Floods

South Yorkshire has been devastated by flash floods and there are many dead and homeless people. Worst of all I heard speculation that the environment agency sacrificied the village of Toll Bar to spare Doncaster Town centre. No-one lives on the ground floor in Doncaster town centre. Oh well, I'm sure the insurance companies see it as the lesser (cheaper) of two evils.

Well that's cleared that up then

From Wikipedia;

"A real or complex Hilbert space is a real or complex inner product space that is a complete normed space (Banach space) under the norm defined by the inner product."

Great. Er, what does it mean? Mathematicians are crap at explaining things in laymans terms. This definition is OK if you already understand the thing. Wikipedia should be there to inform everyone and have several layers of explanation; beginner, middle, expert. Mathematicians seem to write in this dense way just to impress other Mathematicians with how succinct they can be.

Germany

I'm back from my conference visit to Dresden in Germany. It was fantastic. We were shown great hospitality and everything ran very smoothly. Dresden airport was closed on the way in but it didn't cause the sort of chaos we would expect in the UK (on the way in and out the UK airports were hell. At Gatwick we were just making a transfer but they made us go out through security and then back in again! Why? We had our fingerprints taken and our shoes were scanned even though we had just come off an internal European flight. Dumb.). In Germany our train journey from Berlin to Dresden was superb. The train arrived on time, there were seats and luggage space, we had air conditioning and best of all the journey was smooth and silent, like floating on air. Why can't the UK get these things right? We had excellent meals for about 10 Euros (£7 or $14). Back in the UK we called into a service station on the motorway and were met with inedible and expensive choices of food. On the way out we spotted a car being broken into by two kids right across from the transport police offices where I spotted several cops sitting having a cup of tea as we drove past. The good thing about travel is it makes you realise how much better things are elsewhere.

Av It

News from the front line

There is no news. We've been at a major UK science facility for two weeks now but we have done no experiments and have yielded no data due to technical issues. C'est la vie. I wish I could give more details but I might say the wrong thing.

Tessa Jowell has said that the cost of the Olympics has not trebled to £9 billion. It has increased from £2 billion to £3 billion because of unforseen costs in the construction of the Olympic village. The other £6 billion is to be spent upon regeneration projects in London. Are these not associated with the Olympics? Should they not be included in the total cost figures? Would these areas have been regenerated regardless of the successfull Olympic bid? I smell another Millenium Dome. And that logo is ugly.

In other news the chain of Track records stores is to close. This is a crying shame because track records was all about music and variety; they never gave 50% of their stores over to DVDs like HMV and Virgin and cut down the music range to high volume items like Coldplay and the Kaiser chiefs. HMV is in financial trouble too. Of course, the internet will be blamed which is just crap. If HMV continued to sell things that people could not get on torrent sites then people might be more inclined to continue shopping there. Take this weekend. I was shopping for the 'I Am Kurious Oranj' album by The Fall and the Trojan Records Dub box set. I could find neither item in one of the largest shopping malls in the country. I could find crappy reggae compilations and overpriced Fall boxed sets but not the particular items I wanted. The space was taken up by piles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Batman Begins DVDs.

The Fall - Mr. Pharmacist

I'm away doing an experiment at the moment. I'll post from the front line when we get up and running and try and give you a flavour of what scientific research is like. In the meantime, please enjoy mark e. smith singing his mr. pharmacist song which is reyt good.