view from a London hotel window

I had a very productive and enjoyable time at the ALICE workshop in Copenhagen, working with a great team, modifying and using a system that modifies its own programming language.  We hope to get a paper out of it.  Watch this space!

Unfortunately, the last day of the Workshop clashed with a prior engagement in London: Astrofest 2026.  So I left Copenhagen on the last flight out on Thursday evening.  I knew this was a risky decision at the best of times, and then it started snowing...

The flight was delayed by two hours.

In the queue to board.  Brrr.

That meant I missed the last train from Stansted to London.  Saved by National Express!  I got a coach to Paddington.  I felt very 21st Century as I sat on the coach and used my Greater Anglia app on my phone to cancel my rail ticket and request a refund, for which I was charged £5.

I got to Paddington after 2am: the tube was shut, and there were no taxis.  I downloaded a taxi app (not Uber), and summoned a black cab.  That took me to my hotel off Kensington High Street (and cost more than my coach fare from Stansted).  

I arrived at 3am (4am Copenhagen time), but I arrived.  Five hours sleep, then breakfast (and a photo out of the window) ready for a day of astronomy talks.  

no snow!

The talks were very good, covering the JUICE mission, the Herschel telescope, the Square Kilometre Array (and its relationship to K-Pop; yes, really!), landscape astrophotography (marvellous photos), the history of Guillaume Le Gentil's tragi-comic failure to witness two transits of Venus, and galaxies in 3D (I thought the Hubble Deep field photos were mind-blowing enough; seeing them in 3D takes that experience to another level).

Well worth the travel hassle.  And more tomorrow!

view from a Copenhagen hotel window

I arrived in Copenhagen last night for the ALICE (Artificial Life, Intelligence, Complexity and Evolution) workshop. I'm staying in the same hotel I stayed in 18 months ago, for the Artificial Life conference.  This time, I asked for a room without a staircase up to the bed, since I did not enjoy descending it (particularly in the middle of the night, in the dark, half asleep).  I got a room without a staircase, but still with a slight obstacle course:

The bathroom door is where I am standing; the bed is up the step and round the corner.

I arrived last night an hour later than scheduled, as it is windy (and snowy, and cold) in Copenhagen, so my flight was delayed waiting for the one runway still in operation.

The view from my window this morning illustrates the cold.

Most of the snow has been cleared away, leaving a good walking surface, and it is only a 5 minute walk to the venue.  I have brought extra layers, a hat, scarf, and gloves.  I will survive.

on a technicality...

Today is Twelfth Night, or the twelfth day of Christmas, so it's still (just) Christmas season.  So does this mean it's technically a white Christmas?

8:08 GMT, looking north

9:29 GMT, looking west

Despite it now being clear sky and full (if low) sun, we have very little solar PV generation.  It has to get through an inch of snow covering the panels first!

well, I wasn't expecting that!

When I arrived in York last night at about 10:30, it was (relatively) warm, and dry.

This morning, I got a bit of a shock looking out the window:

But it had all gone by lunchtime.

Schrödinger's cat caught in the act

The snow captures the very moment that the cat splits in two:

imprints of birds

We can’t see any birds at the moment, but we have strong evidence of their existence.

footprints in the snow

clear ... snow ... clear

Half an hour ago, I looked out of the window: nothing special.

Ten minutes ago, I looked out of the window, onto a blizzard:

And now -- it's all clear, and the sun is shining!

As they say: "if you don't like the weather, just wait a few minutes".

memories of snowbirds

Two weeks ago, the weekend that my machine died, there was the last of the snow (I hope). Snow seems to make birds more visible.  So we were watching the bird feeder through the window, and saw several new kinds of birds.  First there was this:

possibly a reed bunting

On consulting our trusty bird book, we decided it was a reed bunting (or possibly a mutant sparrow).  While we were trying to identify it, we noticed another little brown bird hopping around on the ground.  I confidently identified it as a distant sparrow, then looked through the binoculars, saw it had quite a streaked breast, and a thin beak, and swiftly lost my confidence.  After consulting the bird book again, we tentatively decided on meadow pipit (or very mutant sparrow).  Then it flew up into the apple tree: maybe it was a tree pipit?  The bird book helpfully points out distinguishing features in its diagrams, such as differences in colour on tails or wings; unfortunately, there are no features indicated to distinguish between meadow pipits and tree pipits. The text says that the tree pipit is distinguished "from meadow pipit by voice, habitat; also by buffer, less olivaceous colour, pinker legs", and that the meadow pipit "perches less frequently than the tree pipit"; not very helpful features if you have only the one specimen! (The same book helpfully dubs warblers "confusing". Yet despite all this, or maybe because of it, it is my bird identification book of choice.)

While we were debating these identifications, we noticed a larger, more brightly-coloured bird. positively glowing in the sunshine, perched on the large trunk of the apple tree.  What an earth is that?  Feverish page-turning.  No doubt about it this time, it was a fieldfare.  Not only had we never seen one before, I can safely say I'd never even heard of them before.  It flew down to the ground, and pirouetted for our benefit.

fieldfare, showing off for the camera (front shot a little out of focus)

Gorgeous.  Almost makes the snow worthwhile.

fieldfare behind the dogwoods

more snow

We had a couple of inches of snow last night.  The view along the path now shows the bamboo bowed down under its weight.

first snow

The first snow of the year fell last night: only a few centimetres, enough to make things pretty but not cause any problems.  More snow is forecast, so the problems are to come!

a view along the path, through the bamboo

Harry Lauder's Walking Stick

fallen syllepsis

A classic syllepsis, due to Dickens, is "Miss Bolo ... went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair".  Syllepsis is a figure of speech where one word ("in" in this example) is used in two different senses simultaneously ("in a flood of tears" and "in a sedan chair").

I have a small collection of these at my website.  They are usually mildly amusing, or used for effect, resulting in a kind of mental double-take.  So I was surprised, and mildly amused, to see one today that doesn't appear to be used for these reasons:

Fresh snow and temperatures have fallen over the Cairngorms
--- BBC News, 31 March 2012

Someone must have enjoyed writing that!

And note also that, despite the date of this blog post, the original appeared yesterday.

Winter -- better late than never?

Saturday night we had the first snow of winter (it waited until February?!), so on Sunday we awoke to a white, quiet world.  I think I love the quiet of a snowscape almost as much as the crisp whiteness itself.