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

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

And has a baby boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've never felt so stupid in my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A warning from the manual of my new MacBook laptop:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Princeton is shaping up to be really interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
















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

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

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



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







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



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




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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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