a turkey isn't just for Christmas

Christmas 2025 is finally over.  We had the last portion of turkey in the freezer for dinner tonight.

banana bumpy

While I was away in Trieste, some bananas back home went too black to eat.  Usually when this happens, my other half makes banana buns.  Given the current heat, however, this time he decided to try making banana ice cream.

It came out a bit lumpy (despite having been blended for quite a while), and rock hard once frozen (we're so used to soft scoop nowadays we don't even have a name for it any more).  It's perfectly nice to eat, however.

banana "ice cream", just before being frozen

I've decided to call this a "banana bumpy", to distinguish it from a "banana smoothie".

deficient

Late March was our 50th reunion for college.  One of the old friends I met there was chatting about her vitamin D experience: she had discovered she was deficient, and had needed a booster course to bring her back up to normal levels.  She mentioned some of the symptoms: fatigue, bone pain, muscle weakness,... 

I recognised some of those symptoms, although I hadn't realised the pain near the top of my pelvis I was having might be bone pain: I didn't know bones could hurt! Muscles yes. Joints yes. But bones themselves?

The conversation stayed in my mind; the fatigue was getting me down, and the (bone?) pain seemed to be getting a bit worse.  Maybe it wasn't just the decrepitude of old age.  I don't get a lot of sunshine (I'm in the UK, after all), but I have been trying to eat food with good vitamin D levels, such as oily fish.  But maybe that's not been enough.

So I booked a blood test, and I had a blood sample taken on Tuesday morning.  They said I should get my results in a week.  But Wednesday (yesterday) morning my doctor phoned: I was vitamin D deficient, and she was prescribing me a "loading dose" to bring me up to a better level. 

I went online to look at the actual test results. I was at less than 25 ("deficient"), where 25-50 is "inadequate", 50-70 is "adequate", and (presumably not too much) over 70 is "optimal" (units are nmol/l).  So yes, clearly a problem.

This morning I picked up my prescription: 6 capsules, each with a dose of 50,000 IU ("international units"), to be taken once a week.

Since the typical maintenance dose is 400 IU a day during winter, that loading dose is nearly 20x the maintenance level!  Wow!  Let's see how it goes.

I'm not sure when in the day I should take it.  The NHS site says "with your main meal of the day", which for me would be evening dinner.  Other places say to take it early in the day.  Also, to take it with fat to maximise absorption (despite being recommended a low fat diet).  Hey ho.  I'll take it at lunchtime then, with an oily fish dish.

Anyway, from blood sample to prescription in hand, less than 48 hours.  NHS FTW!

going bananas

We had some more bananas go black, so time for some more banana oat buns.  Yum.  Unlike last time, they didn't try to escape.

bun breakout

We had 4 bananas going black, so time for some baking.  Here are the banana oat buns that resulted (well, all but one of them: we had to do some acceptance testing):

Out of the oven; next step, the freezer (after testing a couple more...)

It looks like some of the buns are attempting to escape!  And in a coordinated attempt, too.

ying yang eggs

I've seen broken yolks before, but never like this.

 

harvest failure

 The carrots have not been a success.

more harvest

The cooker and Cox apple trees are bearing fruit.

I predict apple crumbles to come...

Audley End

We went to a garden show at Audley End.  The show was okay, but we would have liked more "show gardens".  The street food vans were better: I had a very meaty tasty duck wrap.  We didn't go in the house, but we did walk round the gardens.  There was a large kitchen garden with vegetables, and more espalier apple trees than you could shake a stick at.  But for me, the best bit was the woodland walk, with some great trees.

harvest

 My other half planted a few potatoes this year.  We have produce!

Not quite enough for full self-sufficiency, I suspect...

Belvoir Castle

We are slowly making our way up the country to the Glasgow Worldcon via interesting places.  Today, we stopped at Belvoir Castle.

Belvoir Castle

We looked around the castle, which had castly things in it.  Then we went for a walk around the grounds.

The woodland walk was excellent, with many weird, wonderful, and magnificent trees.

weird : lots and lots of branches

wonderful

magnificent

There were also several buildings constructed of wood, or cut into the rock.  

Root and Moss House

Closer to the castle, on the edge of the woodland, there were some stunning hydrangeas.

they were a much more vivid blue in reality

And closer still were the more formal gardens.

green formality

a lovely rose garden, but just past its best

We then drove to a nearby Premier Inn hotel for the night, chosen mainly because it is part of a chain that has EV chargers.  It also had a Brewers Fayre eatery attached, where we had dinner.  The menu had a nice looking mixed grill, but it was clearly too big for one person.  So we shared it, and had a good, filling meal each.  Then we shared an apple crumble for dessert, which also gave us a good-sized portion each.  The result was a really nice substantial meal for two, for less than £25! 

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

home from Hanover

The NNPC conference was a delight: great invited speakers, great contributed talks, great poster discussions (and I'm not just saying that because I was one of the organisers: all the contributors did a fantastic job).  I learned a lot.  I'm looking forward to the next one; hopefully it will be sooner than 5 years next time!

The conference catering was good, too.  A constant flow of tea and coffee, accompanied by fantastic little hazelnut biscuits (each small biscuit had four or five whole hazelnuts!), and rhubarb fruit juice.  Many of us tentatively tried the latter, then agreed we rather liked it: not overly sweetened, but sweet enough to be a refreshing drink.

The lunches and dinners were all vegetarian, as provided by the sponsors.  This was all very flavoursome, but lacked a certain something.  After the conference finished yesterday afternoon, a colleague and I went out for a steak dinner.

This morning I rolled up to the train station to catch the 7am train to the airport.  On the departure board, in the space reserved for the platform number, were three surprisingly short German words.  I typed these in to Google translate.  "Train is cancelled".  Oh dear, but I had allowed enough time to be able to get the next train if necessary.  I went to the information desk.  The woman there tapped at a keyboard, then told me the next train to the airport was in half an hour.  I don't know what made me check further, but I asked if that one was running.  More keyboard tapping.  A lot more keyboard tapping.  Then she said, oh, the next train that is running is the 8am one.  That would have left very little time before boarding, which I wasn't willing to risk.  I asked if there was another way to the airport.  Yes, I could catch a different train, change to a bus, then change to a further train.  I looked at her, she looked at me, and then she said, but a taxi would probably be easier.  I agreed.  Fortunately, I was travelling with another colleague from the conference, so we shared a taxi, and ended up at the airport earlier than we would have got there by the original 7am train.  Time for a leisurely breakfast of coffee and warm cinnamon bun.

The flight was fine.  The train journey from Heathrow to home metamorphosed into a bus journey for part of the way, due to weekend engineering works, which made the trip a little longer than it should have been: about eight and a half hours door-to-door, for an approximately 560 mile journey.  Considerably better progress than the seven hours for what should have been a 180 mile journey last Saturday.

  

UCNC day 5

The final day of the conference.  Next year, in South Korea!

After the business meeting, where we heard exciting details of next year's venue, we had the second half of the Reaction Systems workshop.  We had four talks on systems augmented in different ways, and how they could then be applied to model particular classes of problems.

Then after lunch was the second half of the quantum computing workshop, with talks on quantum finite automata and quantum channel certification.

The conference concluded with a final session of three contributed talks, on extracting barcodes from genomes, a robot relocation algorithm, and tile self-assembly.

In the evening, a small group of us went to a restaurant I'd heard of, but never visited: the Cheesecake Factory.  As well as cheesecakes (so delicious, but spoiled for choice, so we got a different piece each, and kept rotating them around the table), there were also great savoury main courses.  Yum. I ate too much.

sabbatical location?

It's the last day of my visit, and I'm due to fly back this evening.  Walking through MSU campus, I think I've found the ideal place for me to spend a sabbatical...

A turkey isn't just for Christmas ...

We like to have turkey at Christmas: it’s traditional.  But turkeys are big, and there are only two of us.  A medium turkey (for some reason, there no longer seem to be small ones) typically is advertised to serve 10–14 (or in our case, serve two, 5–7 times).  Although we did eat several turkey meals durng the festive season, the excess was frozen.

Today, we ate the last of the 2020 turkey.  Christmas is officially over!

And we probably got closer to 30 regular servings out of it, without stinting.

disappointment, or surprise

What was on the outside

didn’t match what was on the inside:

... hard boiled egg and cress

prices are weird

I had a trip up to Durham today, to visit a colleague.  I bought a coffee at York station to drink on the early train: £2.05.

On the way back, it was lunchtime, so I popped into a Sainsburys near Durham station, and bought a Ginsters Chicken and Mushroom slice, a banana, and a 500ml bottle of Highland Spring water: £1.80 in total.

Caffeine is really expensive, compared to food!

Christmas done

So that’s all the Christmas Day traditions done for another year:

1. exchanging presents
2. eating turkey
3. watching The Queen
4. watching the Doctor Who Christmas special (with two regenerations for the price of one! excellent!)

ECAL 2017, Thursday

Day four of the European Conference of Artificial Life, in Lyon, with a full day of presentations.

Again, the day started with an excellent keynote: Bill Sellers talking on Synthetic palaeontology: Reconstructing Ancient Life using Virtual Robots.  How did dinosaurs walk?  Could they run?  How can we tell when all we have is fossilised bones?  So, the idea is to build a dynamic model in the computer, which can be validated against modern animals like crocodiles and ostriches (although these do have fundamental differences from the original dinosaurs).
Only a feed forward control mechanism is needed in these models. From the dynamic model, it is possible to evolve gaits, and discover how the animals might have moved.  There are constraints that need to be considered, such as bone strength.  This means big dinosaurs probably didn’t run: the bones in their legs would have snapped on impact.  The same technology can be used to investigate the gait of early humans and various hominins, looking at the evolution from a crouched to an upright posture.

After coffee I went to the Morphogenesis session. The talks had a lot of overlap with the Morphogenetic Engineering Workshop on Monday, but added some more detail.

Lunch was organised with special “junior/senior tables” where we oldies got to impart words of wisdom to the up-and-coming generations; or just have a nice chat, actually.

After lunch I went to the session on Applications of ALife, which I was chairing.  Chairing is always a little stressful: you have to listen to the talk in order to have ready a question to ask if no-one else does (but not ask it if there’s a good flow of questions), and also have to timekeep.  The Effects of Environmental Structure on the Evolution of Modularity in a Pattern Classifier was about evolved hierarchical modularity.  Next was EvoMove: Evolutionary-based living musical companion, which I knew something about, since it was an output from the EvoEvo EU project I was involved with (which explains my several previosu trips to Lyon).  The third talk was unfortunetely cancelled, so we had a slightly awkward half-hour break (we don’t move talks around, in case people want to move between sessions).  Finally was Road Detection using Convolutional Neural Networks, spotting the rather ill-defined edges of some narrow roads through countryside.

Then it was off for coffee, followed by the second keynote of the day: Phillippe Faure on Drug addiction and alteration of decision making process.  This was a discussion of a series of complex and subtle experiments on mice and rats, including some that ran for months: how mice balance exploration of their environment with exploitation of resources; how even genetically identical mice have different "personalities"; how their physical and social environment causes individuation; how addiction to eg nicotine also modifies behaviours other than the desire for nicotine, such as favouring immediate reward over uncertainty; and more.  One part I liked was when someone from the audience asked a questions about the difference between reward and punishment: Faure answered about how the mice avoid punishment, but charmingly added “we don’t do those experiments”.

After this was an announcement about next year’s ALife conference in Tokyo.  Then it was the late breaking poster session, accompanied by wine and cheese, which was sufficiently delicious and plentiful that no further meal was needed.  I attended the European Research Council (ERC) grant information session, which introduced me to “Synergy Grants”, which sound ideal for interdisciplinary work (although they do have a success rate of 2%).