jonny goes to england

seen at a building site.

TimeOut London (a large event/culture magazine for London region) reviewed the street I’m living on as part of their East End special. Now what is surprising is that they chose this road; when I walk down to my flat all I can see are dirty streets, bleak project houses, unappealing shops and bored guys hanging around. However TimeOut managed to describe Globe Road in a positive way — you would nearly want to visit it. Interesting.

They conclude with

Grubby, intriguing and historic, this friendly but edgy area is a worthwhile prospect for those who can see the beauty through the grime and get to the area’s warm heart and lively soul.

Am Sonntag ging ich an das Meltdown Festival beim Southbank Centre an der Thames. Bei diesem Festival wird jedes Jahr eine Band als “artistic director” ausgewaehlt, und diese kann dann das gesamte Lineup bestimmen. Dieses Jahr war Massive Attack an der Reihe. Ich sah jedoch nur den Auftritt von Massive Attack und keine anderen Acts. Sie lieferten eine fantastische Show mit einem interessanten Display im Hintergrund. Zuerst dachte man es sei nur eine Art Lampe, mehr und mehr entpumpte diese sich jedoch als hochaufloesender Display.

Hier ein Clip, welcher warscheinlich nicht dieselbe Stimmung rueber bringt (ich habe hier keinen Ton, deshalb kann ichs nicht sagen):

Yesterday, I was having a quick dinner at Ping Pong Dim Sum at the south bank branch. Obviously, they serve a big variety of dim sums — that is steamed little pockets filled with different Chinese ingredients. There are buns, puff pastry, dumplings and lotus leaves as wrappers. Buns are basically normal pastry, puff pastry are very soft blown up things (man I really lack the words to describe that!), and dumplings resemble transparent fish skins in looks and taste (just more sticky and less delicious I guess!). The different wrappers can then either be steamed, fried or baked, and get served in typical bamboo boxes (see picture). You order about 3-5 different dim sums for a good meal, each of them around £3.50. The variety in food you eat makes the whole meal enjoyable and quite different to a usual dinner. Modern interior and quick service, certainly good for quick dinners.

It’s summer now. The only place you notice that it’s summer is the tube though. From wikipedia:

In summer, temperatures on parts of the London Underground can become very uncomfortable due to its deep and poorly ventilated tube tunnels: temperatures as high as 47 °C (117 °F) were reported in the 2006 European heat wave. Posters may be observed on the Underground network advising that passengers carry a bottle of water to help keep cool.

In the last weeks lots of stuff happened, most of it not really noteworthy though. I started writing a new paper .. perhaps in an another post I can explain what I’m actually doing with it

Tomorrow I’ll be going to the Southbank Centre Meltdown festival where Massive Attack will be playing!

Apparently, as I heard through news stories (which I can’t find anymore) and now saw with my own eyes yesterday night, it’s not allowed anymore to wear hats in (certain?) london pubs/bars/clubs! Due to “security reasons”. So that they can also completely monitor your face indoors, wearing hats is not allowed anymore. When will hats be banned from the streets?

Funny enough, just recently BBC reported that a study showed that the massive spending on CCTV cameras failed to cut crime in UK.

Only 3% of London street robberies have been solved using security cameras

What’s their smart plan? Spending even MORE on CCTV.

Guys, you don’t cut crime by security cameras just like you don’t cut bread by looking at it.

While I’m certainly not a fan of US food I found these two spirit and wine jelly at breakfast quite funny. One has tequila the other champagne and I think you just spread it like jam on a bread .. tasted weird but not bad!

Finally, I’m back from my trip to Tucson, Arizona. For once my flights went smoothly without any delays or anything! I went there from Friday to Monday and it felt like I’ve been away for two weeks (which is good!).

The city itself, Tucson, is not very flattering .. resembles more of a desert boot camp than a city. However, our hotel, built on a mountain (they call it canyon), was very nicely situated and was generous in all regards.

The workshop I attended was co-located at the bigger PLDI conference with a couple of hundred participants from all over the world. My talk went fine and I met some nice students from Italy, Germany and US. Here, a still empty room.

Apart from that I went to the Sonoran Desert and was lying at the pool while small, cute hummingbirds were hovering above my head attacking some flowers! Unfortunately, I didn’t make pictures of them direclty!

Oh right, and I photographed cacti. Many cacti. More specifically, most of them are of the Saguaro species which basically consists of a large phallic (!), monolithic trunk.

The whole valley and canyon is covered in large cacti, some are over 15m high and 150 years old! Here is one of them directly in front of my balcony. The flowers on top are the state flowers of Arizona:

And here a few more from the desert:

On my way back, our plane was avoiding a huge thunderstorm around New York which gave us a totally surreal and amazing view on the storm from above and the outside. Every other second lightnings lit up the huge clouds from the inside and made them look like gigantic, deformed lamps.

Also, I found a nice iPodomat in Houston! Unfortunately, it didn’t accept my credit cards for some reason .. so I couldn’t buy a nano for $140

Here is the flickr set for some more pictures.

Hello. I’m in Arizona and it’s warm. I nearly missed my connecting flight in Houston and probably made a record to run from one Terminal E, through US border patrol, scanning left and right index finger, signing documents, collecting baggage, rechecking baggage, queuing for security check, taking belt and shoes off, putting belt and shoes on, running to the terminal train, driving to terminal B, running down the hallway to my gate to just in time catch the flight to Tucson. However, my effort was rewarded by a terribly boring flight. I guess Texas or Arizona does not make a lot of money out of sight seeing. Not to forget about the baby beside me who just learned to speak and said “nana nana” to everything for 2.5 hours.
Anyway, I’m in a fantastic hotel, spent some time on the pool and today at the PLAS workshop where I gave a talk. What you see above in the picture is the view from the lobby on a canyon out of huge windows. More pics are on the way when I’m back.

One quick fact on the weather. It’s so warm here that I’m unable to eat breakfast outside at 7 (!) in the morning because it’s simply too hot.

Onion Jam. Two words of horror and I had it for lunch. You buy a sandwich with “Ham & Cheese”, but what they don’t tell you is that it contains onion jam! Think of onion jam as sugary confiture with lots of onions cut into ..

In other news, I’m flying to Arizona over the weekend. However, I ended up — in an evil twist — to give the talk at the workshop on Sunday! Title of the talk is Lagrange Multipliers and Maximum Information Leakage in Different Observational Models. Wish me luck.