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.