May 8, 2009

Corixa

Gosh, it's been awhile. I can't possibly hope to capture all that's gone on in the last couple of weeks, but I can skim lightly across the surface like a water boatman.

The gravitational centre of the period was the annual CoMPLEX jamboree at Cumberland Lodge, where I was giving a talk and also dimly representing Processing at a computational tools workshop. The talk described things somewhat related to -- but emphasising the more solid predecessors of -- my research; it will be available in some form here and there in due course. It was well enough received to be almost worth the bank holiday weekend its preparation largely consumed. The workshop was more of a puff session -- look, isn't this pretty? -- but apparently some people found it useful. Whether that includes my bit was not recorded.

I was also a little bit less diplomatic than I intended when questioning one of our guest speakers, Armand Leroi, on his musical phylogenetics presentation. This provided plenty of entertainment for the audience, somewhat contrary to my intentions. Sorry, Armand, I really did mean it when I said your work was fascinating.

Which adjective brings us with plodding inevitability to Star Trek, most likely blockbuster of the year and better than one might expect from the collision of the careworn screen franchise with trash TV maestro JJ Abrams. (As I've mentioned elsewhere, what is it with him and balls of glowing red liquid?) Despite the reboot's slavish adherence to some incredibly tired and annoying Hollywood screenwriting tropes -- really, if I never see another film whose hero is driven by the death of his father it'll be too fucking soon -- and despite its ludicrous insistence that every crew member be implausibly young and good-looking -- if JJ isn't a fag he certainly casts like one -- Trek winds up as a decent skiffy actioner, adequately faithful to the original and dense with in-jokes, but also great fun on its own merits. It has to be said, though, that Leonard Nimoy wipes the floor with the whole brat cast.

Despite the working weekend, I did manage to get my hair cut -- hackneyed photo to follow, no doubt -- and to take in foul-mouthed political satire In The Loop, which was hilarious if not exactly uplifting. The following may currently be the funniest line in the English language, easily surpassing "Sergeant, arrest most of these vicars":

Difficult, difficult, lemon difficult.

Words to live by.

In other news, the Sutter P-2000 laser puller turned up its toes today, and someone has semi-gazumped Sam's SICM modelling paper, albeit in a rather shoddy, rushed-to-print way. On the other hand, we may have recorded an NMDA receptor from a cerebellar interneuron terminal for the first time. Not that we have any hope of proving it on the basis of this one noisy example, but it's a start.

Oh yes. The excitement never ends around here.

Posted by matt at May 8, 2009 11:34 PM