Thursday 8 November 2007

To infinity, and beyond!

As requested, I have now added some FO pics to the previous entry and to Ravelry. No pics of the yarn until the weekend though, it's just too dark to take decent photos in the evenings, and I don't have enough high-powered light sources in this flat. Damn those energy saving bulbs.

Last night's entertainment was all in the realm of space-time. We started off with another lecture at the Royal Society, which purported to be on the role of infinity in physics. Right up my street. When the talk was introduced it was explained that it was in fact going to be about reductionism versus holism in the philosophy of science, again concepts with which I am familiar. But my god, I couldn't understand a word the (undeniably very clever) speaker was on about. I have never heard such an interesting topic made so unfathomably dull. To give some flavour of this, his slides (and he said he'd never used slides before - quite how that's possible in this age of powerpoint is beyond me) were just projected pages from a textbook, all solid paragraphs of text and equations. And there were handouts! Dear me, these lectures are meant to be entertaining and informative, not boring and unintelligible. Certainly they should not require handouts of pure mathematical formulae to understand.

Slightly piqued at having sat through that, we agreed to meet people to go to the cinema, without much idea of what we were going to see or why. It was Stardust, and I was dubious about going to see something that I only knew of as a fairy story. I was wrong, it was brilliant! Genuinely funny, intelligent and not for children. It didn't divert from the standard romantic formula, but it was all so clever and the cast were wonderful (especially Mark Williams and Robert de Niro). I came out, well, glowing like a star. This was all explained by the credits which revealed it to be a Neil Gaiman story - why I wasn't aware of this before I don't know, as I love his work. Definitely go see.

Tonight I am in making a lemon cake (the Nigella loaf cake again) for the lovely Lotta to see her through her weekend of horrible revision - good luck hun!  I am greatly contented when watching the Brownian motion of icing sugar particles suspended in hot lemon juice, stood in a cloud of citrus smell.

Incidentally I think I am obsessed with the craft thing, someone on the radio just mentioned "having a crafty cigarette" and my immediate thought was to wonder how they made that...

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