Rowan Martin-Hughes

My thesis just keeps growing...

Outside of the game itself, badminton on a Wednesday night is entertaining.

For starters there's the constant misunderstanding about our permanent booking which should be at the same time and place every week. Looking over recent weeks in the bookings to try and figure out why our court was double booked again this week, it appears we were given a different amount of time, different court, and different starting time every week for the past month and scheduled for the next month as well. Keeps one on one's toes!


Then there's the rock-climbers. We play more or less next to the rock climbing wall, and quite frequently someone falls off as their precipitous attempts to clamber upside-down to the ceiling fail. As a result they swing alarmingly out over the court before they get lowered gently to the ground, and every time I feel for a second like we're being boarded by pirates. Cutlasses at the ready.


On the other side of us, martial arts occurs. For a while there's the distractingly silly looking warm-ups, and then they move onto the business of shouting, invariably just as one prepares to serve, sounding (much as intended) like a barbarian horde has appeared from the back of the gym and is about to charge. Hilariously, a little kid seems have joined the otherwise older group, and every time they would do something which needed to be punctuated by a yell, the kid could be heard... always a second or two later than everyone else, but twice as loud to make up for it.

My thesis feels like trying to explain a hypercube (a 4 (or more) dimensional extrusion of a cube). You can draw a projection into 2D space but it doesn't really mean much.

With a hypercube, you can give a mathematical description, which I think is what my computer scientists might like... but it's more of a splidgy splodgy irregular shape. Each chapter is kind of like a cross-section. Interesting in themselves, but even taking cross-sections across several axes still doesn't truly give a good definition to the whole shape.

It's been rotating around in my head like the hypercube image below (from wikipedia) for some years now, so I have a good feeling for how everything fits together, but it's still only that. People just aren't good at visualising higher dimensional shapes, and the same sort of reaction seems to occur to my thesis.

200 pages might be too many to describe the outline of a shape, but 20 000 wouldn't be enough to truly even begin... and beginning to appreciate that makes an extra 20 hard to write.

In the office happily tapping away at 5am, I was afraid I might have some regrets. Not so, according to my text editor!

Search string 'regret' not found!

...unfortunately I found them in a different chapter. :'(





(An algorithm with the acronym REGRET, which I prefer to another which is "AWESOME")

Walking home tonight, as the frost began to form on the wet ground. The grass sparkling with a thousand tiny reflections of light. So shiny - an excellent bed of stars! Or at least that's what a man I passed seemed to think, lying in the wet grass and laughing as he chatted happily into his phone.

I lay claim to being a good problem solver. However, showing my mathematician heritage, that really only extends to seeing the existence of a solution, never mind the implementation.

That's not great for getting work done, because when I can see that it's possible to finish writing a chapter, well, that's "solved". But what's worse is that I will think "I'm thirsty", see the glass of water on my desk, think "ah, problem solved" and carry on with what I was doing. Only to repeat the process once again every few minutes. Eventually I actually realise that the water in the glass is the same water as was in the glass before and my problem is not solved, but that can take hours.

Brilliant.

Walking in the dark and the rain, yellow lights turning the eddies and puddles into rippling patterns of gold and black. The next morning the most verdant green as life asserts itself for the briefest of days, before winter arrives and the crackling autumn leaves crunch for an entirely different reason, frozen in a thin carpet of ice.

What will today look like?



BREAKING NEWS: Insipid! Grey!

The letter "D".

Medieval merchant guilds.
Obesity in rats.
Bread making machines.
Rehabilitation of psychopaths.
Vietnamese tea houses.
The 1973 Group Facilitators Guide.
The United States power grid.
Astronauts.
The sexual habits of bonobos.

Waves of gold and amber strewn across the sky.

Watched a quite pleasing movie about an isolated buddhist pagoda floating in the middle of a lake in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Korea. The scenery was beautiful, and it was one of those almost entirely silent and still experiences.

The highlight though, was the older monk who wins the award for most creative use of animals. Using a rooster on a rope to retrieve a boat was good, but was entirely trumped by holding a (surprisingly cooperative) cat and using its tail for a paintbrush in the course of writing a Very Long message on the deck of the pagoda.

Normally Canberra is so crisp, with sharp, well defined edges and a sense of purpose, if not meaning. But this morning a dreamy impressionist blur in a most unusual morning mist. Thick, heavy, wet, and so silent. A wide halo for every streetlight.

A long Easter weekend, so once again the only lonely souls to be spied in Canberra are those who drew the short straw and had to stay behind to maintain a facade of open retailers.

I'm ready to move on, but I'm sure I'll miss the solitude of this place once I'm somewhere new.

There's been a bunch of times over the past 4 years where it's felt like everything is crumbling around me, that everyone's lives are falling apart and I can only watch and listen in silence and try to say the right thing at the moment when all is darkest. I guess it's a tumultuous age to be.

Again recently I've found myself ending most conversations with "it's all going to be okay". But it's different, I can really mean it. My friends are mature capable people and their problems *will* sort themselves out. It *will* all be okay.

Maybe I'm just riding on the tide of love from a wonderful friend's wedding today (and eating my weight in wedding cake) at the moment. Maybe it's seeing the light at the end of the tunnel in my little world of my own phd and what comes after. Maybe it's that objectively I seem to be in a tighter situation right now than most, but I know I'll be fine, so I trust that others will be too. Maybe it's that most of the things are fears and memories rather than current uncontrollable disasters.

Either way...

I just want you to know...

You'll be fine! :)

So the thesis continues to come along in fits and spurts, a page here and there, ideas for further work there and here, all that sort of thing.

Now, when people have read my work I've copped my fair share of criticism for being generally unclear, and not explaining diagrams all that well. I just want anyone who reads anything by me to know that it could be worse.

I was browsing through yet ANOTHER paper that approaches things from another entirely different perspective, because, eh, that's what I do. I came across this beautiful diagram.



I.. uh... well, what would you guess it represents?

As much as I liked 4:13 Dream, it doesn't actually take top honours for the year.

The National do, with Boxer. One of many truly excellent recommendations from a new friend, this album became a favourite largely on the back of the song Brainy. According to last.fm that was my most listened to track of the past 12 months, though it fails to take into account the many many other listens at uni or on my mp3 player.

It's a funny song for me to like in a way, because the lyrics are all creepy stalker... but my brain just picks up some melancholy yearning, which as usual I can't resist. At the same time the drums just draw me in and never let go. Along with From The Edge of the Deep Green Sea by The Cure, it's become my favourite traveling song. Sad songs for leaving people behind, but holding onto the moment a little longer...

( Other albums behind a cut )

Of course, it didn't matter what time of day we arrived in Trondheim, the sun would still have been shining down on us and allowing a pleasant walk around. It was very surreal not getting any clue from the sky, and seemed very arbitrary to see people out and about at some times of day and not others. I absolutely loved it.

Clearly it was pretty popular with the locals too. Everyone except bus drivers seemed to generally be in a constant good mood brought on by all that light (unlike the suicide inducing other end of the year...). Though there was a certain... smugness I felt like I was picking up from Norwegians. I couldn't really blame them though.

The first day and a half was spent doing the touristy thing in the city. The botanic gardens were first up, and as soon as I turned my camera on for the first time in Europe it died very thoroughly indeed with the lens halfway extended. Aww. The ancient gothic style cathedral we visited at the "end" of the day was definitely more my style than the gaudy Catholic cathedrals I'd seen previously.

It was a good thing I got some looking around done on those days though, as I wasn't going to have any more free time during or after the conference. I feel just a bit disappointed I didn't get to see any of the countryside or fjords in the end though.

Time to talk The Cure, 4:13 Dream!

It turns out that a large portion of the albums I've bought this year have in fact been bits of the same one. Starting in May, with 4 singles and then an EP of remixes, before the album eventually surfaced in late October. Unsurprisingly I've rather enjoyed it, although in the end I think having heard the singles a couple of hundred times each before having the full album has hurt my enjoyment of the album as a whole.

Perhaps my favourite songs remain the b-sides of NY Trip and Down Under though. Whimsical and light, lyrics of monkeys and whales and the thoughts that surface in hopeful daydreams.

The real dream begins with the album opener Underneath the Stars. One of their most beautiful and evocative songs. Lying still and looking up at the sky as waves crash nearby ..."Whisper in my ears a dream / We could drift away"... before the less-than-subtle - almost downright rude - fantasies of The Only One.

Being The Cure of course, we couldn't have sunshine all the way. I found it amusing that many reviews latched onto the lyrics of The Reasons Why ..."I won't try to bring you down about my suicide / If you promise not to sing about the reasons why". "Tsk tsk, still being depressing Robert Smith?, they'd say. In an interview he mentioned that many of the lyrics in the song are from a suicide note he received from someone he knew back in the 80s. Gives the song a whole new ironic light... though he never does mention the reasons why.

It is absolutely true that this song and the rest of the album are the same old insecurities The Cure always latches onto though. I'm okay with that. The ways in which we all search for things that aren't really there, that are almost on the edge of our vision, the doubts we have in our dreams, the dreams that make us look twice at something the next day, wonder what could have been, long for always more.

Along the way we have time for a song which is reminiscent of a sea shanty in Sirensong, and a sleazy song about drugs and Snow White "all dressed up in seven ways to please".

It culminates for me with The Scream. An entirely disquieting song which is immediately less pleasant than the rest of the album, drawing me somewhere darker yet irresistible, trying hard to wake up now as the sourness of the dream becomes apparent. Then the frenetic and loud conclusion with It's Over. As this is one of their heaviest songs, you can hardly still be asleep afterwards. Dream over.

Arriving in Trondheim could hardly have been more of a contrast to arriving in Fortaleza. In Brazil we sped past the homeless and their rickshaws at night as music blared from roadside parties around derelict bars. In Norway we arrived in the morning and paid an exorbitant sum of money to get onto the most modern bus I have ever seen, driving past pine forests along perfect roads and through bright tunnels to the small city of Trondheim.

The contrast was there in the people too, in Brazil everyone was always actively friendly and helpful, eager for my possible tourist money. In Norway (and the rest of Europe)... eh, tourists. Arrived at the hotel and found out some spectacular bonuses despite the astronomical cost of accommodation. Buffet breakfasts and dinners - nothing like a spot of pickled herring first thing in the morning, should one choose.

And... WAFFLES! Every afternoon there was a waffle maker and appropriate mixture to be ladled into it, along with cream and delicious jams. To be honest I'm not entirely sure what made me *so* very excited about making waffles. They aren't even something I'd normally seek out... but the freeness and the novelty made them extra tasty!

In a way that was the biggest thing I noticed in Trondheim. While the prices were always ridiculously high, everything one could possibly want was included, and the quality was always good. It cost as much to live like a beggar in Trondheim as to live like a king in Fortaleza, but you got much the same in the end. It's really bizarre that stuff of terrible quality mostly just does not exist in that country, because everybody has enough money that they can afford better.

Still.... nearly AU$20 for a Big Mac (more after our currency crash I expect)? I obviously didn't go for one, but it'd better be crazily better quality than what's on offer here...