ALife 2025 day 3

The day started with some parallel sessions of contributed papers: I went to some interesting ones on evolution.  Then was the day's keynote, by Chris Kempes.  He covered a variety of physical constraints on living organisms: physical laws limit what life can be.  Scaling laws, metabolic rates and growth rates, the way proteins are more dilute in larger cells, the physics of the small: these are all consequences of physics, and so may be universal laws.

On to lunch, and then the excursion!  On registration, we were given a choice of several excursions to a variety of local temples.  I had little to guide my choice, except I saw the words "bamboo forest" on one, so chose that.  On the bus on the way there, the guide taught us to count to ten in Japanese (knowing what little I know of Japanese, I expect the reality is much more complicated than these ten little words!)

We walked from the bus park along a road of very touristy shops, to the temple complex.  We went in the main temple, after removing our shoes.  There was a magnificent painting of a dragon on the ceiling, with a gaze that followed you around the room, but sadly, there was also a no photography rule.  After that, shoes back on, we walked through the complex, admiring the outside of buildings, the raked gravel, and the carefully tended trees.

If you look carefully, you can see three guys up in this tree, pruning it. (Click to embiggen.)

We carried on around the garden, to a lovely lake, also carefully curated.  It's just a little too early in the year for the full spectacular autumn colours.

If you look carefully, you can see a big carp in the bottom right corner.

We carried on up around the garden, to a vista point.

Temples below, mountains in the distance, framed by trees. The tree on the right has amazing spikey leaves

spikey

On to the bamboo forest.  I wouldn't want to make my way through that; fortunately there was a nice wide path.

impenetrable

Bamboo is a kind of grass.  A special kind of grass.

a colleague providing a hand for scale

After exiting the forest, we descended back down the valley, and made our way back to the bus via an ice cream shop in the touristy road.  

The bus then took us directly to the conference dinner, held in a huuuuuge and very modern convention building.  We had a delicious buffet, and wonderful conversation.  There was a bus to take us back to the starting point, but the little group I was with decided to walk back down instead.  It made a very pleasant 30 minute stroll on a warm evening to finish off a great day.

An unexpected gem

 We got a photo of the "new" Skye bridge this morning before we left our hotel in Kyle.

Then we left to drive up to Inverewe, to visit the gardens there.  On the way, we stopped at Acnasheen to charge the car, via the ChargePlace Scotland app. 

Not sure I'm keen on standing in a big puddle while I hook up an electric charger...

Then off to Inverewe.  Like at Dunvegan yesterday, most of the rhododendrons are over, but that allows the spectacular bark to be seen.

But there are still a few late bloomers.

The woodland walk includes a path down to the loch.

panoramic view of the loch

And there are marvellous trees.

Californian Redwood

After about an hour and a half walking round all the gardens, we had lunch in the garden cafe.  Then time to drive to Inverness.

Just before we got there, we stopped at what looked like a large layby with a Public Convenience.  But it turned out it was the small car park for Rogie Falls.  An information board showed two trails: a half-mile Salmon Trail down to the Falls themselves, and a somewhat longer and "strenuous" Riverside Trail.  It was still early, so we put on our boots and set out on the longer trail.

We took the blue trail

disappearing down the trail

This brought us down to a path along the river above the falls.

an unexpected gem

The path led us to the falls themselves.

We guessed from the name "Salmon Trail" that this is a salmon river, but assumed it was too late to see any.  But no! There was a lot of jumping going on, but we failed to get any photos of fish.  We continued on the trail, back to the car park, and then drove to Inverness.

We chose a hotel that was supposed to have an EV charger associated with it, but it was no longer there.  So we went to a local shopping centre, plugged into a Tesco charger, bought some items in Tesco's to be legitimate customers, then ate in a local diner while the relatively slow charger filled the car.

Off to Edinburgh tomorrow!

sushi

We invited speakers at the UCNC conference were invited to a super sushi dinner.  Lots of interesting things to eat!  Other people started photographing the amazing dishes, so I followed them...

many kinds of fish (each lovingly described) draped over huge pieces of bamboo

the next course is more shellfish-oriented

deep fried little tiny things

fish head

more shellfish, plus phoneshadow