Astonishingly, the picture to the left shows not a flower growing out of a stem, or even candy floss or the hair of a back-combed terrier, but just ice. This ice is actually growing out of the plant stem in the sense that the mechanism by which it forms is roughly as follows.
98% of Polish people are national heroes, the other 2% are pianists
This was one of the opening lines of the guy providing entertainment for the conference dinner of the meeting I attended in Warsaw last week. The guy was an extremely accomplished Polish pianist, with a self-deprecating sense of humour. He interspersed jokes with stuff like playing the bit from Beethoven’s 9th symphony called ‘Ode to […]
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Keep the volume down
I am an enjoying a conference in Warsaw – the 17th International Conference on Crystal Growth and Epitaxy. We must be enjoying it, a lady from a neighbouring table asked 6 other attendees and me to keep the volume down – it seems we were talking and laughing too loudly – in a beer hall […]
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Summer revision
Its early August, and the beginning of the next academic year seems an infinite amount of time away, but the two months will go quickly. This summer I am doing what I wanted to do last summer but didn’t have time for, which is to add a couple of optional assignments to my second-year computing […]
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Crystals & Cancer
I am currently between conferences (Barcelona a week ago, and Warsaw next week), and so I am working on a paper. It is on a model of crystallisation via a process that has many steps. I have a general model of this sort of process and am making predictions for how this differs from when […]
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Xuxos for breakfast
I have just got back from a meeting in Barcelona. My hotel was just round the corner from a local bakery. I got in the habit of having a cafe solo (Spanish espresso), orange juice, water (it was 30+C and very humid at midday), and a xuxo for breakfast. Xuxo is pronounced approximately shooshoo, and […]
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