Another successful week has come and gone. I still cannot believe how quickly time is flying by. Nine months down...that's 1/4 of my time here. How insane is that?
On Thursday, upon arrival back from Barony Castle, I had a whole stack of grading to do. Oh the joys of teaching. It did actually take me all day to do, which is good because I got paid for the whole day to do it.
We also had a colloquium that afternoon in the Astronomy department. It was the first time in a colloquium with a visiting professor that I ended up really getting involved in the conversation. See, he was doing a blind optical survey looking for bursts in the data. As I have done research in blind line searches before I started asking him about his data techniques. Turns out it was atrocious, visual inspection with no signal-to-noise assessment or template. It felt pretty good to point that out and have the other professors in the department back me up. I was finally able to cogently lead an argumentative discussion and hold my ground. Anyway, I was right and had professors commending my techniques and actually asking me about it as it is a different field and they were not familiar with my analysis. It is always nice to feel professional.
The next day was pretty short, all things considered. I came in and did some quick coding in the morning before our Friday doughnuts during tea break. After that I ran down to the city centre to pick up my friend from the rail station. This is the friend from high school that is now living in York whom I visited a few months ago. It was really great to have someone visit who was really easy to please and excited to see the city, despite colleagues ragging on it back in York.
I picked him up and we went to the West End to drop stuff off at my flat before getting dressed to go out. We went to the good ol' Mr India's for some proper Glasgow curry: the #13 wine, spiced onions and poppadoms, chicken tikka garam masala and lamb saag. It's the way life should always be.
After that we went to the city centre and met up with a few of my friends from the office to go to the public ceilidh at Sloan's. It still amazes me that they can hold this ceilidh every single Friday night and still have it be super popular (there were over 100 people). Of course, about half the men were donned in kilts of various formality (some with t-shirts, others with the full get-up) and the atmosphere was friendly and relaxed. This culture does not put the same stigma on dancing that America does. The men are fully capable of dancing and it is actually more common to dance with different people throughout the night. No matter how shy they are, they are confident in their dancing ability which is very different from America. There is also a lack of competition or the need to be great. Given the self-depricating tendencies of the Scots, it is fully acceptable to screw up and laugh it off. I really like that atmosphere a lot better. We had quite a few people there, perfectly split boys and girls so it was a great time. We went back, had some tea, fought with my IKEA couch to try to make it sort of like a bed for him and crashed, ceilidh bruises and all.
The next day we got up and had a nice fry with bacon and egg rolls and tea. Great way to start the day. We then wandered our way down to the city centre and sat in the bar by the train station, which I love because it is super confusing, like an MC Escher house and is decorated like a pub one would find in Rohan. We went through a few whiskies before seeing him off. The ScotRail guards are on strike, so the police were doing their best, but the station was a bit chaotic. He got on fine though and I went back to my flat.
That night, my friend and I were getting together to have another Star Trek/curry/wine night. As she is from Switzerland she asked if we could watch the ski-jumping for Simon Ammann (I think that's how you spell it). It was super fun to watch with a Swiss, booing the Austrians, accepting a good Polish jump and pulling out the nice Swiss liqueur when he got the gold. It was great to get so involved and see it from another countries perspective. It is also great to be in the UK where they only have one advertisement each break on BBC Sport. Since that particular advertisement had Sean Connery in it, we were not arguing every time they cut to it. The NBC Olympics are insane with commercials. I do not envy American television watching. We still got our fill of Spock and McCoy that night, so it was all right in the end.
Sunday I woke up not feeling very well, so I slept in as I had not had a free Sunday in about 4 weeks. The day was filled with lots of knitting and TV-watching and catching up with friends on Skype. It was also Alan Rickman's birthday so the obligatory Galaxy Quest had to be watched as well as Die Hard. Hey, I am not going to turn down an excuse to watch his films all day.
Monday I hit the ground running on a simulation I had been asked to perform by the group. By the end of the day, I had it working and cranking away, so that felt pretty good. Of course, by now we have discovered that the code I was referring to at one point was flawed, so we have had to go back and re-run some things, but nothing that I cannot handle. Today we had one of our journal clubs and called in a few ex-Glaswegians to discuss a new paper on probability analysis, questioning whether a gaussian was the optimal noise distribution for simulation. It turned out to be a great discussion though the connection to the others was more like tin cans and string. For next time we are thinking that short wave radios or gravitational wave antennae would be the best mode of communication.
On that note, I better get ready for my meeting in a few minutes. Up for this weekend, flatwarming party, meeting up with a friend from Edinburgh on Sunday and of course, more world-class research. Ta for now!
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