One of my holiday treks this year was across town to visit Bunhill Fields, final resting place of two of my favorite Londoners: William Blake and Thomas Bayes. Blake is of course one of the most famous poets in the English language, but most people know him only from short poems like The Tiger [sic] (“Tyger, Tyger burning bright/ In the forests of the night/ What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry”) and Jerusalem, sung in Anglican churches each week. But most of Blake’s work is much too weird to make it into church. It is peopled...
Posted by Andrew on January 3, 2010 7:51 PM
In further London-based excitement, I was forced into something that most Londoners never get the chance to do: walking in a Tube tunnel. I was taking the Picadilly Line train down to Kings Cross, and, just after leaving the Caledonian Road station, the lights in the car dimmed and the train stopped — nothing particularly unusual. But a couple of minutes later the driver got on the loudspeaker and told us that there had been “a person under the train” (a euphemism that isn’t quite a euphemism) at Kings Cross. After a few more minutes he told us that we...
Posted by Andrew on July 6, 2009 8:06 AM
Central London featured two important events this past weekend. First was the annual Gay Pride Parade, a riotous and joyful procession of rainbow flags, pink clothing, and (mostly) ill-fitting dresses on very large people. Sadly, the only thing that marred the good-natured, family-friendly event were the stupid protesters. But it was wonderful to see that they were just ignored, or occasionally people would point at their sad and pathetic group and just laugh (there was also a much smaller, and yet more pathetic, group of National Front protesters who deserved and received even less attention). At the same time, the...
Posted by Andrew on July 5, 2009 11:48 PM
I spent over an hour this afternoon in full green consumerist frenzy, celebrating the opening (i.e., shopping at) the new London branch of the Whole Foods supermarket chain. Three floors of good food, eco-friendly (more or less; see below), tasty, not at all cheap, luckily located en route from work to home. And noticeably more Americans in one place than I’ve ever encountered here in the UK! And yet. Whole Foods may pay their staff well, but they’re an anti-union shop. They are organic and sustainable, but it’s unlikely to be good news for local small butchers and groceries. Plenty...
Posted by Andrew on June 6, 2007 11:12 PM
Yesterday evening I attended the launch party for Nature Network London, a new site run by Nature magazine, which hopes to be a web home for science and scientists in London. There are articles, blogs, discussion forums and calendars of scientific events. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I ended up meeting lots of people from Imperial — whom of course I had never met here on campus. I also met the site’s editor, Matt Brown, as well as blogger Jennifer Rohn, who also runs the science/culture site LabLit. It’s an ambitious idea, and anything that gets us out of our offices and talking...
Posted by Andrew on March 29, 2007 12:11 PM
In his comment on last week’s post, fellow physicist blogger Tommaso lets me know that he’ll be attending a meeting that we’re hosting here at Imperial College next week, Outstanding questions for the standard cosmological model. We’ll be casting a critical eye over current cosmological models and data, but I expect most of us will come to the conclusion that the whole structure is surprisingly weather-sturdy. In fact if you’re any sort of astrophysicist, particle physicist or cosmologist, Imperial Physics is likely to have a meeting for you in London over the next few months. In addition to “Outstanding Questions”,...
Posted by Andrew on March 14, 2007 10:24 PM
The view out my back window:Now let’s see if I can get into work....
Posted by Andrew on January 24, 2007 8:46 AM
There was a pretty good turnout a last night’s Café Scientifique in London. Thanks to any and all who showed up to hear my spiel about the cosmos (and, crucially, to talk back). We talked about matter & antimatter, the Cosmic Microwave Background, and even more esoteric topics like the origins of time (about which I had nothing more interesting to say than many members of the audience). Thanks especially to Daniel Glaser and Ashish Ranpura for running the Café Sci series, and to all the people at the Photographers’ Gallery. And now a deomographic question: was anyone reading this...
Posted by Andrew on January 17, 2007 12:14 AM
I can see Comet McNaught from my office window, bright in the evening sky due West over London!...
Posted by Andrew on January 10, 2007 4:58 PM
Last night I went to hear Alejandro Escovedo at St James Church in London. As an atheist/Jew, I’ve never really gotten used to churches (and this really is a church, not a performance space), can’t help but want to be respectful of the sanctity of the space. Escovedo brought along his string quintet, and the music veered between folksy quiet and rock’n’roll loud, never mind the instrumentation. Escovedo has been around a long time — he started out in the Nuns, a band that opened for the Sex Pistol’s infamous — “ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” — last...
Posted by Andrew on June 4, 2006 7:20 PM
I went to a discussion by author Bruce Sterling last night, sponsored by the weird alliance of independent tech newsletter NTK and political rag The New Statesman (more precisely, their New Media Awards), with some sort of underwriting from organic chocolatiers Green & Black’s (now rather distressingly owned by Cadbury-Schweppes), supplying lovely samples of Maya Gold (a name I do not recommend googling) to everyone. Sterling’s talk centered around the “intrinsic advantages” of the web as a tool for “sifting, sorting, searching, ranking and tagging” all sorts of information — web pages (Google), photos (Flickr) and more-or-less academic information (wikipedia)...
Posted by Andrew on May 16, 2006 8:40 PM
Sitting at the front of the top of a double-decker bus; Borough Market: chorizo & rocket sandwiches from Brindisa Not so pleasurable: no public transport on Christmas Day (even without a strike!). How am I supposed to keep my busy social schedule??...
Posted by Andrew on December 23, 2005 7:31 PM
Yesterday was the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. So it all gets better from now on (Seasonal Affective Disorder seems to me a perfectly reasonable response to the darkness). But what else? A Republican-appointed member of the federal judiciary has slammed the Intelligent Design crackpots, seeing them for the crypto-creationists they can barely hide being (although both Slate and Salon don't see it as an unalloyed victory for rationality). As usual, PZ Myers at Pharyngula has lots to say on the issue (as a biologist with much more standing than me, a mere cosmologists, at least until...
Posted by Andrew on December 22, 2005 11:44 AM
Spotted on Gloucester Road, London SW7....
Posted by Andrew on November 9, 2005 9:07 PM
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