One More Epicycle

Hooray!

Yep, back. The last few months have been incredibly hectic but great fun. During that time I visited Vienna, which was my first trip ever to the continent, for the annual meeting of the European Geophysical Union (of which I’m a member); beautiful, beautiful city. After I got over the unnerving feelings induced by being given commands over loudspeaker in German (too many WWII movies as a kid, I guess), I settled in nicely and got some sightseeing done.

Almost immediately after that I went to Japan for several weeks by the kind invitation of Nagasawa Makiko and fell completely in love with the place. I felt more comfortable in Tokyo than I had in Vienna, even though very few people there spoke English but most everyone I came across in Vienna did. I considered blogging the trip, but frankly I was having way too much fun to stop to type, and too much to describe in any case. I have to get back as soon as I can.

There’s some discussion here of bringing Nagasawa-sama over here, which would be really cool. I’m too junior to have the budget to do it myself but some of our mutual friends do! I think I embarrassed her slightly by insisting on the -sama honourific: she complained that the grad students asked her if she’d told me to call her that. (-sama’s a little above what one would ordinarily use in that context.) But she was my host, and genuine gratitude + major teasing = WIN!

For anyone who was wondering, the introduction to my talk (which I gave in Japanese– the introduction, not the talk) went very well. Everyone laughed at the right spots, and not just because of my accent, I think. So that was good.

After Japan it was off to Victoria for CASCA, which was enjoyable though I have to admit not as much fun as usual. Not sure why, although I suspect it was because not all of the usual suspects were there, including some of my favourites. Then a few weeks in Red Deer visiting the family, and then back to London!

Never done so much travelling in my life.

One mildly irritating thing happened while I was in Japan, though: I got the referee’s report back on my last paper, a report which was quite snarky. It was anonymous, as these things usually are, but from the use of idiosyncratic terminology used only bay a certain author and the fact that a considerable fraction of the report was devoted to asking why I didn’t refer to/do things the same way as said author, it’s obvious who it was. Certainly he knows a considerable amount about the subject matter, and once you correct for the steel-wool tone the report is thorough and detailed.

But surely a professor at [very famous American university --redacted] has better things to do with his time than COMPLAIN ABOUT THE NAME OF MY CODE?! Good grief.

(“Naoko”, for the record. “New Adaptive Orthochronous Kepler Orbiter”. Any relation to Yamada Naoko, the character who helps out physicist Ueda Jiro in the brilliant “Trick” series, is too much fun for the referee and so should probably be kept hush-hush.)

In any case, last Friday I fired off the revised version on which I’ve been working since my return to England, and so my promise to myself to stay away from the blog until it was done has been kept. Harsh mistress, astronomy.