Liverpool & Physics

Received last minute information that something awesome was going down Tuesday evening at the University of Liverpool.

In my world, you can't call yourself a proper scholar if you pass up an opportunity to listen to this guy (or any of the other superstars of contemporary science). For those not familiar with the superstars, here is a link to my favorite panel discussion with my favorite science superstars, Sci Fi author, and more (Part 1, Part 2). In my opinion, Part 2 has the best parts of the entire discussion session.

Liverpool is a stunning city! It used to be known for sketchy alleyways and massive crime. Local law enforcement and citizens have done a wonderful job cleaning the place up and making it a beautiful city to visit.

Check it out...

If you read any Terry Pratchett, you may be familiar with this abandoned Post Office. In particular, I suggest reading the book "Going Postal," then watch the movie.

Leaf on Bold Street, where I received great service and pretty good food too. The coffee was perfect.

The bombed out church. The exterior walls are still holding strong, just no roof or interior... or windows. They show movies off the interior back wall sometimes. How great is that?!

I can't remember what this wild monstrosity is called, but it's a church the size of the SuperDome and the locals refer to it as the Wigwam. 

Stayed in a hostel overnight, Hatter's Hostel on Mount Pleasant. I can't say I'm a hostel fan, but one look at this ominous, grand exterior and I knew I had to give it a go.

I had the privilege of meeting employees on every shift for the 24 hours I was in Liverpool. Every employee was extremely nice and, in my opinion, the second best feature of the hostel. First best was the free WIFI. 

You would think that the beds with a roof overhead were the best features. But let's be honest here, this is a hostel. I was grateful for a secure, dry place to crash for 3 hours, but the bedbugs, plastic sheets & duvet, and the 7 other sleepers made it a bit difficult to fully relax. It was all worth it, though, when I eased myself into the top bunk and was lulled to sleep by the late-night rain. At least I slept so soundly that I didn't notice the bedbugs until I left. 

The ambiance was exactly what you would expect from a hostel. Private little nooks in the commons to curl up in and read while sipping 24-hour-free coffee & tea. As well as scary hallways with only one working light ("working" = "flickering").

The walk to my room was no picnic.

But my whole reason for being in Liverpool was to listen to Lawrence Krauss. He was in London the day before, shooting a movie with some other people, and the head of the student Humanist society at Liverpool University asked if Lawrence would speak at the university before he left back to the states. To everyone's surprise, super-cool-awesome-guy Lawrence said yes.

I don't know if there will be a video of his talk. Since his attendance was so last-minute, the hosting societies didn't have a lot of time to set everything up proper. He mostly answered questions and discussed his perspectives on physics today and where it could go (or not go) in the future. I had the opportunity to thank him for lending his voice to a specific education decision in Texas that finally came to a close the day before I left for Liverpool. Lawrence laughed, graciously accepted my thank you, then filled in the rest of the young, Liverpoolian audience on Texas current events. 

I was second row, center. For a change, no one blocked my view of the main event.

After the talk and pictures made to make everyone look uncomfortable, we went out for a bite to eat. Many of the other students preferred liquid suppers on this particular occasion.

This place was so posh, that even the lady's restroom was stunning. It was also covered with framed pastels of half naked women bathing. Hmmm.

The female side of the room.

The male side of the room.

At one point Lawrence had to leave for a Skype meeting. After a bit a student noticed that Lawrence left his pint of ale half finished. It was at that moment that I realized the writers of the Big Bang Theory are not that far from the mark. At least 10 physics students shared in Lawrence's leftover libations just for the sake of sharing a bit of DNA.

This was all possible because of the fanatical work of the Physics & Humanist societies at the University of Liverpool. Thank you!

Here are a couple other different perspectives on the Lawrence In Liverpool Experience:

Malburn

Ed

The Forest Hermitage

Woke up bright and early to a full moon at 7am. Brewed some delicious coffee and hopped on a bus headed toward a Buddhist hermitage. In particular, The Forest Hermitage in Warwick. Saturday was the last day of Vassa, the annual 3 month Rain Retreat. The monks take a vow of stationary. For the three 'rainy' months of summer, they do not travel. They pick a location (this year it was the Hermitage) and they stay there for 3 months. We celebrated with prayers, songs, food, and a word from the head Sangha monk. His message was that everything begins and ends with the 5th precept. To break that is to change your life instantaneously.

 Magpies!

 Entering the Hermitage.

 So many people.

All lined up to offer food to the three monks and one nun living at the hermitage.

Had a lovely lunch of, well, EVERYTHING, followed by a wild discussion on health care and politics in an open-air pagoda in the front gardens of the hermitage with a Scottish historian, an English laborer, and a Chinese businessman.

Third Week-Term 1

Monday Conversations:

Q. Opportunities do they exist?
A. Possibility.

Q. When is something a missed opportunity?
A. Daniel Dennett says it's only an opportunity if you had knowledge of it. If you didn't know, you didn't have the freedom to make the choice. Without that freedom, the opportunity never existed for you.

Q. So you like to jog?
A. Acclimation. Wearing myself down to exhaustion makes me vulnerable to the environment. It is in that state of vulnerability that I must rely on my environment to support me and build me back up. By doing this, I acclimatize much quicker and more fully. The assumption here, of course, is that it is a good thing to acclimatize.

Q. What is campanology?
A. Having a wickedly good time with bells.

The Warwick Bell Ringing Society meets at St. John Baptist Church, Honiley. We walked up on it at night, through a graveyard. Beautiful.

Ringing the bells! 

 The view from inside the bell tower.

After a couple hours of bell ringing, we bus over to The Case Is Altered pub in Five Ways. This isn't my photo, but we arrived at night so no photo opportunity.

Super old world pub. Cash only, fire place, low ceilings, perfect.

After drinking, billiards :)

Take a gander at my Monday :)

Tuesday Conversation:

You know when you watch a movie and it makes you want to go out and buy a bottle of red wine, smoke a cigarette, and take a stroll down High St. until you reach the park and you just have to touch the leaves of every plant bordering the moss covered stone path, kick the tops off dandelions, then brush the hair from your eyes a moment before you make eye contact with the most perfect croissant in the shop window, and as you indulge in the pastry butteriness, you must, absolutely must high-five the granite counter? That's Blue Jasmine.

Wednesday Conversations:

Q. How'd you do on the economic assignment?
A. Really well. I think I'm starting to get it.
Q. Really?
A. Well... I missed every answer, but I really think I'm getting the hang of it.

Q. How'd you do on the programming assignment?
A. Really well. I think I'm starting to get it.
Q. Really?
A. Well... I haven't written a single successful command, but I really think I'm getting the hang of it.

Forget it, I'm going for a walk.

 Chestnut trees (aka "crackers"). Children everywhere collect them - the bigger the better - drill a hole through the middle, tie a string and swing them around to try and "crack" the opponent's swing. In other words, a game perfectly designed for the big brother to win and to create a life-long hatred in little sisters everywhere.

Thursday Conversations:

Q. What do you do when you're new in town and everyone you know is also new in town?
A. Schedule a last-minute meet up at the local pub for drinks, chats, smirks, and pool.

This is the night I found out that at least two people in my graduate group have been too intimidated by me in class to ever talk with me. What is up with that?

Friday.....

I slept in then spent the rest of the day talking with H.A.L.
H.A.L. only had one thing to say to my computer commands all day.

Scones

I have not yet tasted a scone. I want to. With the abundance of cafes on campus, it's a wonder I haven't yet. I love our homemade scones, but I'm pretty confident they're different from the scones here. However, I must point out that I loath Starbucks' idea of what a "scone" should taste & look like. They make triangle cupcakes, not scones.

But I digress....

With a cold front in full force and spotty rain, I donned my wellies, and hoofed it to the grocery store for a couple ingredients for a batch of scones.

Oh. My. Sconeness. The self-rising flour, baking soda, and real European butter made the absolutely BEST dough I have ever experienced when making scones. I also used high-quality vanilla with vanilla beans in the bottle and soy milk (slightly sweeter than US soy milk).

Fantastic batch. I chose my method of forming the dough into a circle then slicing it like a pie, as opposed to the UK method of cutting out circles with a cutter. My reasoning, the less you mess with a dough, the more flaky and soft the results. Using a circle cutter requires picking up the remains and reshaping them to cut out more. This can toughen the dough.

They are as delicious as they look.

Second Week-Term 1

Monday Warm-day:
Weather report this morning warned of the season's first **Frost** by the end of the week.

Attended the first meeting for Warwick Improvised Theatre Society (WITS). I tried to channel the teachings I remembered from Luna (1st acting instructor) and my theater friends. I used the space, freed my body parts, tried to keep awareness of 'safety zones', invaded people's space, and generally tried to be as foolish feeling as possible. We went for drinks afterward at the Dirty Duck, on campus. I might join up and attend their Thursday session, too. Campus has bars, but I'm not about to drink that beer. It's about the quality of Miller Light.

At this university you have to pay for every club membership and be on the official Warwick Uni registry in order to play with the society kids.

Tuesday Spa:

Road the bus to Leamington Spa for a day in the gardens. Queen Victoria used this town apparently for royal retreats, etc. Many of the houses & buildings here are a few hundred years old and still contain the servant's bells in the basements, where their rooms were traditionally located.

I mostly spent time in Jephson Gardens and Mill Gardens. Enough chit-chat, enjoy the view :)
Click on the pictures for a larger view.

St. John's Church. It was closed.

Leamington Spa Town Hall. How cool is this!

Town Hall

Oversized statue of Queen Victoria in front of Leamington Spa Town Hall.

Lionhead fountain at one of the entrances to the park.

Lionhead fountain up close.

The trees were so wildly tall. The building in the back is the Royal Pump Rooms & Bath. 

Yep, authentic old-school turkish baths tapped into local hot springs for the rich and dirty.

Found a Redwood here. Very cool.

Strike a pose, sir. You're about to be immortalized.... again.

I wonder what's going through his head? 

"How is thought possible? I'm made of stone. Oh look, a cookie!"

The Butterfly gardens.

This Japanese *** tree contracted a root fungus early in its sapling years. By the time they detected it, they had no choice, but to cut it down. Rather than throw all those lovely ginormous branches away, they made them, and the stump, into stunning benches with different engravings for the park. The other side of this trunk is a bench.

To give some perspective, these leaves are half my height. They're growing on the banks of the River Leam. 

Under the leaves.

The other bank.

The leaves are beginning to fall. The trees are changing.

River Leam, early autumn.

A lovely mixture of mediaeval & modern. 

The Royal Pump Rooms & Bath.

....and I caught site of these two lovely gems just before leaving. 

1. "Munchies" is a sandwich shop two doors down from "Planet Bong".

2. An employee of Munchies has now offered up another submission for Apostrophe. 

Wednesday Snoooze:
I slept in an extra 30 minutes this morning. Arrived on campus 1:30 hours early, slept for the first hour. Attended a 2 hour lecture on basic statistics (for the economic students), slept for about an hour off-and-on throughout. STILL asked more questions than the other students (save one) and even got some research talk in with the professor. At one point in my lecture nap I actually dreamt about sleeping.

I went straight home to nap, then couldn't sleep for lack of a snuggle buddy. I changed tactics and did a slow yoga routine to stretch my back, hamstrings, quads, calves, and shoulders. The entire back side of my body must have been all scrinched up I guess, because the practice felt wonderful.

Thursday Thinking:
CCCCold. FFFFront.
This is my long day of the week. I'm on campus first thing in the morning until possibly well after dark. Today was old and new theories which kept me just interested enough not to fall asleep. I really don't mean to, I just don't do well sitting for hours at a time not writing, not typing, not asking questions, while being lulled by soft talking English professors. For bucksakes I gotta do something! Which has always made me wonder about my long-winded meditation sessions. Am I reaching greater depths of consciousness or just falling asleep?

Met up with another student society tonight, WASH. I forget what it stands for. The meeting was at Terrace Bar on campus. Same beers at the Dirty Duck, so no thank you. We played pool, they drank beers, I enjoyed the rare soda-POP. Everyone seemed more interested in pointing out the differences between my American terms and their English terms.

English pool: 3 types of balls; red, yellow, and the 8 ball.
American pool: 1-7 solid balls, 9-15 striped balls, and the 8 ball.

English pool: you "pot" the ball.
American pool: you "sink" the ball.

English pool: potting the cue ball is a "foul".
American pool: sinking the cue ball is a "scratch".

English pool: a foul earns the other person two consecutive shots.
American pool: a scratch earns you limited free placement of the cue ball.