I don't quite remember writing up a paper to be such hard work. I am now writing up what was officially my first semester project which had overflowed beyond the first semester and had been put on hold for several months. I had written up papers before, most for most of those I essentially just wrote up the method and a brief summary of the results, leaving the detailed interpretation for my supervisor(s). So I guess it is progress that I understand more about the results than my advisors do. Nevertheless, that is not a very reassuring thought when I'm cracking my head trying to interpret the data.

I think I know understand why Princeton requires us to submit at least one paper before general exams. The process of writing and trying to present the work in a coherent manner is a very effective method of revealing deficiencies in my own understanding. While actually doing the project, my understanding is a vague and jumbled blob. Actually writing it and having to justify to the referee and scientific community is a great way of beating my own comprehension into shape.

I'm still halfway through the first draft, and the week has probably been the most concentrated amount of work I've ever done, averaging 14-15 hours in the office a day. But the thought of getting the paper submitted and fulfilling 1/3 of my generals requirements (the other two is that I pass my courses and oral exam) is a driving motivation. The feeling of actually getting concrete things done is also a very welcome change from the feeling of helplessness and ignorance in my first months here, when I really did fear I will get kicked out (as it transpires, a very common sentiment among graduate students in Princeton).

Nevertheless, it's slightly annoying to realise that after the first draft, there will still be the process of revising and editing the paper (probably extensively) to make it more coherent and take into account my advisors' comments, adding in references etc before submission at some point.

In the meantime, J. who is 2nd semester advisor taps his fingers at my laughable progress in his project...

I just struggled out of bed at 11am to give a talk at lunch, and afterwards I noticed this article in the BBC:

Late risers unite in Denmark
By Chris Morris
BBC News, Denmark

If you find it hard to get up in the morning, don't despair - you're not
lazy, you're just genetically programmed that way, says the B-Society in
Denmark.

I have still got a rather nasty bruise on my shin at the moment after the
flawed execution of my latest elaborate plan - to make sure I did not miss
the dreaded early morning flight. I was sleeping rather fitfully in the
spare room downstairs, trying to avoid waking up the rest of the house,
when the time ticked around to 4.30.

First the phone alarm on the bedside table chirruped. I soon dealt with
that. But then one minute later the alarm clock cunningly hidden on the
other side of the room burst into life. The trick is to place an obstacle -
in this case my son's rickety wooden rocking horse - in your path, making
immediate access difficult.

The idea, obviously, is that by the time you find the blasted clock you are
awake. The trouble was, in this case, in my bleary-eyed trance, I forgot
about the horse altogether and crashed into it at some speed. Searing pain,
followed by muffled obscenities, left me lying in a heap on the floor, the
alarm clock still beeping impatiently. I made the flight, the sunrise looked
lovely, but boy do I hate mornings.

But it is OK. Now I know it is not my fault. I am a B-person. A B-person -
as opposed to an A-person - genetically pre-disposed to operate better and
to be more alert later in the day.
Denmark it seems is full of B-people. So where better to form the B-society?
Six months after it was set up, it already boasts several thousand members.
Now it is campaigning hard for businesses to sign up to its B-certification
list. "We're calling," the society proclaims in its manifesto, "for an
uprising against the tyranny of early rising."

Mmm, sounds good.

But how does it work in practice?

Rush-hour in Copenhagen seems relatively sedate to me - it is certainly not
central London on a wet Monday morning. But the glazed looks on the faces of
grumpy commuters are disturbingly familiar.

So, time to find some B-pioneers. One strong cup of coffee later and I was
on my way to meet Stephen Alstrup who runs his own B-certified company.
Empty tube trains are one of the joys for Denmark's B-people
By the time he gets to his train station the platform is empty and so are
most of the seats on his commuter train. "I'm useless early in the morning,"
he says cheerfully. "All I can do is drink coffee, and stare into space."
"People used to get up early because they had to feed the animals. But I
haven't got any cows or chickens, so I can sleep late."

And when we get to Stephen's office, that is empty too - apart from one
member of staff who has been there most of the night and is just leaving,
and the company's only A-person who actually enjoys the early start. The
rest of them arrive when they choose - any time up to 3.30pm or so - each to
their own rhythm. It is a small hi-tech company and Stephen needs brains
which are working at full speed.
It used to be called disorganised but not any more. "Everybody gains," he
says, "they're here when they're fully awake, and the business benefits."
More confusing for me is the guy who works to a 25 hour clock. If he is in
at 10 today, it will be 11 tomorrow, then 12 - you can get the general idea.
I do not know where his cycle had got to when we called at the office but
there was certainly no sign of him by midday.

It used to be called disorganised, but not any more, not in Denmark. His
body clock is just different. And it is not just businesses which are
getting in on the act. Are you a teenager who cannot get out of bed in the
morning? Or a parent who never quite gets the kids to school on time?

Fear not - the Danes may have the solution: B-classes.

>From next year a school in Copenhagen will offer classes which start later
in the day - at 10 instead of eight. It is likely to prove popular.

Even the government seems to like the idea.

Work-life balance is a big political issue in Denmark, Families Minister
Carina Christensen tells me. And B-philosophy fits right in with the need
for a flexible labour force. When I confess that I think I am a B-person,
she gives me a comforting smile. "Don't worry," she says, "some people might
think you're lazy - but there's more to it than that."

Well, I hope so. The B-society and its founder Camilla Kring are certainly
convinced that they are on to a winner. "It's a 24/7 society," she says, as
we sit in a park and watch some swans... swanning around. "Our institutions
have got to move with the times." Quite so. Which means the choice should be
yours.

As one famous Dane once said: "To B or not to B?" In modern life, that
really is the question.

One of the most beautiful articles I've read on music. It's a very long article, but well worth the read.

I'm amazed that Joshua Bell can play the Bach Chaconne on a Strad and hardly have anyone notice.

Joshua Bell plays in the Washington DC Metro.

Before starting university, I worked for a month as a musician in a hotel cafe, and I used to be hurt when people wouldn't even notice that I was there. I was playing sappy popular music arrangements, so it was mostly background muzak to many people.

In the summer before coming over to the US, I had planned to spend the summer working as a busker in the London Underground. However, that required registration and an audition before being a licensed busker, so I sent in my application in May...and they only asked me to come for an audition in October, well after I had arrived in Princeton.

Pictures from my Chile trip are online. Not that many, since it wasn't really a leisure trip....

I was goofing off in my room yesterday afternoon, having just gotten up at 3pm after a good night's observing. Suddenly, the room began to rumble and shake. I looked out the window to see if there was some large truck driving by, and then I realised that I was at the top of a mountain with just narrow roads. There are no trucks up here.

This was an earthquake.

However, from the fact that I was still on my feet and things weren't falling off my table yet, it couldn't have been any more than 3 or 4 on the Richter scale, so I didn't bother leaving the room.

Still, it was my first direct experience with seismic activity. (My indirect experience came from the fact that a beach-side house I once lived in was hit by the 2005 tsunami).

Magnificent desolation.

Standing on the edge of a cliff high in the Atacama desert, with the sun beating down on me from the cloudless blue sky, I can almost feel my skin burning under the merciless rays. A cool wind howls past, offering some respite from the relentless heat. I had never realised there were so many different hues of brown and red, the palette colouring the mountains stretching out across the horizon. Mighty as they are, these mountains are no more than the southern foothills of the mighty peaks of the Andes far to the north.

Apart from a few telescope domes and small dormitories, the landscape of Las Campanas is an alien one, implacably hostie to human life with its heat and scarcity of water. Humanity's presence here is no more than a small community of people dedicated to servicing the observatory to support visiting astronomers, but even they work only in one-week shifts.

At night, I am reminded even more of the fragility of life, as the immensity of the cosmos is spread out at night. In the clear night sky, unspoiled by water vapour and the lights of civilisation, one can see the Milky Way stretching from horizon to horizon, and thousands of stars across the entire firmament. It tingles my spine to comprehend the vastness of the universe, and also a sense of gratitude that I have the opportunity to do astronomy.

Being around professors who have discovered so much in their field, it just occurred to me to wonder: how are people supposed to refer to theories named after themselves? How is Jim Gunn supposed to refer to the Gunn-Peterson effect?

Today, Princeton Men's Volleyball Club had our first home game, against Seton Hall University. Our team plays against other institutions around the area, mostly small colleges and university in the New Jersey area.

The last time I played competitive volleyball was over a year ago, and hardly touched a volleyball since then. I play as libero, rotating the position with Dave between sets. I managed to get some good passes in since none of the opposing players served me any floaters, the style of serve which I am utterly crap at receiving. Ironically, we scored quite a few points from dumping floaters on to their libero, who seemed as inept at dealing with them as I would have.

The game fluctuated back-and-forth, and a lot of our lost points were from silly mistakes, e.g. service errors. We had to go to 5 sets before we got the victory, and I felt that I had a lot more of my game to work on, especially keeping calm when dealing with floaters, and also my reading of the game.

Our next game is on Tuesday, which is pretty rushed.

I am doing a new semester project this semester on primordial black holes with Jerry Ostriker, one of the most senior figures in astrophysics. I was discussing some physics of the early universe with Jerry, and we tried to look up some stuff in a cosmology textbook written by Jim Peebles, another senior statesman in astrophysics who works across the road in the Physics Department here in Princeton.

We couldn't seem to find what we were looking for, and then suddenly Jerry picks up his phone and calls up Peebles. I was speechless as Jerry started quizzing Peebles on some subtleties of hydrodynamics in the early universe.

After several minutes of conversation on the phone, Jerry turns to me and dead-pans: 'Well, we didn't get very far'.

I will be going to Chile in March! By a happy coincidence in timing, I will be going there for both an observing run (on a sample of magnetically active brown dwarfs) and a summer school (recall that it'll be summer in the southern hemisphere) on the theoretical aspects of the Atacama Cosmology Telescope project, which aims to measure the small-scale fluctuations on the cosmic microwave background.

The observing run will be at the Carnegie Institute's observatory in Las Campañas, about 200km north of the capital Santiago, in the Atacama desert (the driest desert in the world...I'd better bring a small bottle of Evian!). Incidentally, Chile must be one of the most one-dimensional countries in the world, in that one can describe most locations in the country in terms of north or south.

We have four nights at Las Campañas from the 13th to the 17th of March, and I am pretty excited at the chance to learn some observational skills. Now here's the interesting part: since our last night is the 17th, we will finish on the morning of the 18th. I then have to travel back to Santiago, where the summer school starts on the morning of the 19th. So I have less than a day to change from a night shift to a normal day shift, which should be interesting.

I won't have much time to do actual sightseeing apart from a couple of days after the summer school, but it should be a fun and very educational experience. I can't wait...

The new term starts in the coming Monday. It's been amazing how much I can get done when I can work at my own leisure without classes and seminars to attend. Nevertheless the reason I came over to this side of the Atlantic was to take extra classes and learn material I otherwise would not learn, so I'd better not complain.

Since getting back from my winter break, the past month has mostly been about doing the take-home final for my stellar structure class, and after that working to try to get something done in my semester project from the last term.

The take-home final had an interesting problem on the larger-than-expected radii on extra-solar planets close to their host stars. It was obviously highly simplified for us to work on, but the probable answer is that the atmosphere of the planet has a high metal content which increases the opacity. Hence, like a bubble with a thicker skin, it puffs up more than it would otherwise.

The flip side was that this problem intrigued me so much that I didn't pay as much attention to some of the other problems on the exam, which pulled my final grade down to a B. It's the first B I've received since I started university education, but at least better than I initially feared when I was trying to settle into grad school.

It is easy for an astrophysicist to gain inspiration in his work. He merely needs to step out and look at the night sky.


...until I stepped out tonight and got hit full on the face by the -20 Centigrade wind.

A news article I saw on the BBC today:

Inventor of instant noodles dies

The inventor of instant noodles, Momofuku Ando, has died in Japan, aged 96, of a heart attack.

Mr Ando was born in Taiwan in 1910 and moved to Japan in 1933, founding Nissin Food Products Co after WWII to provide cheap, quick food for the masses. His most famous product, Cup Noodle, was released in 1971.

Its taste and ease of preparation - adding hot water to dried noodles in a waterproof polystyrene container - have made it popular around the world. Mr Ando said the inspiration for his product came when he saw people lining up to buy bowls of hot ramen noodle soup at a black market stall during the food shortages after World War II.

Noodles in space

He developed his first instant noodles, Chicken Ramen, in 1958. The product came out as Japan recovered from the ravages of WWII and began a long period of economic expansion. It was the masterstroke of providing a waterproof polystyrene container for the noodles that made his Cup Noodle an instant success in 1971.

Nissin has led the global instant noodle industry since then, selling 85.7 billion servings every year, according to Agence France Presse. His firm also developed a version of Cup Noodle for Japanese astronauts to eat on the space shuttle Discovery in 2005.

In 1999, Mr Ando opened a museum in Osaka devoted to instant noodles. He retired as Nissin's chairman in 2005. Japanese newspapers and businesspeople have been paying tribute to Mr Ando. "He was a self-made man who developed an epoch-making instant noodle product and spread it to all corners of the world," Akio Nomura, chairman of the Osaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told Kyodo news agency.

Mr Ando remained active until just days before his death, giving a New Year's speech to Nissin employees and having a lunch of Chicken Ramen with company executives.

I salute you, sir, for bringing sustenance to impoverished university students worldwide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*To be continued*

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

Orange. Ugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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