sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLIV

The latest batch:

Some of these are due to recommendations at the Belfast Eastercon; some from the Seattle Worldcon (which we attended virtually).

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CLII

The latest batch:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLI

While the birthday presents were accumulating, other books not slated to be birthday presents were also accumulating.  Here's that batch:

No, the 43 Visions for Complexity book isn't upside-down.  It just has the title on the spine running upwards, rather than downwards.  I know this is more traditional in other languages, but it makes the bookshelf annoyingly inconsistent when it's done in English-language books.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXXXV

 The latest, pre-Christmas, batch:

A third Checquy book!  I didn't know there was another one. Yay!

excursion to Segesta

The early morning weather has been getting clearer each day, and this morning I could actually see a, still slightly hazy, view from my room window when I got up.

I experimented with panoramic settings to get a great, if slightly curvy, view from the tearoom window.

Then down to the lecture room, where today’s schedule of talks started at 8:30am, but finished 1pm, as today is excursion day.  We all piled on to a coach, which took us to the even more historic site of Segesta.

As we arrived at the entrance, we could see a hint of the Doric wonders to come.

the top of the temple just visible above the trees

But first, we hopped onto a shuttle bus (that for some reason was called free, yet cost 2Euro) that took us up to some ruins and a Greek theatre.  Both the acoustics and the view were fabulous.

We inspected various ruins for a while, then hopped back on the shuttle bus to take us back down the hill.  The winding trip down gave us several glimpses of the temple from a distance.

Once back down to the entrance, it was only a short walk up to the temple itself.  (Despite not being far, I needed a short stop part way up, due to post-Covid lack of puff.)

wow !

The roof hasn’t fallen down: it was never erected.  The temple was never completed, and has stood like this for two and a half thousand years.  Signs of partial completion include no internal structures, lack of fluting on the columns, and the construction “knobs” on the base stones, used for attaching ropes.  These construction signs are not visible on completed temples, as they would have been chiselled off to give a smooth final finish.

Unlike the ruins up the hill, the temple was never dismantled by the locals for its stones, as it is “too remote”.  (Mind you, the ruins up the hill aren’t all that accessible, either!)

The temple is 6 columns wide by 14 columns long, breaking the standard “n by 2n + 1” formula.  It was difficult to get a good shot of the side, due to the length.  Panoramic view gives a weird curve.  But I eventually managed to get far enough away, taking care not to hurtle down into a chasm, to take a normal shot of the entire side view.

wow !!

a view from below

fearful symmetry

Back down to the entrance, and just time to get a gelato before piling back onto the coach, and back to Erice.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXXIV

 The latest batch:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXIII

 The latest batch:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CII

The latest, pre-Christmas, batch:

There are several books accompanying “Great Courses” lecture series – there was a sale on; the individual lectures make a nice half-hour session to eat lunch to.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time C

My one-hundredth sequestration post!

The latest batch:

The Kagan book is not upside down; the title is printed on the spine in the opposite orientation to conventional, possibly because it is from a German printer?  Is the convention the opposite in Germany?

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCIX

The latest batch

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XCI

The latest batch, pre Christmas rush:

sequestering carbon, several books at a time XC

The latest batch, including a few venerable old titles purchased from a retiring colleague.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time LXXXVIII

The latest batch:

Château de Fontainebleau

This afternoon was the conference trip, to Fontainebleau palace.  This is right in Fontainebleau itself, so no long coach trip required.  In fact, I have been walking past it every day on my way to the conference venue.  I thought it was big from what I'd seen.  But it's bigger on the inside.

Plan of the castle.  The view from the road is of the courtyard marked (1).  It's huge.  But there is a second equally huge part behind it!

The view of the chateau from position (1) on the plan above.  It looks big.  It's bigger.

The guided tour goes through a relatively small part of this, but is still quite long, and carefully designed to start with amazing and move on to jaw-dropping.

We start in a long corridor of paintings of Napoleon and family.

The rooms off the corridor are full of modest little ornaments...

Moving through this into the older part reveals even more ornateness.

Just a door

Another door like the one above (see the carved heads in side view) leads into a gallery

Every inch of the gallery walls and ceiling is covered with carvings, statues, and painintgs

and I thought the gallery ceiling was ornate...

I suppose this sort of thing happens when you run out of walls to decorate...

This is the wall at the far end of that ceiling.  I suppose it does make the ceiling look relatively restrained.

my fascination with ceilings continues

If you prefer looking down, there's always an understated carpet to catch the eye

Ooh! A library! (We weren't allowed in, although most of us on the tour wanted in!)

Now getting to the more homely part : a bedroom ...

... and a games room

okay, back to ceilings

and the floor under that ceiling

That was the end of the interior tour.  We had a brief walk outside, including:

if I understood correctly, this is the kitchen

We then took a brief tour round some of the gardens.  But it was way too hot to linger.

Magnifique!  Absolutely stunning.  Highly recommended.

But now I want to go start a revolution ... well, I'll wait until after the conference dinner, maybe...

wait, a house needs other rooms?

Some interesting house design ideas...

Dream, Fantasy … world of wonder awaits you …

St.Gallen Abbey Library, St. Gallen, Switzerland

---

For all my social networking posts, see my Google+ page

sequestering carbon, one Christmas at a time V

His‘n’hers Christmas presents:

Something to read whilst unable to move from overeating turkey.

ECAL 2017, Wednesday

Day three of the European Conference of Artificial Life, in Lyon, with half a day of presentations, and half a day of excursions.

To start the day we had a keynote presentation by Csaba Pál on the Evolution of complex adaptations.  The emphasis here is that the current state of an evolved system, such as the complex bacterial flagellum, is not necessarily related to how it evolved.  The question is how can a system that needs several complex adaptations, each of which may be individually deleterious, actually evolve?  The answer is ... complicated.  There are many mechanisms, including non-adaptive origins such as neutral mutations, macro-mutations such as gene and chromosome duplications, mutations affecting multiple traits, pre-adaptation / exaptation, noise, dynamic environments, and more.  The four main methodological pillars used to research these issues are population genetics, systems biology, experimental evolution, and comparative genomics.  This great talk was another example of how nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of the phrase “but it’s more complicated than that”.

After coffee I went to the Artificial Chemistries track.  Structural Coupling of a Potts Model Cell examined the coupling between an organism and its environment, and how that affects the  morphological transition network.   Functional grouping analysis of varying reactor types in the Spiky-RBN AChem (my student’s paper) discussed an AChem where the binding properties are emergent properties of the composed molecules.  Time as It Could Be Measured in Artificial Living Systems discussed the simplest possible clocks that might be exploited by simple systems.  Finally, Delving Deeper into Homeostatic Dynamics of Reaction Diffusion Systems with a General Fluid Dynamics and Artificial Chemistry Model looked at a modification to a thermal Gray-Scott reaction-diffusion system that has a more physically plausible source and sink of material.

After lunch we had a choice of excursions: a vineyard, or old Lyon.  I chose the latter.  A bus took us up to the top of the old city, to the Basilica, an amazing building, cool grey stone on the outside, lush decoration on the inside.

Basilica front aspect

Basilica decorated ceiling

Basilica: one of many murals

Then it was back into the bus, and down the hill to the old town: narrow cobbled streets, tall old buildings, gorgeous smells of fresh food; hidden courtyards and towers, and secret passageways ("traboules") between the streets.  Then back on the bus to return to the hotel.

the old reflected in the new, seen through the bus window

The evening saw us all congregate for the conference dinner on the Hermès restaurant boat.  The boat seemed to spend a lot of time turning around.  GPS helped explain the reason: cast off; turn round to go south down the Rhône past the confluence; turn round to go north up the Saône; turn round to go south down the Saône past the confluence; turn round to go north up the Rhône back to the mooring.  Then back to the hotel using the excellent tram system.

a summer evening in Lyon

I was in Lyon on Thursday (as a member of a PhD defence panel) and Friday (continuing my collaboration with Wolfgang Banzhaf and Guillaume Beslon on Open-Ended Evolution, emergence, and metamodels).

On Thursday evening the panel had dinner with the successful PhD candidate.  We walked from the hotel to the restaurant via the old town.

Cathedral Saint-Jean-Baptiste

rue de la Fronde

crossing the Saône on the Saint-Vincent footbridge; the view north west at 8pm...

...and then the view south east

Fresque des Lyonnais: this whole-building mural depicts famous people from Lyon

Then on to a lovely leisurely meal at Le Bouchon des Filles.