The Ongoing Work Stoppage

I brought a short pile of books with me to Budapest – I always bring books with me when I travel, even if it’s just overnight – but I was so busy that I only got through two of them, one of which was mostly on the plane. Here is one of the two:

Here we have Twin Spica vol. 1 by Kou Yaginuma, artfully backed by my tourist’s map of Budapest. Twin Spica is about a young girl named Asumi who wants to go to Japan’s astronaut school. When Asumi was one year old, Japan’s first manned rocket, “The Lion”, crashed in the middle of a city, killing and injuring many people, including Asumi’s mother, who spent five years in a coma before dying. Admittedly the back story could be cheerier.

The main part of the book deals with Asumi starting on her path to space school – first she must overcome her father’s resistance, then pass a grueling test along with some difficult classmates to be accepted into the school. Following this are two side-stories set ten years earlier which shed some light on Asumi’s family, classmates and imaginary friend ‘Mr. Lion’, a man in a lion costume.

I liked Twin Spica. It’s a sweet, touching story, despite being a bit predictable; it appeals to the idealistic part of me that believes space exploration is humanity’s destiny, a part that doesn’t get out much any more in a world where no one’s stepped on the moon in my lifetime and we may never go back. I say it’s a little predictable, but Mr. Lion’s story made me tear up a bit despite the fact I pretty much knew what was coming.

So much was going on when I was reading the book that I feel like I didn’t give it my full attention. I’ll definitely go back to it again once I’ve fully recovered from the trip – and then get volume 2.

Just as I always bring books with me on a trip, I also inevitably acquire books on a trip as well. In Budapest I got two pamphlet-sized books as souvenirs.

Also note the fairly sweet conference back-pack.

On the right is Hungarian History in a Nutshell, which is exactly what it says on the cover. I got this at the National Museum last Sunday, because I knew nothing about Hungarian history beyond the 20th century, and it is fascinating. On the left is a book of various patterns from Hungarian art history, which was kindly given to me at the conference by a gentleman in the teaching section. It has nice frieze and wallpaper patterns in it I think I’ll use in the symmetry course I’ll be co-teaching next month.

Next up: The Greatest Manga Artist in the World?

I woke up Friday at 3:45 AM Budapest time [6:45 PM Thursday, PDT -- Ed.] to get ready for the airport. Three flights and 24 hours later, I finally made it to my apartment in Vancouver. I stayed up until 11 PM, puttering around, unpacking, watching some DVDs, under the theory that a normal bed-time would help the jet-lag.

I ended up sleeping until 9:30 PM on Saturday. That’s about 22 hours.

I mention all this because I am genuinely impressed at how messed up my circadian rhythms are. I am now literally 180° out of phase.

All that aside, I had a pretty great time at the conference. I saw some fantastic talks, and met some interesting people, reconnecting with some I’d met at conferences past and meeting others that I’d only know (in some cases for years) as names on journal articles. I got a tonne (metricized for that European feel) of ideas for things to work on, current projects, old projects and new projects.

I got to do a little bit of sight-seeing, but to be honest I found it kind of exhausting, and was most interested in the sciencey stuff.

Not even a cretin like me can avoid a little culture, though! The conference was at the Eötvös Loránd University, which is right on the Danube River separating Buda from Pest. Our hotel in Pest, the University in Buda, and it was just a short walk (or tram ride) between the two. We were also in sight of several landmarks, such as the Castle Hill and the Parliament buildings.

(I didn’t get to most of the touristy sights, but I did do a lot of walking, so that I had blisters by about the third day. Also, it was a humid 28° C or more most of the time, so even the short walk across the bridge had me sweating like an overweight Canadian physicist. [Speaking of which, there were two Japanese guys at the conference who looked like such stereotypical otaku, down to the bandanas and wispy facial hair, that I swear they'd taken a wrong turn on the way to Comiket.] So I ended up using the tram quite a bit, which was fast, easy to figure out, and generally air-conditioned.)

Here are some pictures:

This morning I was trying to take a picture of one of our dumortierite samples so I could put it on the poster. Unfortunately neither my photography skills nor the equipment at hand were up to the challenge of producing a high-enough resolution picture. Valette clearly needs to move closer.

I did get one halfway decent picture, using the desktop scanner, of all things, but again, not high enough resolution. So here it is: dumortierite, the pretty blue aluminum borosilicate with an awesomely cool crystal structure that I’ve spent the last year and some studying.

As I mentioned on the Twits, I’m going to the IMA conference in Budapest next, so most of my processing capacity this week was devoted to getting my poster ready and generally fretting. I fret because in general I do not like overseas travel. I like being overseas, just not getting there. I’m sure it’s a universal feeling.

I did get a chance to finish my other two library books since JIM Day, and here they are:

I am so full of cake right now. Anyway -

I read a lot of books. I also have a new camera (see previous posts) and a blog I would like to put things on. These three things have come together in my mind into my latest cockamamie idea: Starting today (my birthday!) I will take a picture of every book I read and post it here. Then I shall say something about the book. If this project is successful, by next JIM Day, I will (a) have made a whole lot of blog posts, at least one or two of which is bound to be pretty good, (b) have a record of everything I’ve read for the past year, which will be cool, and (c) probably have gotten fairly decent at photographing books, which is the kind eccentric life skill I like to have. So consider this post entry number one in the project I am uncreatively calling… What I’m Reading.

[Though, yes, technically it should be called What I've Read, but to me that sounds kind of awkward.]

The first book is volume 3 of Usagi Yojimbo by Stan Sakai. As you can see, I am not yet very good at photgraphing books. After many attempts, this is best picture I could come up with; I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of the glare off the cover while still having the picture in focus. I checked this out at the Vancouver Public library on Saturday, as you can deduce from the barcode. The VPL seems to have a good smattering, at the very least, of Usagi Yojimbo’s 23 collected volumes to date. Though the series has been around for 20 years I’ve never seen any of the collections in a book or comic store.

Usagi Yojimbo, for those unfamiliar, is the ongoing story of a wandering rabbit samurai (or ronan), Miyamoto Usagi, in a version of 17th century Japan populated by anthropomorphic animals. The animal-ness of the characters usually isn’t a big part of the story. Though the series has an ongoing continuity the individual stories are pretty self-contained; in this volume each chapter (originally a single issue) is one story, and most longer stories are contained in a single volume. This makes this a great series to read the way I am, by getting a volume here, a volume there from the library. And the stories themselves are terrific. Usagi and all of the people he meets have their own unique situations, backgrounds and personalities; the stories are simple but compelling, emotionally involving and are hard to put down. Plus, sword-fighting, political intrigue and the occasional demon. Usagi Yojimbo is basically a perfect comic, and I want one million volumes of it.

In this volume, Usagi helps a lizard and gains a travelling companion; becomes wrapped up in a family tragedy; faces a blind swords-pig (who I have yet to encounter in any of the later volumes and would like to see more of); first meets one of the major villains of the series, a psychotic ronin named Jei who may or may not be either a demon or an instrument of the gods; and gets involved in two other intrigues involving a priceless tea cup and a stolen sword. This volume also includes a short scene where Usagi meets one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which is exactly what it says on the tin. But the rest of it is so good, who needs a Ninja Turtle?