are NOT made up....I recognise several acronyms I know of which are real. So, it would appear that astronomers have way too much time on their hands...must be while waiting for bad weather to clear during observations...

Today, the 6th of August, marks 60 years since the first combat use of an atomic bomb over Hiroshima. 3 days later, on the 9th, another nuclear weapon was dropped on Nagasaki (little known fact: the original target was the city of Kokura, but it was covered with clouds, preventing from the aircraft from aiming the bomb. So the bomber proceeded to Nagasaki instead). These strikes precipitated the Japanese surrender less than a week later.

As a physicist, I regard the beginning of the nuclear age as a loss of innocence for physics... the entire Manhattan project which created the atom bomb involved countless physicists, many of them already well-established (like Fermi, Oppenheimer, Bethe etc) and others who would eventually go on to become Nobel-prize winners in their respective fields, like Feynmann and Segre. So in a sense, my intellectual predecessors were responsible for opening this Pandora's box, and I am personally fascinated by the history of this effort, which had its beginnings with the discovery of radioactivity in the late 19th century, at the end of the steam age.

It was also this moment when physicists went from being detached boffins to becoming a strategic resource...the nation with the most physicists would hold the key to power (this is of course not as simplistic, but certainly it must have seemed so in the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Billions of dollars were poured into physics research, a lot of it directly into nuclear weapons development, but much of it had very tenuous links, like particle physics and space research. For scientists in the US and Soviet Union, making vague, indirect links to weapons programmes used to be a useful way to get research funding (a project with the word 'nuclear' or 'atomic' in it doesn't necessarily have much to do with nuclear weapons or energy at all).

I have been to Hiroshima some years back, and it was quite a harrowing experience; the Peace Park is such a serene and beautiful place, until you realise that before the bombing it was a densely populated slum. I dearly wish Nagasaki is the last time anyone ever uses the bomb, but... I think the decision to drop the bombs was the right thing to do.

Japan was being blockaded by mid-1945, most of its navy on the bottom and its army beaten back from across the Pacific, but there was still an absolute refusal to surrender unconditionally (the military elite were only hoping for a conditional 'surrender' which would mean, among other things, that no occupation troops were to touch mainland Japan and most of the existing power structures would remain intact).

It was intended that in the event of an Allied invasion of mainland Japan, every man, woman and child would fight to the death. This was no idle threat: in the battle of Iwo Jima, the Japanese residents (including elderly and children) there had flung themselves off a cliff rather than be captured by American troops. So if the invasion had occured, in addition to massive combat casualties on both the Allied and Japanese sides, huge numbers of Japanese civillians were likely to have perished as well. A million Japanese combat troops were still stationed in China/Manchuria, and they would have provided a huge fight for the Allies, as well as continuing the brutal oppression of the occupied Chinese.

So, I believe that in the cold arithmetic of war, the use of atomic weapons was a tragic, but necessary decision.

On Tuesday evening, I was working overtime at the office when suddenly I received a phone call from home. My mum had just called me on the weekend, so it was unusual for her to call again so soon. She asked me what I was doing, if I had dinner etc., which was what she always starts off with whenever she calls me. A few minutes into the conversation, she suddenly said, 'Your eldest aunt's husband just passed away yesterday.' (We were talking in Mandarin, and it's a bit less awkward sounding it seems in English). This came as a total shock to me; I knew he had been ill for the past few years and he had to have major liver surgery last year, but there was no indication that he was critically ill. He wasn't the first family member to have passed away in my recent memory, but yet I felt a sadness that I haven't felt previously, and tears started welling up.

When I was a baby, my parents left me under the care of my father's eldest sister as my mother wanted to keep working; I only went back home with my parents in the weekends. Thus, I spent the first two years of my life in that house with my aunt's family, until my sister was born and my mother decided to quit work. There is hardly anything I remember from that period of infancy, but my parents tell me that my aunt's husband was very fond of me when I was staying in his house, and I used to cry whenever my parents came at the weekend to bring me home.

Years later, when I was about 4-6 years old, when my family went to visit this aunt, or when we were all at my grandmother's house, I would insist on staying overnight at my aunt's house... I still have memories from this part of my life, squeezing into bed with my cousins (they were 6-7 years older than me, and as I was my parents' eldest child, I regarded them as older brothers), and digging for toys in the musty dust-filled storeroom. I remember clambering up the shelves in the living room,looking for things I could play with.

After I was past 8 years old or so, my bond to my aunt's family waned... memories from my infancy and early childhood faded as I grew up, and I've hardly spoken to my cousins or their father since then. Still, I continued feeling a strong, unspoken, affinity to my aunt and her family. Whenever my family went to visit their house, I would somehow feel very much at home as every corner carried echoes of my early years. The cabinets which I had climbed up as a child now seemed so very small, yet so comfortingly familiar.

In the past decade, I must have not spoken directly to my aunt's husband except for greeting him (in part because I'm not very fluent in my supposedly native Hokkien language, and because the generation gap is so huge), yet went my mother told me he had passed away, I started crying (I have tears in my eyes as I write this). Maybe it's because he was present in some of the happiest memories of my life, and with his passing I seemed to have lost another link to my childhood.

I have not said anything about what sort of person he was, but on a level it doesn't matter. All my personal reminiscences of him have now regressed beneath the level of my conscious memory, and the emotion I felt at his passing is coming from a little boy who still lurks somewhere within my subconscious. Yet, I have one very vivid memory of him: I must have been 6 or 7, and my family was visiting his house. At that age, he seemed so towering, and he picked him up and swung me around as I squealed and laughed. In that brief moment, I was flying.

I have no other memories of anyone ever doing that to me.

So far, work has been good. I met Joss, my supervisor on Tuesday. He had just returned from a couple of months in Europe on Sunday, and he was too jet lagged to come into work on Monday. Joss is actually an Englishman, and he had presumably brought his family back to UK/Europe for vacation.

Joss is a very nice person, and in fact one of the most charismatic people I've met. He is effervescencely enthusiastic about the project we'll be doing (more on this later...). He might have noticed that I seemed rather glum most of the time.... but whenever I'm with someone who is very animated, I tend to be quite 'down', as if their friendliness is pushing me down. Or is it a natural suspicion towards people who are friendly towards me for no reason? He was also praising me a lot even on my first day at work, which made me feel a bit more unconfortable.... I tend to get uncomfortable when I get praised which I do not feel is warranted. I once had a friend who said that she liked praising people because it made her feel good...maybe he's like that as well. Personally, I feel that praise is devalued if it's given out too liberally.

Still, work is nice. The AAO shares is in the same compound as the Australian Telescope National Facility (which deals with radio telescopes...while the AAO operates optical/IR telescopes, and most of the buildings here actually belong to the ATNF. The ATNF also runs a lodge where visitors can stay, and this is where I'm staying. The other two summer students in this programme, Sam from Yorkshire and Pablo from Valencia (Spain), are also staying in my place. The rooms are en-suite, and the lodge is very well equipped, with a nice kitchen, free laundry facilities and TV lounge, and I'm basically paying hostel prices for this, so I have plenty of money to spend on other things.

I just went to downtown Sydney last weekend, and my pics of the harsh Sydney winter are here...

Apologies for not posting anything for over a month. This was due to a combination of heavy workload and a lack of Internet access outside my workplace.

In any case, a quick update on what I've been up to... I was at MSSL for 5 weeks in most of June and early July, creating a new model describing relativistically shifted AGN reflection spectra. The model creation was reasonably straightforward, but the testing and verification has been an absolute bitch due to my inexperience in experimental x-ray astronomy, which wasn't helped by the fact that both my supervisors were away during my last week in MSSL.

Of course, on 7/7 the London bombings occured. I was at MSSL in Surrey (1 hour outside London) when it happened, so I wasn't directly affected by the chaos which ensued, but nevertheless it was emotionally catastrophic. It's not nice to have carnage happening in places which I'm familiar with (the Edgware Rd, Kings Cross and Tavistock Sq blasts were within walking distance of UCL, and I often take the No. 30 bus that got blown up with 13 fatalities). I'm familiar enough with the locations of the incidents to note the irony that the Tavistock Sq blast occured virtually in front of a statue of Mohandas Gandhi situated right in the middle of the square.

In the weekend after the attacks, I went to visit 'La Loco' Mel in Cambridge. The train to Camb from London departs from Kings Cross station (the National Rail trains were mostly unaffected, just the Tube), and there were missing-person notices plastering the walls in and around the station. A street corner outside the station was set aside for floral tributes from the public to the victims, with an army of journalists and TV camera crews nearby. I was standing outside watching the scene when I saw an old man giving his respects to the dead. It happened that the weekend was the commemoration day for the end of the Second World War, and this old gentleman had a chestful of medals, obviously a veteran of the carnage 60 years ago. It was deeply moving to see him quietly bowing his head to the victims, when he had already gone through the worst carnage in human history nearly an entire lifetime ago.

Anyway Cambridge was blast... Mel brought me for lunch at a tapas restaurant so she could laugh at my feeble attempts at speaking Espanol, we listened to a symphonic concert by the Camb Graduate Orchestra in the magnificent Trinity College Chapel, and took punt along the River Cam. Mel is doing her PhD in the Institute of Astronomy in Camb, so she brought me there to take a look... I was such a workaholic that I actually managed to get a fair amount of work done by remote connection to MSSL via one of the IoA workstations. It's a nice spacious place with plenty of large windows and greenery just outside. Mel also pointed me out to Andy Fabian a.k.a. King Carlos IV of Spain. Andy Fabian is famous because he's one of the most prolific authors in astronomy, and we nicknamed him King Carlos IV because he bears an uncanny resemblance to several portraits of the monarch we saw in the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

















Separated at birth? King Carlos IV of Spain (left image, at left) and Andy Fabian (R)

A few days after returning from Cambridge I flew back to KL. I stayed in KL for only 4 days (although I managed to have a big argument with my parents within that time) before flying down to Melbourne in Oz, along with my sister. She's starting a degree in Creative Arts in the University of Melbourne, so as I was going down to Australia anyway, my parents decided to let me accompany her. Officially Melbourne was supposed to be a holiday for me, but I spent half the time helping my sister settle and sort out her things, while another part was spent trying to finish my MSSL project (unsuccessfully) via my hotel room's wireless connection. I didn't get to do much sight-seeing in Melbourne (my camera ran out of batteries, so no pics from Melbourne unfortunately), although I did manage to meet up with a couple of old friends (except *cough cough* Gin).

I flew over to Sydney last Sunday ... the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO) where I'm working is in Epping, a suburb about 30 mins train ride from downtown Sydney, and surprisingly I managed to get to AAO without any hassle. AAO is in the premises of the Australian National Telescope Facility (ATNF), and I'm staying in a lodge within the ANTF grounds just a few minutes walk from work. My supervisor, Joss Bland-Hawthorn, just flew back from overseas in the weekend, and he didn't come in yesterday (Monday), so I spent the day goofing around reading science magazines and trying to finish my MSSL project (again, didn't get very far). Joss has just come in today, but he's entertaining a guest so I'm still goofing off at the moment.

I'll write more about AAO and Sydney later, but for now I'd better wrap up this post.

I'm currently working in MSSL, nestled on the side of a hill in the Surrey countryside. I'm supposed to be here for 5 weeks (although I'm being funded to work for 8 weeks, heh), and I just got here on Monday. MSSL is in an old Victorian mansion which some rich old person donated to UCL, which did the most obvious thing: turn it into a space science lab. Anyway it's a very nice location, if slightly out of the way. The view is a stunning vista across the fields of Surrey and almost all the way to the coast. And the old Victorian architecture here gives an ambience of poshness which scientists aren't very used to in general.

I'm staying with one of my supervisor's post-docs, Curtis. Before I came here, he warned that his flat is crammed with things his family sent him which he didn't need, and that he has the habit of working strange hours. When I first arrived at his flat, I saw that he wasn't exaggerating about his flat being cramped. Before saying anything else, I should mention that Curtis is the epitome of a Star Wars fan. I consider myself a fan, but I do not own 98% of all Star Wars publications nor a third of the toys (Curtis' own estimate). His storeroom, where I was to put up, was filled to the ceiling with boxes of Star Wars toys. We moved about half of the stuff to his living room, just enough for me to put my inflatable mattress. As a result, his living room, which already had stuff scattered all over the place is now packed to the brim with all manner of boxes and miscellaneous objects.

When I opened the window in my room (i.e. the storeroom) to ventilate it, he said, 'Oh good, that'll let in some insects for my carnivorous plants'. Cue awkward pause from me. He does in fact have carnivorous plants hanging near the windows around his flat, although they don't look as menacing as I'd imagine. He also has a couple of tropical plants in his bathroom, with several sun-lamps permanently shining on them. This has the unintended effect of turning his bathroom into a sauna.

He then mentioned to me, 'I hope you brought some plates of your own, because I have only one plate'. I did in fact bring along with me my tupperware and cutlery, but that was more with the intention of using it to cook instant noodles than for holding its own as my only utensils. He also didn't have any dish-washing liquid ('Ive never bothered, because I never entertain visitors'), so I had to buy some to clean up after I eat.

In spite of this situation, things are actually quite fine. Curtis is a bit eccentric to say the least, but he's pretty nice, and the fact that he seems to like working late means that we don't get into each others' way so much. His flat is a bit too cramped for my tastes, but there's an endless supply of Star Wars comics and books to keep me entertained, and my inflatable mattress is actually surprisingly comfortable.

The only slight quibble left is the fact that I have to walk about 40 minutes as part of my daily commute to work, This is a bit of a drag, but at least I get plenty of exercise.

Life is good here.

I have finished 4 of my exams now....there is one more paper left which is 2 weeks away,but I guess I'll only need to study part-time for it, so to speak. The exams haven't been bad overall....apart from solid s*** physics, I think I did all that was humanly possible for the other papers. But I'd better not speak too soon...I have one more paper to go.

Anyway, on Tuesday I went to a CD launch by my pianist friend Mei Yi, who is a fellow Malaysian. It was held at a piano centre in a posh part of London near Picadilly. I was supposed to meet Jane and Bobby there so that we can discuss our concert in November along with Mei Yi, but I was the first of us to arrive, apart from Mei Yi who was already there, but she was busy greeting people for a while before she withdrew to prepare for her recital. Thus, I spent quite a while milling about aimlessly amongst the literally chattering classes, partaking in the free beverages and Pringles on offer. As this was a private event, a lot of the people there were clearly Mei Yi's friends, and from their conversation they seemed to be mostly musicians as well. Apart from musicians themselves, most of the people there were rich old people who see themselve as patrons of the arts. The musician in me appreciates this, but then the socialist in me is shouting 'Bourgeouisie!'.

Mei Yi gave a short recital, followed with a lot of congratulations from the audience and a CD signing session afterwards. I won't say much more about the recital itself, except to say that she has a solo recital at Wigmore Hall next Thursday which I am looking forward to listening.

I was however impressed with the fierce adoration that Mei Yi has among her fans. I spoke to this lady who turns up to virtually every single one of her performances in London... she told me that at an earlier concert in Wigmore Hall, Mei Yi played before two other musicians. After Mei Yi finished, the lady just left the hall because she went just to watch Mei Yi. One of the people who spoke after the short recital concluded with, '...and we look forward to seeing Mei Yi becoming one of the premier concert pianists!'.

I would be a bit more cynical than that... she's a fine pianist, but she's already 25 and there are so many other pianists out there that the competition is insanely ferocious. In the naivette of my youth, I had wanted to be a musician. My parents had given a firm 'no' to that, and I was extremely angry at the time, but now I know actual professional musicians and how they have to struggle, I have to admit that I see their wisdom.

As for Mei Yi, even if she doesn't hit the absolute prime-time, I think she has already secured for herself a great career as a concert pianist.

I had 2 exams this week: quantum mechanics on Thursday and cosmology the day after that. I shan't say more about the exams apart from the fact that I could do most of the stuff, although cosmology had a bit too many 'wordy' questions for my liking.

Immediately after the cosmology exam, as I was packing up my stuff, a guy from my class whom I didn't really know came up to me and said, 'Khee Gan, could I ask you something?'. I'm used to people coming up to me asking me questions about the courses, occasionally even from people I do not know, so I just said yes. 'Is it true that you left early in quantum yesterday?'. Usually, people leave early in exams if a)They can't do any of the questions and can't be bothered to sit there in boredom, or b) They are so good at the paper that they've finished everything well before the allocated time.

Now, I'm fairly well known in class as the guy who always asks questions in class, and my reputation for being the top student in class is quite widespread (even though technically I'm not the top student...my average lagged Xinhui's by < 1% last year). So he must have been implying that I was so smart that I can walk out of the toughest paper before time. I gave him a puzzled look and said no. He turned to his friends and said, 'See...he didn't leave early!'.

I've had earlier indications about crazy rumours circulating about my prowess. Last term, Courtney in my space systems tech class leaned over to me and asked, 'Khee Gan, out of sheer curiosity, is it true that you got an average of 97% last year?'. Now, I was pretty pleased about my 91%, but I personally think that 97% is just plain insane and out of reach. I never boast as I feel that arrogant people are just asking to be put down, but apparently in this case the fact that I don't talk about my results has just let all sorts of rumours about me spring up. Maybe there are rumours that I'm being nominated for the Nobel prize floating around as well.

Most people get gossip about relationships and stuff. I get gossip about my imaginary intellectual prowess.

I am pretty much a confirmed atheist, but sometimes it does feel as if my life is being pushed in a certain direction by circumstances beyond my control. People sometimes think I must be an absolute genius of some kind, but my answer would be: get stuck in a Catholic men-only hall, have no girlfriend despite years of trying, hardly any interest in pop culture, what's left to do?

So I went to the finals of the London International Piano Competition last Tuesday at the Royal Festival Hall. There were 3 finalists who were to play a concerto each with the London Philharmonic. By chance, all of them offered almost the same programmes (one Liszt and one Beethoven concerto each, from which the jury selected one for them to play). So Jayson-Lloyd Gilham of Australia and Frederick Neuburger of France were to play the Liszt 1st and 2nd piano concertos respectively, while Herbert Schuch of Germany was to play the Beethoven 5th.

There was certainly an element of luck involved, because it's much easier to show of one's musicality playing Beethoven, than with Liszt. Incidentally, Herbert Schuch was the German I watched at the beginning rounds with the love affair with his sustain pedal, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, so I guess his combination of exquisite tone and lavish romanticism has more than overcome any stylistic doubts (I still think his Bach was totally wrong!).

Of the two Liszt concertos, I personally prefered the 1st over the 2nd, which probably coloured my perceptions regarding the French pianist (who played the latter), because he received a very enthusiastic response from the audience, while I didn't find myself as touched by it. The Beethoven by Schuch was very well played, but again I personally felt his approach was a bit archaic in this time and day, and would be less out of place 50 years ago. Don't get me wrong, I love a lyrical and romantic approach towards interpretation, but from an objective point of view (i.e. that of the typical music critic) I wouldn't have thought he could progress through the first rounds.

In the event, Schuch in fact did win the first prize, with Neuburger getting the 2nd prize and the Gilham, the Aussie, getting the 3rd prize (I should also point out that both Neuburger and Gilham are only 18 years old, while Shuch is a comparatively more mature 26). However, I thought all three pianists were absolutely incredible, and I would have paid money to watch any one of them alone. Somehow, having to seat there and figure out who was better detracted from the enjoyment from just listening to the music.

More random stuff about the competition... after the competition, I was present at the reception. A random old chap mistook me for one of the semi-finalists who was a Chinese, despite the fact that the pianist was about 6 inches taller and didn't wear specs. I also got to speak briefly with the conductor who led the London Phil, a nice lady called Sian Edwards. When I mentioned that I was doing physics in UCL, she asked me if I knew Marshall Stoneham, one of the professors there (yes, I did know him). Apparently, Prof. Stoneham is an amateur horn player, and when Sian Edwards was a young girl, she used to go to his house to play in a string quartet... talk about a small world.

The Earl of Wessex (Prince Edward, brother of Charles) was present as the VIP, and he is WAY better looking than the Prince of Wales. While he was on stage to give out the prizes, I was horrified to see that he was sitting on a humble straight-backed chair. In Malaysia, the organisers would have been shot, hung, and then quartered if even the most minor royalty had to sit on anything less than a full-blown leather sofa armchair with a long yellow carpet leading all the way up to it.

A picture of the finalists awaiting the moment of truth: (L-R) Neuburger, Shuch and Gilham. The Chinese guy in the back is my alleged spitting image according to some 80-year old eyes.