Joe in Cambridge

My new team

2010-03-23T23:41:00.053Z

I made it out to my first professional football (soccer) match, going down to London with my housemates to watch West Ham United take on Wolverhampton Wanderers. On the right is Matt, my English housemate, who has been a lifelong West Ham fan. Last year I was repeatedly told I'd need to pick a team to support, so I staked my lot with the Wolves this year. It's their first year in the Premier League, so I figured they were in need of some fans.

The system is vastly different than American sports. The money gap between teams is enormous, there's no revenue sharing or salary cap, and teams get sent up and down between the different levels each year. Last year the Wolves finished at the top of the Championship (the league just below the Premier League) so they were promoted to the big time. Of course, if they finish in the bottom 3 out of 20 teams, they'll be sent right back. That made this game quite important, as both West Ham and Wolves were tied for 16th coming into it-one spot above relegation.

The result was fantastic for the Wolves, with a decisive 3-1 win that's made it very likely they can remain at the top. For West Ham, meanwhile, the loss at home was a disaster. I've never seen fans react so badly-there were frequent chants of "You're not fit to wear that shirt!" and "Give us our money back!" West Ham (the Hammers) are a gritty team from London's not-nicest neighborhood, with some pretty tough looking supporters. The possibility of them being sent down felt real, I could sense how crushing that would be to dedicated fans. I can't imagine what I would think if the Oakland A's were sent to Triple A after a bad season (though maybe if they move I'll get an approximation).

Beyond the fantastic fan support (the first half, which was scoreless for 40 minutes, they fans were very excited and loud and were singing and chanting in unison). The game itself was a also a revelation. Like watching ice hockey live for the first time, this is a sport that is just completely different in person on a big stage. Being elevated above the pitch, able to see the angles, brings a new appreciation that gets somehow lost on TV. Also the sheer speed and distance of ball movement was amazing. I found myself completely glued to the action at all times.

This was good because there's no getting up and walking around at a football match. There are only 90 minutes of play so everybody is seated the entire time. Alcohol isn't even allowed in the seats and there are no roaming vendors. Here Matt and Andrew are finishing a beer before the game. Most people seem to mill around outside the stadium eating and drinking in the hour before the match, then are seated during the whole contest. Frankly 90 minutes + 20 minutes of halftime is a much more reasonable length for sporting event than 3-4 hours of baseball.

Another interesting thing is the ticketing system. Each team organises its own supporter's club and you literally can't get tickets without joining. Technically I had to register as an official West Ham supporter to get these seats. There are a limited number of tickets for the visiting team, but these go right to the Wolves supporter's club. They physically separate fans of the opposing teams, and in fact it's against the rules to wear the other team's jersey in most of the stadium. Makes sense given the violent history of football hooligans.

Finally, the in-stadium gambling is quite a different experience. The table here is taking bets on the game. You can bet on pretty much anything.

You just fill out a little sheet like this with your picks and hand the guy your money. For example, I bet one pound each on the final score being 2-1 Wolverhampton, and on Nenad Miljas scoring the final goal. Both lost. It's a strange twist to the sporting experience in that the gambling is so normalised.

Overall, I loved the experience and am more enamored with my adopted team. They remind me of some of the things I liked about the A's. They'll always be underdogs because of the small size of their home town, but they fight hard and have very smart management. I probably won't get to this point, but Go Wolves.

End of Term dinners

2010-03-13T01:14:00.001Z

Research students don't really have "terms" in the undergraduate sense of the word where you get to stop working and relax for a while. There actually aren't many "stop working" occasions as a grad student if you're doing it right. But, since professors and undergrads still work on a term system, towards the end of term there's usually a raft of dinners and celebrations.

First up, our research group had a dinner together at my supervisor Ross' house. That's him playing the bagpipe to entertain the crowd. Needless to say the computer security dinner wasn't the most rambunctious of the week, but it was fun seeing people outside of the office.

Next up was rugby dinner. No pictures of that, it was a strictly no-cameras-allowed evening and with pretty good cause. That was definitely the most rambunctious night of the week, with a bunch of young rugby players eating a formal meal in tuxedos, but most of them loaded on two kegs of ale and playing drinking games the whole time. Football dinner (above) was a little bit more relaxed. Dress code was black tie on top, football on bottom, though I changed it to black tie on top, rugby on bottom. The three on the right above are me and my two housemates Andrew and Matt. Formal sports team dinners are a very British concept, with the captain giving many long toasts recapping the season, but they provided a nice cap to a long year of sports. I am pretty worn out from trying to play rugby, football, and basketball this year. There were good results though. Churchill rugby had a very strong second half, including a huge upset over Trinity to make the semifinals, where we lost to Jesus. It was the best finish in the 30+ year history of Churchill rugby, which I'm glad to be a part of. Churchill MCR football was knocked out in the quarterfinals, but also had a very strong year. Even Churchill basketball put together a nice end to the season, winning the final two games to qualify for the playoffs and avoid getting relegated.

With sports wrapped up, I went down to London on Friday night to see Wicked with the Gates crowd. It was my first musical in London, and it was well worth it. There were a few plot holes in the play, but the production qualities were fantastic and it was a very enjoyable night, and I got to catch up with many friends I hadn't seen for most of the term.

Finally, Saturday night was MCR guest night, a large grad-students only party with a (slightly ahead of schedule) St. Patrick's Day theme. You can see our varying interpretations above, between green bow tie, Irish rugby player, and leprechaun.

I had a lot of guests come, which made it lots of fun, and it turned out to be a very lucky night. At the craps table with my friends Elsa and Noah, we managed to turn our 500 initial chips into 10,000 which earned us... well, theoretically a chance to win a free bottle of wine, but it turns out that probably never existed. Oh well. By the end of all this I was pretty tired from all the end-of-term festivities.

Women's Varsity Match in Oxford

2010-03-06T00:48:00.048Z

Made it to Oxford for the first time to catch the Women's Varsity rugby match. Going to Oxford after a year and half in Cambridge is a bit strange, it seems like an alternate-universe version of Cambridge. For example, the towns use the exact same street signs in terms of size and font, but Cambridge's a are black on white and Oxford's are white on black. The universities are set up in a very similar fashion, with colleges running the show and having many old, exclusive buildings. The colleges have such similar names it seems like a joke. Six have the exact same names, and then there are Magdalen and Magdalene, St. Catherine's and St. Catharine's, St. Edmund Hall and St. Edmund's College, and Queens' College and The Queens' College. You get the idea, the places almost go out of their way to seem different despite being almost exactly the same. Unfortunately we couldn't actually see very many because, like in Cambridge, they limit entrance into most colleges to students only.

There are some differences though. First is the river, the Isis, as seen above. Unlike at Cambridge the river doesn't figure prominently into the layout of town, it misses the center and there isn't much built along it.The city overall is about 17% less charming than Cambridge. Besides the river, the main streets are pavement and not cobblestone, and they're wide and straight. Not nearly as memorable as the crooked little streets of Cambridge.

I did happen by chance upon the Stanford House, and chatted with a student there who's doing a year abroad from Stanford. Very strange to see Stanford being involved in such an old place.

The match went very well for Cambridge, with the team taking a 25-0 lead at half time and carrying that home as the final score.

Here we are supporting our (American) friend Talia, the captain of the Cambridge team. If that flag looks familiar, yes, it's the same one from the hockey game last week. That flag has been busy spreading freedom all over this country.

It's a long bus ride to Oxford but it was great to support Talia and get a chance to see a small bit of Oxford. I will have to return some time and spend a little more time seeing the place.

USA-Canada Olympic Hockey

2010-02-28T00:42:00.000Z

My work schedule during the winter months (and the time difference) prevented me from watching much of the Vancouver Olympics. But, despite being in the middle of finishing up a big paper, I did manage to watch the gold medal match between the USA and Canada in ice hockey, along with about 30 other Gates scholars. As can be seen, we had a number of Canadians and Americans present, and the flags were out. The US lost in overtime 3-2, but it was a fantastic match and a nice brief moment of nationalism to distract from the grind.

Stonehenge & Bath

2010-02-20T23:59:00.024Z

Finally made it out to perhaps Britain's most famous monument, Stonehenge. It's a three and a half hour drive from Cambridge so we were out at 7:30 in the morning with a big bus to take 60 Gates Scholars out to see the Stonehenge monument.

I'd summarize Stonehenge as an ancient version of Mt. Rushmore. You know what to look like since you've seen it so many times, it's a bit surreal to see such a famous site in person, and then there's not much more to say about it after you snap a few photos. What disappointed me is that there's little historical info at the site, just a few words that "nobody knows what the stones were put up for." I feel like they should be encouraging kids to let their imaginations run wild. My guess? They put up the stones to encourage other stone age tribes to visit this lonely part of the English countryside, and trick still works today.

We spent the rest of the day in the comparatively modern city of Bath. It's one of the most architecturally interesting places in England, being very close to a stone quarry everything in town is built from magnificent stone.

And of course, the namesake Roman bath. Not very well preserved, but still quite impressive and interesting to see the complicated system to pump hot spring water in for the old Roman aristocracy to enjoy a hot bath in their colonial outpost.

The rest of Bath is just a very nice city with beautiful buildings and a few very nice parks. I really liked the hills as well, being used to the very flat terrain of East Anglia.

If you squint, I'm somewhere in this picture. A little camouflaged and a little off the ground, but there I am enjoying the sites in the middle of the Royal Crescent, a magnificent semi-circle of houses with a few magnificent trees in the middle. I think the look on my face says "I need to remember to see more of England while I'm here."

Poland, F19 Cup Champions!

2010-02-14T23:48:00.000Z

My roommate Andrew, a huge football fan, and I have been playing an entire simulated World Cup on FIFA 2010 on the Xbox 360. The games only take 10 minutes, but it's still a lot of games (63, to be exact) and we've been working on it since November. It's a pretty good opportunity to unwind at the end of the day. In a shocker, Poland was the eventual winner over France, winning 6-3 in the finals with the help of 3 goals in the last 10 minutes. Here I am celebrating the win. Time for a serious video game break, we may have to turn to board games next.

Spring Ball

2010-02-12T23:36:00.008Z

Churchill Springball tonight. Here I am in my tux as usual with a few new friends from the MCR this year. Not quite as big of a group as we had for last year's spring ball, but the ball was probably better organized this year, and they had a cool theme of the 1960's, celebrating Churchill's 50th anniversary.

There was all the usual ball elements-tons of music, food, drinks, and entertainment. One of the highlights which was new this year though was Human Table Football. Just like the mini version you're tethered to a rope and can only move laterally in one line. Like everything else in spring ball it's a little silly doing all this in formal wear but most people have had too much to drink by this point in time to really notice.

Three Sports

2010-02-06T22:14:00.012Z

No pictures, but I did play in three matches for my college today. Football (soccer) at 11:00, rugby at 13:00, basketball at 20:00. Churchill won all three as well, making it probably the most productive sports day of my life. Of course, not the most productive work day, and I'm pretty sore now. I still love sports, I may be getting to the point though where the utility of them as an "excuse to get out of the lab" is wearing off. I've got plenty of those these days.

Tenerife

2010-01-30T22:14:00.032Z

I just returned from a week in Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain where I attended the 2010 Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Sounds pretty sophisticated, in reality it's a nice academic conference that gets very good funding from a few banks and is in a different tropical locale every winter. I gave a talk on presenting my paper on guessing statistics for personal knowledge questions.

Tenerife certainly fits the bill. This beach was about 200 m from the conference room. I was able to go swimming most days after the presentations ended, I also did some climbing on the rocks in the left of this picture and jumped off them into the water, which was cold but very refreshing.

It was a serious conference, but with a very upbeat and fun vibe. On Tuesday evening they had a session for impromptu talks on work in progress with the traditional unlimited rum from the conference's Caribbean origins. I mistakenly gave a serious talk about online protest, with a mixed reaction, though I did work a few off-color jokes in.

The island itself is surprisingly large and has very interesting geography due to its volcanic origins. This peak here is El Teide-at 3,715 m it's actually (by a good margin) the tallest peak in "Spain," though geographically quite far from the mainland.

Didn't get to go to the very top-although they have a cable car to take you there-but I had lots of fun climbing around the various smaller rock formations formed decades ago from huge hunks of lava being thrown from the peak.

The island also has a fascinating history. The Spaniards have been there for quite some time and built some very nice villages in the hills, like this one, La Laguna.

Walking around there are dozens of open-courtyard homes like this one with beautiful gardens built by the old nobility. It's enough to have earned UNESCO world heritage status for the town, which they are happy to remind you of as they try to sell some of the local fare-a fortified wine called Presos Canarias and rum-laden honey.

Much of the island feels pretty touristy, which it is, as a major destination for Germans and Brits. I didn't feel like I got a very good impression of the local scene, but I did get the biggest pizza I've ever seen served to me, which I was unable to finish.

Still, was a nice break from the Cambridge winter and for the £40 plane fares you can get I'd consider going back.

New York

2010-01-10T22:13:00.043Z

On my way back to England I spend a long weekend in New York with my old friend Alex. I've been to NY quite a few times now but Times Square is always pretty impressive/overwhelming. This year they build a new glowing red staircase in the middle of the whole square. I've visited Alex a few times in NY and seems like we always catch a movie around Times Square, this time it was "Youth in Revolt."

The great thing about New York is that there is basically an inexhaustible list of things to see so even when you've been before there are new things. I'd wanted to see the Bronx Zoo for a while, and despite the frigid weather that kept a few animals inside we made it up there. I've been to many zoos, and this one compared well, with very nice old buildings and a good collection of animals.

The nerd highlight of the trip (which of course is the overall highlight as well) was the NY Hall of Science, a hands on science museum for kids. We didn't get to see nearly all of it but this was one of the best museums of this type I've been to. Two exhibits in particular were perfect for me. They had one on sports science, where we got to see how fast we could throw, test our balance on a fake surf board, and test our reaction time in a fake drag racing car. Then they had an exhibit on network theory, which blew me away because this is a pretty new research area and one where I've published, and they came up with some really fun exhibits. Above is a large display of Conway's Game of Life, one of computer science's best public facing demos. Quite a fun visit.

The least nerdy part of the trip was our tour of (new) Yankee Stadium, which was Alex's gift to her roommate Lydia. Here they are in the dugout. I got yelled at for trying to pick up the dugout phone and call for a reliever. It was a neat tour, we got to see the locker rooms and dugouts and a few other places you always see on TV but never get to go. They also had heaps of historical Yankees stuff, and believe it or not, some Yankees merchandise for sale.

I also made it to Princeton on Sunday afternoon to visit Jess, and we watched the unbelievable Packers-Cardinals playoff game. All in all a great trip that broke up my San Francisco-London journey and avoided an overnight flight. Thanks to my great hosts in NY.

Christmas Break

2010-01-07T22:30:00.035Z

I was lucky to spend over three weeks at home over Christmas. Here I am in London getting ready to fly home with my favorite sister. It was really nice, it worked out that I could catch the same LHR-SFO flight she was taking on her way home from Russia.

Being a busy grad student I had to work quite a bit at home. I spent the first week or so finishing up a research paper, and was lucky enough to visit the EFF, an organization I've looked up to for a long time, and give a talk and help work with them on the recent Facebook privacy mess.

Of course, Christmas is mostly a time to relax with friends and family, which I did find some time to do. That's us above winning pub quiz night at the Rogue Ale House, with my former roommates in San Francisco and two siblings.

Here's my family in Union Square celebrating my mom's birthday a few days before Christmas. We went to a steakhouse, not the best food for a vegetarian but it was great to have the whole family together.

Dad's birthday was a few days later (on Christmas itself), this is the family looking very festive celebrating Christmas, birthday, and a very late Thanksgiving all at once (note the pumpkin pie doubling as a birthday cake).

My favorite cat, Fletcher, was missing from that family photo but he was around sleeping on the couch for most of the break.

One of the stranger moments was when our dad brought home swine flu vaccinations for the whole family. Depending on you who ask, this picture is either the result of my dad being the worse shot-giver in the world, or my brother being the biggest wimp about taking shots in the world. Needless to say I got mine from my mom.

Football was of course a big part of the break, watching bowl games on TV and playing a pickup game on Christmas day. Here's a big group of us watching the Emerald Bowl in San Francisco a few days after Christmas.

Finally, New Years in San Francisco with my old roommates. Definitely miss them and the apartment. Here Tyler and I are celebrating 2010 on a nice night in San Francisco with about 60 other people crammed onto our roof with no guardrails. Luckily nobody fell off, I'll consider that a good omen for the year.

Wrapping up the term

2009-12-12T19:53:00.020Z

I'm getting ready to return home for a few weeks for a break, it seemed a good time to reflect on my experience in Cambridge so far. Though I've been here for about 14 months it seems like "the first year" is over. While I never have as much free time as I'd like to, I have gotten to do a lot of fun trips and my experience as a PhD student has mostly been positive. I've worked in a number of different areas and become quite interested in social networking privacy issues and graph privacy. In the past week I posted my analysis of Facebook's new privacy changes, and they were used in the news and and by privacy advocates

I still have a long way to go in my field and my career but I'm enjoying the journey right now.

Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T02:01:00.014Z

Thanksgiving isn't quite the same in the UK, when you have to go to work all day, there's no football on TV and most of the locals have only heard of the holiday because they watched it on 'Friends.' In some ways it was nice though because since so many grad students are away from their families they come together in bigger groups. I actually went to two Thanksgivings this year. The first was on Sunday and had about 50 other Gates scholars.

The second was on Thanksgiving itself and was an all-vegetarian affair hosted by my good friends Stella and Talia at their place. That big mound in the middle is a tofurkey, though it was actually fashioned as a tofurtle:

In the end, Thanksgiving is about being close to people you care about, and though I miss my real family I was still realizing I had a lot to be thankful for.

More Trivia!

2009-11-12T13:13:00.000Z

Wrapping up my crazy week I hosted another trivia night tonight. It was frantic as always writing the questions and my quest for perfection made it take way longer than it should have, but it was a great event in the end, I had a good group of friends show up and (I hope) everybody enjoyed the questions, even if they didn't know all of the answers. A few people complained about the difficulty as always, but Cambridge grad students are smart, only 5/40 questions weren't answered by any of the 4 teams so I was happy with it.

Though I am happy to write trivia questions just for the run of it, I was able to make it a charity night pretty easily, raising £50 for the FreeBSD foundation, and probably getting a few people to have heard of their work who wouldn't have otherwise.

Robbie in Cambridge

2009-11-12T01:00:00.002Z

Special treat today as one of my best friends from home, Robbie Reid, came up to Cambridge from London on short notice. It's been a crazy week having just gotten back from Belgium and Russia, but Robbie's a good enough friend that I could always make time. We spent the morning walking around town and checking out some of the sights around Cambridge as seen above.

Then in the afternoon Robbie suited up and played rugby with me for Churchill. It was a slight bending of the rules of college membership, but it was a great experience to get to play together. I think Robbie captured the spirit of Sir Winston nicely enough that he should qualify for honorary college membership. He managed to score a try on English soil which was a great experience, though we lost the game at the very end on a tough break.

Cambridge is really a great spot to visit, I hope more old friends will get a chance to pass through while I'm here.

Russia

2009-11-10T01:13:00.000Z

It wasn't easy or cheap, but I made it to Russia for 5 days to visit Alissa, my sister who's studying in Moscow this term. As seen above I got to deal with the Russian visa process and it's "special" rules for Americans. I was a bit intimidated by all the rules and fine print and the prospect of transliterating my information into Cyrillic without knowing what any of it meant, but it turns out the whole thing is mostly a money-making boondoggle at this point (assuming it was ever about more than that). They even managed to compress my surname by 2 letters (BONNEAU→БОННИ), showing an impressive grasp of French phonetics that I've rarely seen amongst Americans.

Starting out in the subway was a nice concise preview of my experience in Russia. It was a mix of surprising beauty you'd never see in "the West" (check out the chandeliers), big crowds of people in hurries, loads of security/policeman/soldiers everywhere, and a few things that seem right out of a Russian Halloween costume, like the furry hats (ushanka).

Despite my fears though it wasn't all that difficult to get around. The level of English is low but Alissa speaks enough Russian to get by. The food was okay, even for vegetarians, though I had to take a few leaps of faith I got to try many of the famous things, including some meat-free borscht.

In many ways the modern Russia is as capitalist as you can get. They certainly will sell you as many nesting dolls (matryoshka) as you can buy. Right across from the Kremlin is the GUM, one of the biggest and nicest shopping malls I've ever seen. There's clearly a lot of money flowing around in some parts of the city.

Other parts, not as much. This guy is selling knives, and yes, a taser which he is giving a live demo of.

The Soviet era is still all over the place though. They have a whole park dedicated to old statues of Stalin, Lenin, and Marx which we visited, some are still in quite normal places though, and the hammer and sickle is built into so many buildings and monuments I think they've given up trying to remove every one of them. They don't seem particularly keen to wipe it all away though. I got the feeling that there's more of an indifference to the era than anything else. It's quite different from traveling in Germany where Nazi era history is very difficult to spot, and it makes it much more interesting to visit. Lenin in particular seems to be fondly remembered as they have his body on display still in Red Square. We waited about 30 minutes for 30 seconds of viewing, with soldiers telling us to keep moving throughout the whole thing.

Alissa and I saw a ton of historical sights-Lenin's Mausoleum, the Kremlin, St. Basil's Cathedral, Christ the Savior's Cathedral, Victory Park, the Statue Park, the Military History park, the Novodevichy Convent and Cemetery, and many others I'm surely forgetting to name. Of course, Russian's view of history is very different from what I learned in American schools, as this plaque above from the the Modern Russian History Museum (formerly Museum of the Revolution) demonstrates.

As always though it's not about the big things as much as the little things. This is an underground passage between two subway lines which had one of the most amazing collections of art for sale I'd ever seen.

And the cemetery was the most creative I've ever seen. Most cemeteries are solemn and dreary, but this one seemed more to be a celebration of some of Moscow's residents. People's tombstones were elaborately sculpted to represent them. I loved this mathematician, who had some of his equations carved into his tomb.

I loved the whole trip despite the weather and the mild hardship (we badly botched our attempts to catch a show at either the Obraztsov Puppet Theatre or the Nikulin circus). Alissa was a great travel guide though and with her experience living there a few months made a big difference in how much I was able to discover.

I could sense major changes going on all over the country. I have a sad feeling that if my children travel to Russia they won't see it a being so much different than the US. Poland certainly shocked me with how Western it seems to be becoming. But for now, Russia is still a unique and amazing place.

Networking in Leuven, Beligum

2009-11-06T00:53:00.001Z

I spent 4 days this week in Leuven, Belgium at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. They have a huge computer security research lab and our probably our closest colleagues in Europe. There are many similarities to Cambridge, with some beautiful old buildings and a downtown packed with students, though everything here is a bit bigger than in Cambridge. I didn't get to spend a whole lot of time exploring the town but enough to appreciate it.

I spent most of the time working, I gave a talk about some of my research on guessing personal knowledge questions and served as a panelist at a one-day workshop on social networking privacy. I could definitely see myself spending some time here as a postdoc if I get the opportunity. I owe many thanks to my host, Claudia Diaz, for giving me a great week away from Cambridge.

Halloween

2009-10-31T01:58:00.004Z

Spent Halloween at Churchill College for a formal hall and a Halloween Pav with some good friends. Andrew wore the most creative costume: a mum his mother brought from Texas (one of the strangest Texas traditions I've ever heard of) along with a Cow costume to be a prize-winning steer. I just took out the old Senegalese Mouride outfit which I also wore last year. Low on creativity but it still turned heads.

My stroke of creativity came with my pumpkin: I carved the entire globe into it. It took me an hour or two, but I got all 7 continents, the oceans, the Panama Canal, and a bunch of Islands, all the way down to Tasmania, which got a complement from a friendly Aussie. I guess all those hours playing GeoSense are good for something.

Trivia Night!

2009-10-06T22:47:00.002+01:00

Tonight I hosted a trivia night for the new students in Churchill college. I had some experience writing trivia questions but this was my first crack at researching, writing, and then hosting a trivia night as a one man show.

No pictures, but you can see the questions here. Overall it was a big success though, I got feedback that the questions were tough but interesting, and a few people really enjoyed it so I'm planning to host a few more throughout the year.

Am I Ready For Some Football?

2009-10-03T16:55:00.002+01:00

I'm planning to play much more football (soccer) this year, partly because my two roommates are captain and ex-captain of the Churchill MCR (grad student) team, but also I've wanted to improve at the sport in my time here. I wouldn't mind playing more American football as well but this is what I can get. We played in a 5 vs. 5 tournament today, and it was a great opportunity for me to improve. I don't have any pictures of me since I had the only camera, but here are my two roommates for the year:

Matt Warner, English student doing a PhD in molecular biology (focusing on diabetes research), here playing keeper.

Andrew Marin, American student doing a PhD in materials science (focusing on photovoltaic solar cells), in white here going for the ball.

Gates Retreat

2009-09-30T22:55:00.001+01:00

I spent the last four days at the annual Gates Scholars Retreat in Ambleside, in what's known as "the lake district." Made me realise it's been a year since I turned up in Cambridge as I had many good memories from last year's trip. This year brought more fun and (many) more new people to meet.
Here we are hiking. You can see the type of countryside in the Lake District, lots of green hills, clouds, and rain, though much less rain than last year.

Lake Windermere is one of the main tourist attractions, it's an enormous lake that's long and has many narrow inlets to explore by kayak, supposedly it inspired William Wordsworth and the Lake Poets. We had more fun playing kayak polo, trying to pass a tennis ball around and score goals.
The town is very nice as well, with a nice river and some old buildings and a cemetery with Wordsworth and some other famous residents.

Finally we stopped at Tatton Gardens on the way back, a traditional and well-kept garden complete with a hedge maze. I'm here at the center, of course I couldn't pass up the opportunity to climb up the statue in the middle. Should be a fun new year, meeting all the new people has me feeling invigorated, though I'm reminded how much social distraction comes about in the fall.

Chariots of Fire

2009-09-20T00:11:00.000+01:00

Today was the annual Chariots of Fire relay race in Cambridge. It's named for the movie, but is actually a 6 x 1.7 mile relay which I think is unlike anything run in the movie. There were almost 400 teams running so the handover point was pretty hectic.

To be honest I didn't want anything to do with this race but I agreed to run a leg because Churchill's MCR team was short on runners. I normally don't enjoy distance running too much and particularly not races, but I actually surprisingly enjoyed this. I liked the relay aspect of it, the course was beautiful and weaved through many famous Cambridge sites (and downtown Cambridge is pretty spectacular).

I also didn't have nearly as many problems as I was expecting. I felt pretty strong and passed lots of people, I finished my leg in just over 11 minutes which is much faster than I would have expected, and our whole team had a strong showing. I don't think I'll take up running seriously anytime soon but it was a nice day out.

Killer Glass Attack

2009-09-19T00:07:00.003+01:00

I've been taking my bike out frequently, and loving it, but I had a freak accident today and managed to simultaneously puncture both of my tires out on the road going down to Linton.

The damage was pretty bad. Neither tire is salvageable.

I took the culprit bottle home as a souvenir. It was fractured exactly in the worst way, with a razor-sharp edge angled directly into the oncoming tire and a very solid base on the ground so it didn't give way at all. Hopefully I'll ride bikes the rest of my life and never see that again.

New Apartment

2009-09-06T23:58:00.001+01:00

Over the past year, I slowly posted interesting items I collected on my bulletin board. It worked out nicely as the board was full just as it's time to move into a new place.

I only moved about 100 meters so I carried everything in one trip in a big wagon. It was a simple move but unpacking all this took a while, it's amazing how fast you can accumulate clutter from the original two suitcases of things I took here.

My new place is a three-bedroom flat, originally designed as housing for a college professor and his family, but opened to grad students this year so I jumped on it with my friends Andrew and Matt. We have a lot more space now and it's very nice to have a place all our own like this.

The balcony is probably the best part, it's big enough to play soccer on and has a great view of college. Not quite like my roof in San Francisco, but it's a nice upgrade for the year.

Poland

2009-09-02T00:09:00.008+01:00

I didn't really know what to expect from the last 4 days in Poland. Poland has always been the far-off land of ancestors in my mind, and the reality of hopping on a plane from London and being there in a few hours was a bit strange.

Fortunately, I was pretty impressed with Warsaw as I walked around. It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and there was a festival in town so the main street had crowds milling about for miles. The city was surprisingly beautiful, with parks and monuments all around downtown, and it also seemed to be buzzing with new buildings going up everywhere. The festival was celebrating Warsaw's international community and there was an interesting diversity of foreigners about, I even found some Senegalese selling jus de bissap who were happy to chat in French. Not what I was expecting I guess, but Warsaw is a very modern city, partially as a result of being almost entirely destroyed in the war. We learned all about it at the Warsaw Uprising museum, which was fascinating. The perspective on the war is obviously quite different in Poland, it seemed from the way the story was told there remains a bitterness about Poland's fate and the lack of aid the "west" provided despite being allied with Poland. Visiting on the seventieth anniversary of the German anniversary, it seemed to be a constant backdrop for the trip, not just in the museums but in the graffiti on street corners which still mentions the uprising of '44. The Polish today seemed remarkably friendly, especially our couchsurfing host Agata, who gave us a great place to stay in Warsaw just outside downtown despite having exams this week (thanks Agata!).

The food was a mixed bag. There wasn't too much for vegetarians but I did get to try a few new things, like the dumplings here, a fried-cheese dish sold on the street, and of course a Pierogi.
The necklace of mini-bagels was a pretty bizarre item. I'm thinking it's a tourist thing, or at least only tourists were putting it around their neck.

Krakow had a quite different feel, with more of its historic buildings preserved. There was quite a lot to see at the main castle, including a few museums on Polish history, a few royal collections, and a bell bigger than I could have imagined. The Zygmunt bell here weighs 11 tons and takes 12 people to ring.

There's also a statue below the castle of a dragon which actually breathes fire. These are the reasons you travel. I just never would have thought of building such a statue, but it fit in quite well with the area.

We wrapped up the trip by going to the Auschwitz concentration camp outside Krakow. It seemed appropriate as the war and the Holocaust seemed to be a sad subtext to the trip. The experience of visiting a former extermination camp is quite different from reading about things or going to a museum. It was more raw but also more banal. The grounds of the camp are huge and minimally maintained, big sections are essentially ruins, and the tour seemed to focus on small details of the period in place of presenting any overall narrative of morals. To me this was much more powerful, as the site stands quietly in the woods as an eerie testimony to the past.

It was a great trip and wrapped up quite a nice year of traveling around Europe for me. I probably won't get much travel in until the spring due to work, the Christmas vacation, and the weather. But it was the best kind of trip in that it pushed me to a range of new experiences in just a few days.

Sister in Town

2009-08-29T00:09:00.007+01:00

This week I had the pleasure of hosting my favorite sister while she was on her way to study in Moscow for the quarter, stopping in England for a few days.
This photo summarizes the beginning of her visit. I can sympathize though, as she had only a brief time after finishing her internship and then had to get ready for a semester in Russia and make an 8 hour time change. I actually got some useful reading done while she slept off the jet lag.
Soon though we were up and about and enjoyed the sights of Cambridge. Here we are on a punt. Alissa actually took over punting for a while and did a very admirable job. We did a tour of the main sights around town, like King's, Trinity, and St. John's, as well as the river and the parks.We also did some fun new things I hadn't done before. Here we are on top of the tower at Great St. Mary's Church, the highest point in town, where we had a view over the whole town. It was something like 20 or 30 flights on a tiny, narrow staircase, but it was worth it. We also visited two museums. The Whipple museum of the history of science, which has a neat collection of scientific instruments like telescopes and slide rules from hundreds of years ago, and the Museum of Zoology.
We also had some nice time just hanging out with some of my friends here, cooking dinners and such. I wanted to make sure Alissa got the full UK experience, so here we are watching a big soccer game at a pub. Finally we got to spend some time in London. I still have only spent a handful of days in London, so there was plenty to see. We went to the British Museum (here we are next to a famous dog statue), Buckingham Palace, Green Park, and Harrod's department store. Buckingham Palace is only open for tours for one month a year so we lucked out on the timing.
We lucked out on the timing in general as I got a chance to spend some time with Alissa, and she got a chance to see England and get some rest before her adventures in Russia. It was only a brief moment but it made a very nice end to the summer for me and reminded me what a neat place I get to live in.

My New Ride

2009-08-22T00:09:00.004+01:00

Here's a look at my newest means of transportation. I had wanted a road bike for some time but it was hard to procure one in the UK which hasn't caught up on the craigslist concept quite yet. I ended up buying this lightly used Cannondale off of eBay UK, and the seller was kind enough to drive down and deliver it because his wife wanted to visit Cambridge anyways (it really is a nice downtown). It's my third road bike and it's beautiful, in shiny silver, and being a Cannondale it has "Made in USA" prominently, along with the stars and stripes. I'm tentatively going with the nickname "Silvia," the bike is pretty enough that it deserves a female name.

I think I got a good deal, although bikes have so many hidden costs associated with them it's not a cheap hobby. In particular I had to order pedals, shoes, a bag, a pump, and some other nonsense.
The first feeling of being on a well tuned-bike on the open road was worth it though. England is a fantastic place for a bike, mostly flat, with endless miles of winding country roads and many small towns to visit. Here I am on a nice bend by an old stone church. Except for the bugs and the weather this country is a biking paradise. I remember living in Seattle owning a bike made a huge difference in the amount of the surrounding area I saw. Hopefully I'll get to do a fair bit of biking here as well, because there's a huge amount of England outside of Cambridge that seems worth exploring

Farewell to the MPhils

2009-08-15T00:05:00.004+01:00

This time of the year in August, many of my friends from Churchill and the Gates Scholarship program who were studying for one-year MPhil degrees in Cambridge are heading back to the US and elsewhere, so it's been a long steady stream of goodbyes. Two good friends from Gates, Brian and Garth, left in the past two days.
To say goodbye to Garth we went out for full English breakfast (as opposed to the dreaded continental breakfast), which consists of a huge plate of eggs, toast, beans, and sausage.
We followed up with the less traditional game of tennis-golf. Less traditional as in, we just made it up in the last few weeks but it's already become a classic. Kind of like frisbee golf, you pick objects as the "hole" then have to hit them with your tennis ball in as few strokes as possible. There are a lot of places around Churchill to have interesting holes with bouncing the ball off of obstacles, the game is amazingly entertaining for how simple it is. That's the kind of innovation you get when Gates scholars from different fields mix.

Triathlon in Antwerp

2009-08-03T23:57:00.005+01:00

Of course, I didn't complete the triathlon, but my friend Andrew (running above) did and I went along for the ride with a big group of friends. Andrew completed the Antwerp half-Ironman on Sunday, we watched the race and cheered, then spent Monday exploring Brussels. It was a very easy trip on the Eurostar and it was surprisingly fun to watch the triathlon. We spent some time at each of the "transition points" where the racers switch from swimming to biking, then biking to running, and were able to follow Andrew quite a bit.

The biggest challenge was probably getting Andrew's bike to Belgium and into the hostel we stayed at (here we are lugging it up the stairs). Towing the case around the cobbled streets of Antwerp was probably as tiring for me as the actual race was for Andrew.

Here Matt and Talia are eating a Belgian waffle in Brussels with a whole pile of toppings. When in Rome, I guess. Although these types of waffles with toppings on them seem to be set up for tourists.

Jess and I, being sophisticated world travelers, paid a visit to the European Parliament which is hosted in Brussels along with many other EU buildings. The building itself isn't too surprising but they gave a nice tour and I learned much more about how the EU functions. Plus, they had a ton of free EU promotional material, like posters and postcards, which we cleaned them out on.

Summer in CA

2009-07-17T08:57:00.001+01:00

I had the good fortune to make a trip home for the summer, combining some work activities with seeing friends and family. It was a short, week and a half trip, but I packed a lot in and had a great time.

First day home I went on a nice bike ride and then went to trivia night at Rogue Ale House in the city with old roommates and co-workers, and we managed to win. Friday I worked a bit at home, played tennis, then Saturday spent most of the day with my brother and sister and had a BBQ in the evening with old friends.

Sunday we went out on the bay sailing with the family and some old and new friends. That's my old roommate Dave at the helm-last year at this time we were sailing a tiny boat in Mexico. Monday was more work, because I gave research talks at Facebook and at Stanford on Tuesday, then attended a conference in Mountain View on Wednesday-Friday.

Friday night was maybe the highlight, as the family and a few friends went to an A's game on my birthday. We had a very nice group, it was an exciting game, and they were holding their annual 'dog day at the park' promotion, so the outfield bleachers were packed with dogs and it was a very fun time out.

I also got my name on the scoreboard (thanks Mom and Dad!), which was a first for me.

Beep If You Love Engineering!

2009-07-05T01:10:00.003+01:00

It's nice to get back to the simple joy of being engineer. In it's basic form, being an engineer is seeing a problem, unscrewing the thing, thinking of all the things you can do, picking the best one and hoping it all works out. Catchphrase is one of my favorite games. Basically the unit above shows phrases like "Gone with the wind" or "Not on my watch" and you have to race to get your partner to say as many as you can in a short period of time. Like a game show in your pocket. Only problem is that it is really loud, to the point of annoyance and people not wanting to play.
So Jess and I cracked it open and thought of some ways to dampen the noise:

Add a resistor in sequence with the voltage line going to the speaker, lowering it's power to make noise.
Damaging/cutting the diaphragm on the speaker.
Surrounding the speaker with noise insulation.
Soldering in a quieter speaker
Re-programming the microcontroller to not make the ticking noise, only the end-of-round noise.

Okay, most of these weren't too serious (though I think this might actually make a good interview question: how many ways can you achieve this goal?). But that's part of engineering. Think of all the things you could do and try the simplest one. We picked noise insulation, in the form of paper crammed into the speaker's plastic housing. It took a few iterations to get the right amount in to get the noise to a pleasant level on the outside. Problem solved.

Sometimes computer scientists aren't considered engineers, and sometimes I certainly feel like a mathematician, a lawyer, or an economist at work. But I definitely enjoy being an engineer every once in a while.

4th of July

2009-07-04T10:46:00.003+01:00

Happy 233rd birthday, America. I felt the need to write a blog post though the only thing we did was have a small barbecue and play all the songs in my friend's play list which had "America" in the title. It was a nice moment to stop and think about my views on country having lived abroad for nearly a year though. If anything, I think I appreciate some things about America, it is a beautiful place and in many ways the society is more the land of opportunity than anywhere else. But the political process is poisoned in a very specific way, the more news I read from home the less I want to read any more. I worry sometimes that America is losing its open-mindedness as it loses its dominance and hopelessly clinging to the past. It's nice to be away from all that for a bit. But I still think that in the end, it's an issue of America being the worst country out there, except for all the others. I'm excited to get back.

St. Edmunds, Night Punting and Bridge Hopping

2009-07-03T10:46:00.008+01:00

Interesting evening out. First went to a formal at St. Edmund's with my friend Garth. St. Edmund's one of the poorer (near-bankrupt) colleges so I was surprised at their fancy dining hall and quite formal dinner. The most interesting thing though was afterwards we took out a St. Edmund's punt on the river Cam. Punts are flat bottom boats that you push off the bottom with a pole instead of rowing. They don't go fast but are quite peaceful and there's so much beautiful scenery on the river by the old colleges it's more like an amusement park ride.

But the river was actually quite loud on this Friday night. There seemed to be a lot of people yelling at us from various drinking spots on the shore. For some reason I decided to try my hand at bridge hopping on one of the tougher bridges, the Darwin bridge. Bridge hopping means you jump off the punt while passing a bridge, grabbing onto the bridge and pulling yourself up, then jump back onto the punt from the other side.

I did this without too much grace in front of several bar patrons who were hoping I would fall into the water. They were disappointed when I managed to stay dry, but begrudgingly admitted it was still an entertaining site.

USA vs. Brazil

2009-06-28T10:44:00.003+01:00

Tonight was a surprise treat as we got to watch the USA men's soccer team play in the finals of a major international competition, the Confederations Cup. Getting to the finals required a few semi-miracles including beating Egypt 3-0 when we needed a three-goal win and beating Spain, defending European championships. For the finals we were matched against Brazil, and were widely expected to be rolled over.

A big group of us watched on the big screen at the MCR bar and tried to get the USA pride going. It seemed to work quite well in the first half, the US took a shocking 2-0 lead and looked like they might pull it out although Brazil was dominating much of the game. In the second half, Brazil just had too many scoring chances and came back to win 3-2. I've been surprised at how little soccer I've watched since coming here, but I can still get quite into the international matches. Tough loss for the USA but I was proud of the effort.

WEIS

2009-06-25T10:43:00.001+01:00

Spent the week in London at the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security, at University College London. The conference included economists and computer security people, looking at the economic factors of security problems. I presented my research on the economics of privacy in social networks.

The conference dinner was a highlight, we had a talk from Paul Wilson who is a famous scam artist with his own show on the BBC. Overall though, this was a business trip, I was busy and tired throughout and I didn't spend any time in London sightseeing. So I feel like I'm slipping into a more professional role at work, but I still very much enjoyed the conference and learned a lot, and it helps that I'm starting to see the same people over and over at conferences so there are friendly faces.

June Feast

2009-06-18T10:36:00.000+01:00

There are a lot of formal dinners in Cambridge, and each college holds June Feast is the longest and most formal of all. Like many things in Cambridge I didn't know what to expect until attending, but I found out it's hard just to get invited. I got invited because of my talk to the college on Internet censorship. This is the only event all year in Cambridge which requires a robe, it is also black-tie. The meal was unbelievably long, something like 4 hours and 7 courses.

It was the only dinner I've ever been to with an intermission. That's right, halfway through the dinner they rang a bell, everybody got up and went out of the dining hall and mingled in the Churchill Archives where the college had its most valuable possessions on display. Then we came back in and there were new, different assigned seats than the originals. I actually kind of liked this because I got seated next to twice as many strangers that way. Still not a fan at all of the long, rectangular tables when it comes to Cambridge, but they've probably been holding June Feasts for centuries like this so I doubt my complaints will get very far.

Pembroke May Ball

2009-06-17T22:00:00.001+01:00

I got the opportunity on short notice to go to a second May Ball for free, Pembroke. I went with the Churchill Casino and worked for half the night and was off the other half to experience the ball. Churchill Casino is a service put on by our colleges for local events, we run a casino room with roulette, craps, blackjack, and poker. During May Ball season the casino is in high demand and shows up at many of the balls and it's a nice way to get to go to a ball for free.

Pembroke's ball was very nice, but after going to three balls (including Churchill's in February) they definitely start to run together.

Clare May Ball

2009-06-15T20:35:00.001+01:00

I mentioned previously my experience at Churchill's Spring Ball. Now (in mid June) it is the real May Week as undergrads have finished final exams and there is a week of celebrations and parties to wrap up the academic year. Many of the colleges, including most of the big ones, hold May Balls this week, which are a bit hard to describe but are essentially like a mixture of a wedding, a royal ball, and the US concept of "Grad Night" after high school graduations. They key ingredients are black tie dress, tons of live music and unlimited food/drink, activities, and shows, lasting until 6 am. Here I am posing with Jess, my date to the Clare May Ball, with the river cam in the background.

We went with a small group, as seen above, and the first part of a ball is, per tradition, queuing, although it started raining this year during the queuing and people got a bit testy. Once inside they had an admirable collection of free food and lots of musical acts, plus some nice activities we tried like a giant swing set, fire dancers, ballroom dancing lessons, ceilidh dancing, and punting on the river cam. There was also a spectacular fireworks show, although it was put on by Trinity's ball which was going on right next door, but everybody still stopped and watched.

The nicest part was probably the beautiful location at Clare, which is one of the nicest colleges and probably has the best gardens. You can see above us relaxing in the Clare Gardens, lit up in many beautiful colors for the night, they turned this section into a hookah bar. Not for me, but I enjoyed the setting a lot. I enjoyed the ball as well, it was nice to get to go to at least one to see what the tradition is all about. Some friends go to 3 or 4 balls throughout the week, which is quite impressive as they cost over 100 pounds each and last from about 9 pm until 6 am. I was satisfied just fine with Clare for this year.

Security and Human Behavior in Boston

2009-06-14T00:56:00.000+01:00

Spent the last week in Boston, attending a conference on Security and Human Behavior at MIT. It was organized by my supervisor (Ross Anderson). The event brought together people from different fields studying security, deception, fraud, and conflict. There were philosophers, engineers, psychologists, and policymakers. It was a very innovative conference, both for being cross-disciplinary and that everybody's talk was limited to 10 minutes. I liked that, speakers rarely get across more than 10 minutes of info that anybody remembers.

I gave a brief talk on social networks. I was probably the most junior person there but I tried to soak it all in, I had some great chats during the breaks and meals. I also got one day to cruise around Boston, which I spent re-visiting the main sites downtown. The conference certainly got me excited about the breadth of topics in security and psychology going forward, but also made me realize I am new to the field and have a lot of work ahead of me.

Paris

2009-06-07T00:34:00.003+01:00

I've been working pretty hard recently so I took the chance to take the weekend in Paris. One of the perks of being in Cambridge, you can get on the train and be in Paris in just a few hours, walking around gardens like this:

It was a fantastic weekend away. I've been to Paris a few times now but every time I go, I seem only to realise that there is more to the city than I previously thought and it will take many more visits to really see it all. Among other sites, in two and a half days in Paris I saw the Sacré Coeur Basilica, Sainte-Chapelle, Notre Dame, Modern Art Museum at the Centre Pompidou, the Champs-Elysées and Arc de Triomphe, the Catacombs, the zoo and natural history musem ad the Jardins Des Plantes, the Arènes de Lutèce, the Grand Mosque of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, and the Hôtel des Invalides.

I'll just mention two things that sum the trip up. Above is the Arènes de Lutèce, a small Roman Amphitheatre that was built sometime in the 1st Century AD. It's a pretty amazing archaeological site, beautifully nestled in the city amongst some greenery, and it barely shows up on most guidebooks. People there were playing pétanque (bocce), there is so much in Paris that a 2000-year old amphitheatre just blends in.

The other thing was the Eiffel Tower. I've been up it before and figured there wasn't much more to see, like Paris itself you hear about it so much it seems like an overhyped tourist attraction. But in re-visiting the tower, I was completely struck both by how beautiful the tower is in person and how incredible the engineering is.

There's a reason Paris is so famous. It's an amazing place.

Here's a photo of me and Jess, my travel partner for the weekend. I'm quite tired on the return but it was an amazing weekend.

Gates Annual Dinner

2009-06-03T00:20:00.003+01:00

Today was the annual dinner for all the Gates Scholars. That means time to assemble everybody in dressy clothes and take a photo:

Then we had a lengthy formal dinner at Wolfson College. It was a fun event, we also had a speech from Bill Gates Senior. Bill Gates Junior will be meeting the scholars next week but I will have to miss that as I head to Boston.

Why Computer Science Interests Me

2009-05-27T13:45:00.001+01:00

Today was a special day celebrating computer science as part of the university's 800th anniversary, and I've been working a ton recently so I took the time to go to a few events. I got a great view of the past, present, and future in a strange way. The morning showcased a hydraulic computer built in the late 40's to model the UK economy: The MONIAC, or Philips Hydraulic Computer, which uses water tanks, pumps, and valves to model the flow of money. It was a truly amazing machine, and of 14 built, only one is still in operation, and we got a personal demo from the Cambridge professor who restored it to working order and showed us how it works. It was inspiring mostly for the imagination that went into it, literally built from leftover parts from WWII bombers. This was the past of CS, unlimited opportunities and creativity to assemble something new. Next we saw a demo of quantum computing research in Cambridge, right next door to our lab in the Physics department. The above machine is a 2-qubit machine which had to run at 4K (unfathomably cold) to work, and doesn't work yet. Quantum computing is the (very distant) future of computing, when we may be able to perform computations impossible today in strange sci-fi looking devices like this. Most of our research group remain skeptics though.

Finally, we had a fantastic talk by Bill Thompson, a former computer programmer turned writing called "The 10 Cultures Problem," a tribute to CP Snow's "The 2 cultures problem." The title itself demonstrated the problem: computer scientists can see that 10 is 2 in binary so the titles are the same. Snow feared in the 50's that a divide between engineers and non-engineers would alter society, Thompson is afraid of that with computer scientists today, and I've agreed for years. Too much of life is shaped by computers now-people use them dozens of times a day in ways they don't realize. Without understanding the basics of computer programming, this all seems like magic, and we're headed to a world with some who understand the magic and some who don't.

When You Know You're a Grad Student...

2009-05-25T13:55:00.001+01:00

It's been a rough few weeks finishing up the biggest paper I've worked on yet, here's a shot of me in the office over the weekend working all day and night to finish up. The paper is a 45-page article for an economics conference about privacy in social networks. I'm proud of the paper and the work put it in, but mostly just appreciating the little aspects of dedication that this lifestyle requires. Saturday night in the lab my dinner was a can of chili and a sack of potatoes. I had to make do, microwaving the potatoes and eating them with a spoon. You know what though, they tasted just fine.

Media Blitz

2009-05-21T13:28:00.000+01:00

So we ran a little experiment this past month about how long photos stay up on social networking sites. I posted the results on my group's research blog, turns out many sites don't delete photos after a month. Moderately interesting from a technical perspective, but given the involvement of privacy fears and social networks it blossomed into a huge news story that I wasn't fully expecting. I ended up spending much of the day responding to phone calls and giving interviews with journalists. Good articles were written up by BBC, Sky News, and The Guardian (more sensationalist versions appeared on some less well-known media outlets). I appeared on BBC Radio Scotland to discuss the matter. But the real highlight was doing a TV interview on Sky TV, the main satellite TV provider in the UK. They droveThe camera man was quite nice and we spent some time setting the shot up in the computer lab. Like all interviews, it felt brutally short and I wasn't sure on what level to be explaining things, but hopefully I got the message across. Unfortunately the interview was only for satellite subscribers so I don't have the video. But I have a picture of me in the truck:

Churchill Conference on Everything

2009-05-15T00:40:00.002+01:00

Every year the Churchill MCR (grad students group) puts on a "Conference on Everything" for students to demo their work. I was fortunate to be selected to speak and I gave a talk entitled "Internet Censorship and Resistance." It was fun and rewarding because I think this is a major human rights issue that gets ignored because it has the word "Internet" so people don't think it's serious. I tried to make a case that free access to information is crucial in a free society and the Internet is increasingly the only forum that matters. I think the talk went well, I got a good response and many questions afterwards. Other talks were fascinating too, on everything from flying robots to mathematics education. Made me appreciate being at a university which is strong in many areas.

Where it All Started

2009-05-06T10:01:00.001+01:00

Today was a special treat at the Computer Laboratory, the 60th anniversary of the first program on the EDSAC. By most reasonable definitions, this machine was the first computer in the way we think of them today. It was developed and built at Cambridge by Sir Maurice Wilkes, who at age 95 returned to the Lab today to give a short speech commemorating the machine. It's worth a read on Wikipedia about the machine and the man, which have needless to say proved incredibly influential to the world as we know it today. Makes me wonder how I'll look back on my own research in 2070, which is a good thing to be wondering some times.

Côte d'Azur

2009-05-05T09:34:00.004+01:00

Just returned from 4 great days in the South of France. The weather was fantastic, not too hot to walk around all day, but just warm enough that the mist from this waterfall was pretty nice.
Jess was my fearless travel partner. We spent Saturday in Nice, taking in the views from the Colline du Chateau here. We also saw the modern art museum, took a swim, and of course, enjoyed some of the best bread I've ever seen. Nice seemed to be just short of "in full swing though," as our hostel rate demonstrated the official start of high tourist season is next week.
Sunday we made it to Monaco. I've passed through twice before but this was the most time I got to spend in Monaco, and we made the most of it. We saw the famous Jardins Exotiques, an amazing collection of cactuses and other bizarre plants in the cliffs, took a tour of the royal palace, and visited the world-class aquarium. We also had time to walk largely from one side of the country to the other and take in the mega-yachts and expensive cars outside the casino.Finally, Monday and Tuesday I attended an EU-sponsored workshop on computer security in St. Jean-Cap Ferrat, a resort town between Monaco and Nice. I gave a talk about why security for social networks is hard, slides are available over on my research page. It was a nice workshop, as seen above the location was a major attraction and it had a pretty relaxed feel to it, though people generally took the event seriously.

Job v. Halifax

2009-04-30T23:56:00.002+01:00

Today was a very unusual day in my academic career, many members of our research group took the day off to watch the civil trial Job v. Halifax. The case was brought by Alain Job, a Cameroonian immigrant, against Halifax bank. Job claimed there were phantom withdrawals from his account and was the first person in the UK to bring a bank to trial over the security of the Chip & PIN system for bank cards.

This has been a major topic for my research group over the years, which I've caught the tail end of, and Steven Murdoch testified as an expert witness in the case. We went to watch Steven, observe the case, and to learn a bit about what it's like to see crypto in action in a legal setting. This case had everything, lots of intrigue and mistakes by both sides. And of course the Lawyers were wearing powdered wigs. It's a minor case, but represents an interesting battle of the little guy vs. the giant bank, which is a struggle that has been playing out more and more these days.

The judge should issue his decision within a month, we're all anxiously waiting.

My Very Own St. John's

2009-04-27T23:52:00.002+01:00

I enjoyed a formal dinner at St. John's tonight with my friends Julia, Emma, and Jess. And, curiously, nobody else. In a rare turn of luck, we were the only 4 people to sign up for dinner for the evening and so we had the large and historic St. John's dining hall all to ourselves. The show went on admirably, and we had some delicious food. They even printed up a menu, listing the vegetarian option for the night, which I was the only one to get. Not sure I'll ever see this again.

Quiet Period Begins

2009-04-24T10:26:00.001+01:00

The Spring (or 'Easter') term is designated quiet period in Cambridge. So, tonight was the last formall hall and Pav dance of the year for Churchill. Cambridge tradtionally takes the time before exams extremely seriously, to a silly degree I think, because it's pretty unlikely the undergrads will be using next Friday night with no Pav to be studying for their exams which are still weeks away. Anyway, as a grad student I'm just busy 100% of the time so it doesn't really matter, there's very little sense of the academic year for me. But I'll miss the Friday night Pavs, which have been fun.

Copenhagen

2009-04-20T19:03:00.005+01:00

I spent the weekend in Copenhagen, visiting my high school friend Keegan who is doing an exchange semester there as part of his law program. The weather was beautiful, as was the city, and I had a really pleasant time seeing the old downtown. Here I am with my friend Jeremy, who made the trip with me, atop the Rundetårn with a nice view of downtown. It was my first time in Scandinavia, and as expected things were clean, orderly, friendly, and extremely expensive. When the airport has hardwood flooring and leather chairs, you know you're not in Kansas anymore.

Copenhagen is also known for being the home of Carlsberg beer, so we took a tour of the brewery, which had some nice historical exhibits on the brewery and the town, as well as the largest collection of beer bottles in the world at over 14,000. Finally we had a very eventful day at the Copenhagen zoo, one of the nicer zoos in the world. We saw several fights, lots of animal babies in the springtime, and were lucky enough to see a zebra give birth. The baby zebra was standing immediately and walking within a few minutes, truly amazing to see.
live

Happy Easter

2009-04-12T23:30:00.000+01:00

I celebrated by dinner with friends, and tried my hand at making hot cross buns. They were a mixed bag taste wise, but I think my effort to be multicultural was commendable. In addition to the traditional hot cross buns, I made a hot star of David bun, a hot star and crescent and bun, and a hot agnostic bun (though I inserted a toothpick into that one to see if they were done-so I guess there's always a tiny bit of doubt).

England meets the Parents

2009-04-11T12:17:00.002+01:00

Parents visited for this past week, arriving last Saturday and leaving this morning. On paper 7 days with the parents in town seemed like a lot of town, but we certainly kept busy.
We spent the first few days in London. Mostly I remember doing a lot of walking, such as above on the Millenium Bridge, but we also saw Buckingham Palace, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, Number 10, Trafalgar, Hyde/Green/St. James Parks, St. Paul's, the Tower Bridge, etc. We spent a good deal of time each at the British Museum and the Tower of London, which were both phenomenal. Makes you realize how much history this country has, truly spectacular.

Next came three days in Cambridge. I thought this would be the more relaxing part of the trip, but I majorly underestimated the amount of things to do and see in Cambridge. We spent hours seeing the colleges, the old streets, the churches, and so on. We even caught a service at King's Chapel (above), and went out punting (also above, though you can't see us, we're on a boat). Parents also saw the Fitzwilliam and Botanic Gardens.
Of course, one of the major elements was just my parents wanting to know what life is like here for me, as parents like to know these things. As seen above, we made it to Churchill and also the Computer lab, and had dinner with a bunch of my friends one night and my research group the next night. The trip was a nice semi-break from work (though I still worked a decent amount), but also showed me how much this place has to offer, and reminded me to take advantage of it all while I'm here.

Two Conferences, One Week

2009-04-03T15:01:00.003+01:00

Just wrapping up a crazy week. Tuesday I presented some Facebook research at the ACM Workshop on Social Network Systems in Nuremberg. This also got some minor media buzz. Then from Wednesday-Friday I was in Cambridge at the International Workshop on Security Protocols. I presented some work on human-level cryptography on Friday.

I took a little bit of time after the two to reflect on my academic career so far with my first two publications in the book and a number of others floating in the ether. So far it's going well, I have a number of topics I'm interested in and I'm grateful for the position of freedom I'm in, despite the amount of work it's taken so far.

Nürnberg

2009-03-30T14:47:00.000+01:00

After some crazy times working to finish up papers and all, it was nice to have a weekend of vacation exploring Nuremberg (well mostly, I did work quite a bit in the evenings to finish up a report). Nuremberg is a very old town, and much of the castle and walls are still preserved. Above is a section of wall, you can see the huge moat, which is now empty and has a nice walking path around the city with sculptures though.
There's something quite dark about the city though. Scary statues like the one above are all over the place. Most of the architecture is old and Gothic, with statues of knights on the corner of many buildings, and many old medieval coats of arms.
Then there's Nuremberg's Nazi past. It was the headquarters of the party, and the site of the annual huge rallies and the film Triumph of the Will. The Nazis were building some fantastical party monuments at the time the war started. I think the city has handled it correctly, by leaving the Nazi ruins but not maintaining them. They are slowly eroding away, but stand as a reminder that not too long ago the world was a very different place. They also have a phenomenally good museum about the era, which I quite enjoyed.
Of course, the Nuremberg Zoo was a must for me. It's a world-class zoo, although it's under heavy renovation and some animals are being loaned out elsewhere. Above is Flocke, the zoo's famous polar bear cub who's growing up quite fast.
I also made the short trip to Bamberg, a much smaller town but with an incredible well-preserved medieval center and some amazing cathedrals and a palace from it's days as the capital of the Holy Roman Empire.

And I didn't leave Nuremberg without some Lebkuchen, the city's trademark gingerbread.

Botanical Gardening

2009-03-14T18:35:00.001Z

Made it out to the Cambridge Botanical Gardens with Jess, and was really enjoyed the variety and vibrancy of the plants. The plant above is Jade Vine, a rare plant which only grows in the Philippines, which they have a nice bunch growing in the greenhouse. Quite striking.

Here's a picture of me, outside. Hard to tell but I'm sitting on a branch that was about 6 feet off the ground. It was quite a trick to get up there, then I had a nice moment to reflect, although my hand was bleeding. Like this picture though, kind of symbolizes my life right now in that there is a crazy amount going on, but then when I sit and reflect it's beautiful.

Rugby season wrapped up

2009-03-08T22:29:00.000Z

We finished the season with the traditional "old boys match" against Churchill rugby alumni. Earlier in the week we were eliminated in Cuppers, the playoffs involving all colleges. We were two matchs away from the finals. We would have had a good chance to make the semis but a large number of players (myself included) got violently ill in our quarterfinals game against Caius. Oh well.

Definitely glad I played this year, I met a lot of actual Brits this way and it was a good outlet for me. Hopefully be out again next fall.

Preaching what I Practice

2009-03-01T18:14:00.004Z

Gates Internal Symposium, meaning a chance to talk about one's research to the other Gates Scholars at a more general level. I really enjoyed it, I gave a talk entitled "Privacy Implications of Social Networks." This covered both my research of the past few months and my general thoughts on the area. People responded pretty well, the enjoyed the topic of course since they were almost all Facebook users and of course people like the idea of online privacy.

The best part was that I got to present after a biologist, a historian, and a physicist, which put my work here into perspective. I left being really glad to be a grad student in Cambridge at this point in my life. I realized that despite the workload I'm really happy to be here and getting the opportunity to focus on topics which interest me. Hopefully they interested everybody else just a bit.

York and Vikings

2009-02-21T23:20:00.002Z

Traveled with other Gates scholars to the historic city of York, 3 hours to the north. I was pretty exhausted and it was an all day trip, but I still enjoyed it a lot. York has many old buildings, from ruins of its walls and castle to York Minster, one of the larger cathedrals around. The highlight though was watching a reenactment of a battle between Vikings and English from 954, which we're watching here. Strangely the vikings seemed to be the more popular side amongst the crowd.

Rugby Playoffs!

2009-02-15T17:31:00.002Z

Rugby playoffs started today, and we played Homerton, a college from the second division (we're in the third, there are three total). So we were seeded lower, but we came out really strong and took it to them, winning 22-3. It was particulary nice for me since I had a bunch of friends show up and I had an exciting game, with a few longer runs, a blocked kick, and later managed to catch my own kick about 30 m downfield in a full run-one of the rarest plays in rugby. I was named man of the match for the second time of the season.

Spring Ball in February

2009-02-14T12:13:00.001Z

Yesterday was Churchill's Spring Ball (or May Ball), although it was not in Spring or May, it was in February. Many colleges hold May Ball, which is kind of like a more grown-up and over-the-top prom. The basic premise is a black-tie evening with the entire college decorated for a theme, Churchill this year did 'Tokyo: The Neon Sunrise.' The colleges all compete to have the biggest and most expensive ball, which Churchill can't really compete in so we have the earliest instead.

Still it was awesome, one of the most fun big-event evening I can remember ever attending. There was tons of live music, lots of games like laser tag, sumo wrestling, a mind reader and other performers, and of course food. One interesting thing was Silent Disco, which is a room with many people dancing to different music via headphones (above). The effect is quite strange when you turn your headphones off.

Of course, probably the most unusual thing for Churchill was that we actually had lots of women show up. Probably figure since it's a male-heavy college it was a good event to go to. That's my game-theoretic explanation. Not sure if that's it, but I can rule out my vest as the reason women came...

Nikola Tesla is rolling in his grave

2009-02-11T23:02:00.003Z

Minor electrical mishap occurred down at the computer lab today. No injuries or equipment damage, but it made a really loud noise. The full incident report is here, apparently it will be a part of future health and safety lectures. Although I didn't do much wrong, the adapter was one of the worst designs ever built, I'm astonished this kind of thing doesn't happen more often with this model.

That was the most excitement for this week though. I'm just working, a lot, these days, trying to get a few papers out there.

The Great Blizzard of '09

2009-02-02T23:07:00.001Z

The most snow fell in the UK in 18 years today, I was told. It wasn't much snow in the grand scheme of things but we did get a foot or so of nice powder in all-day snow fall.

I decided the bike was inoperable, so I walked to work, but it was well worth it. I brought the camera and was just snapping photos of everything, it was beautiful to see my surroundings coated in snow, like a whole new version of the world. Massive problems occurred as the roads aren't equipped for such a huge snowfall in one instance. So many departments shut down, we received an email recommending we leave before dark because the snowy roads weren't safe at night. I had plenty of fun though, making a snow angel for the first time in my life I believe. We also had a massive, semi-organized snowball fight and some more snow football.
Glad we enjoyed it, because it was mostly gone or turned to ice by the next day...

Super Sunday

2009-02-01T22:46:00.001Z

Definitely a different Super Bowl Sunday than the usual affair in the US. For one thing, I gave a 30 minute talk, with presentation slides, about the rules and history of the game. For another, the game starts at 11:30 PM, and there are no funny American commercials.

Fortunately, this was a fantastic game with a really exciting second half, and everybody enjoyed it thoroughly. We also had a nice selection of American beer and junk food available.

Best of all, I got my traditional half-time game of football game going-despite the fact that it was 1 am and it was snowing. A good time was had by all.
I didn't get to bed until around 4, but it was okay, after submitting 3 papers for publication due to crazy conference deadline overlaps, I was ready for a nice break.

I hope video doesn't kill me

2009-01-29T23:18:00.004Z

I was on BBC Radio today. The program was called "Europe Today," and it was on BBC's worldwide station:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/europe_today.shtml

I went down to the local BBC station for good sound quality, which was interesting since most of the equipment in the little recording room I was in looked straight out of the 1950's:

The evening's topic was privacy for social networks, a topic I've been researching a lot recently, since today was Data Protection Day and an EU minister commented that young people don't know the risks of social networks. I felt comfortable enough going into it, it's an issue I know something about and thought I had some points to make, plus I had 3 pages of talking points.

Then I was told a few minutes before I went on the air that about 100 million people listen to the program. Gulp. Honestly I ended up being quite nervous and I didn't think it was my best showing. It's kind of a tough setup, in a little room talking to nobody, but I'll get better if I do this more often. Anyway, I posted the audio:

http://www.jbonneau.com/bbc-social-networks-interview_Jan292009.mp3

I definitely wasn't ready for the extremely small amount of time I would get, I had more points I would have made earlier if I knew I would get about 60 seconds to speak. Hopefully somebody heard me and was sufficiently scared to change their privacy settings.

And if nothing else, the host really pronounced my name correctly.

Victory!

2009-01-27T22:43:00.000Z

I was elected MCR Computing Officer in an uncontested election. This basically means I'm now in charge of running the mailing lists and website for the grad students of Churchill College. Glad to be getting involved a bit in the college, although I was a bit concerned when every other new officer's plans included "have a really nice web interface for X"...

Haggis and Lasses

2009-01-26T22:39:00.001Z

Tonight we had a special feast for Robert Burns night. He's a Scottish poet and national hero, and the annual feast in his honour is a big deal, I've heard it described as a cross between Thanksgiving and Fourth of July for Scottish people. Traditions include bagpipe and fiddle music, eating haggis, drinking scotch, and lots of toasts about the memory of Burns and other things Scottish. I had the vegetarian haggis, no idea what was in it, but like the haggis in Edinburgh I thought it was fantastic. After dinner was ceilidh dancing, a distant cousin of American square dancing, which was quite good as well.

Here's to you, Mom

2009-01-25T22:27:00.003Z

One of the more interesting potluck dinners tonight, theme was "Tribute to Mom." Above you can see Andrew carrying his "beer butt chicken" outside in the cold, after an oven malfunction mandated moving the chicken mid-roast. That's dedication to the cause.

As for me, I had to make manti, originally a Turkish dish but for me something that I will always associate with my mom's edition, which includes pasta, plain yogurt, ground beef (or Quorn mince in my case), and crushed red pepper. Wikipedia may disagree, but I think that's the correct way to make it. Most of the attendees agreed after they got over their initial resistance to hot yogurt. Thanks Mom!

President Obama

2009-01-20T22:34:00.002Z

Thought I should remark on the historic inauguration today. I had a really full day-it's been busy this term-and introduced a speaker at the same time as Obama's speech, 4 PM local. My joke about how the security seminar on hardware security trends, would have the same "Yes We Can!" spirit as Obama's talk was not a big hit.

I did catch the speech online before bed, and it was very good. I'm actually think being American means a lot more to me now living abroad than it used too. I'm not too political but I'm proud for the country.

Happy 800th Birthday!

2009-01-18T20:50:00.001Z

Officially, Cambridge was founded in 1209, although this is under some dispute. Anyway, that makes 2009 the 800th anniversary of the university, and the event was marked by a fairly bizarre show at the Senate House downtown. A slide show depicting scenes of the university's history was projected onto the wall of the building itself, giving a cool effect. Also, every bell in town was rung at 7:15 PM on Saturday, giving an incredible celebratory aura. I am told they do that only very rarely. There were some strange choices though, such as displaying raw HTML code in between scenes. After working most of the day on screen-scraping for a research project, that was the last thing I wanted to see. The crowding was also out of control which took away from the enjoyment. When huge crowds of people pack old, narrow city streets the traffic implications are bad news.

Still, made me appreciate being a part of a university with such a long and amazing history: Stanford's 800th anniversary is scheduled for the year 2691!

The World is Flat

2009-01-13T21:21:00.004Z

So our Sunday night dinners are becoming a pseudo-fixture, I was organizing this and I picked the theme of "2-dimensional food," because I'm just that clever. As you can see from my plate above, it was a success, I managed to put zucchini slices, crepes, pizza, omelet, cong you bing, quesadilla, and rice patty on that plate, and you could still slide it under a door... there was even some sliced roast duck. Everything was delicious, as has seemed to happen despite our really small kitchen and general lack of expertise. Of course having every person try to make something flat in one evening made for a pretty crowded burner and shortage of frying pans, but it was still a very fun evening. Thanks to everybody who made it happen.

Baby it's cold outside

2009-01-06T20:11:00.003Z

It's been cold since October, but snow is rare in this part of England, despite being at the approximately the same latitude as Edmonton. It's finally gotten cold enough though for a bit of snow, and I woke up yesterday to the winter wonderland above. Of course, most of the snow melts from being stepped on and then freezes at night, so after a day most of the ground is slick ice.

The worst thing so far though is my bike lock, which freezes in the cold and then is really hard to open. I'm used to applying a lot of force to get it to turn, I guess today it was too frozen and I got carried away, now I have a very bent and unusable key:

Visiting the big city

2009-01-03T22:07:00.000Z

So my friends and I tried a new thing this Saturday... visiting London, the worldwide center of culture and art that is an hour away that we hadn't yet really seen. We visited the Tate Modern gallery, Borough market, and Somsert Gallery. The Tate modern gallery included pieces like this, a giant spider, which we read is interpreted as a "rejection of the politico-dialect dogma that pervades our society."

Exactly.

Tradition continues

2009-01-02T11:16:00.004Z

I've watched the Rose Bowl every year as long as I can remember. Who knows why. Anyway, it was extra difficult this year as it's not on TV anywhere, but we managed to get a bootleg webcast of the game and, through some pretty precarious engineering, hook it up to a big TV. We had a 30 foot ethernet cable and it left a few inches only of slack is it snaked through a door and around furniture. USC crushed Penn St, as expected, but it was a fun experience watching anyways.

Merry Christmas!

2009-01-01T09:11:00.001Z

Spent two weeks home in the Bay Area. It was a ridiculously busy two weeks:

*Raiders-Patriots game

*Ice skating outdoors at Union Square

*Pub Trivia with my former roommates in SF

*Habitat for Humanity with my friend Dave

*Two movies

*Annuaul Christmas day Football with friends and family

*Three mountain biking rides

*Several tennis games

*Two movies (Slumdog Millionaire and Valkyrie)

*Three Christmas parties

*Mom and Dad's birthdays

*A few hours consulting work for my old company

*Some reading and research for Cambridge

Mostly though, got to spend some time with my family which I'm realizing will be increasingly hard to come by. Pretty tired by the time I flew back to the UK, spent a quiet but fun new years. Ready for a happy and productive Lent term.

Securing the world, one term at a time

2008-12-12T23:20:00.004Z

So, the Michaelmas term is over for me and I'm getting ready to fly home for a break. I spent some time during the week evaluating how the term has gone, personally and professionally. Mostly I've written here about fun stuff I've been doing, it's probably obscured that I've been pretty busy getting started as a research student, putting in some long hours in the Computer Laboratory (above) when needed, and learning a lot.

"What does a computer security PhD student do all day?" is a pretty fair question, as I've seen from talking to other Gates scholars that being a PhD student can mean almost anything, depending on field of study, research group, and supervisor. Humanities PhD's read fairly obscure stuff they dig out of the library, some Biology PhD's spend most of their time setting up experiments for their advisor and collecting data.

Even within computer science, which is already a different beast, security is truly unique because one needs to understand broadly a huge number of fields to design security that actually works in the real world. A huge system like the internet or global finance can fail in thousands of ways, and security researchers need to understand all of them fairly well to do things right.

So, I'm forced to jump around pretty crazily from topic to topic. One day I'll be thinking about terrorism and bombs, the next about cryptographic protocols, and the next about the business model for sending spam. The security research group is appropriately diverse, about 10-20 people in various roles doing about 20 different projects simultaneously each. The best part is that we spend a huge amount of time brainstorming and discussing security topics with one another, which is the way to really learn. For me, that's the payoff in being a PhD student: I spend at least an hour a day over lunch learning security from some of the real experts in the field, plus seminars, "official" group meetings on Friday afternoons, and then there are usually afternoon teas. I haven't sat down yet with the group and not learned something.

I spend most of my time talking to people, getting ideas, then reading a lot about them. I've learned to walk around with a notepad, and every time I hear a term like "SCADA" which I didn't know, I pull up the relevant Wikipedia page next time I sit down. I constantly have a pretty big queue of topics I need to read, because they're all things a security PhD needs to know.

Here I am in my office. I'm here quite a lot, I don't spend much time in a laboratory despite the name. The days pass pretty quickly though, with some mixture of:

Tracking the daily security news
Reading research papers
Learning about various other fields which intersect with security
Discussing/brainstorming ideas
Coding up demo attacks, poking around products looking for issues
Going to seminars
Writing up ideas and sharing them
Supervising undergraduates and passing on the gift.

So I'm never idle, I have an enormous stack of papers to try and work through on my "vacation." Fortunately I'm really enjoying the subject matter, though it's sometimes frustrating to work so hard and feel that there is still a mountain I don't know.

As it happened, I was quoted in this news story today, so hopefully I'm at least a little bit on the way...

Varsity Match CXXVII

2008-12-11T22:19:00.004Z

As mentioned, college sports in the UK are played primarily within the colleges at Cambridge or Oxford. Today was the exception. The Varsity Match is the annual rugby game between the two schools, played since 1872. We made the trek down to London to Twickenham stadium, among the most famous rugby stadiums in the world, and it was well worth it.

It had some of the atmosphere of a Cal-Stanford big game, a smaller crowd, but very involved. In the morning was the under-21's match, which was nice because a few teammates of mine from the Churchill team were involved. These two teams were basically all-star teams of the best undergrads playing in each university's college league. We won handily and it got everybody warmed up nicely.

The main match in the afternoon was easily the best rugby game and among the most entertaining sporting events I'd ever seen. Oxford owned the first half, with a guy called TMS Catling putting on an incredible display scoring 3 long tries, and we were down 25-10 at half. In the second half Cambridge fought incredibly well, the forwards controlled the game and we got within 33-29 with a few minutes left and had some chances from Oxford's 5 meter line. Time ran out and Cambridge came up just short, but it was an epic game and the highest scoring in the 127-match history between the two schools.

More importantly, I got to travel down with a group of 10 good friends I've made here, and everybody had a great time, particularly some of the group who barely knew anything about the sport. It was a great end to the quarter.

Masquerade Ball

2008-12-07T11:02:00.001Z

Churchill Guest Night, once-per-term event for grad students and their guests. Unlike most of the Churchill events the undergrads had all gone home so this one was much more mature. Actually, not at all, it was overall the craziest night of the quarter. Sir Winston would have been proud.

This picture shows 5 of the gentleman from my apartment building: Brian, Myself, Matt, Andrew, and Simon.

Christmastime in Cambridge

2008-12-06T17:58:00.004Z

Spent the day out and about soaking up the Christmas spirit. The Mill Road Winter Fair was going on, basically an outdoor holiday street fair in Cambridge's bohemian district. Not a whole lot of note, but there was an awesome drum band performing here, and it was fun walking around and seeing decorations and everything.

Next we got some ice skating in. They set up an outdoor skating rink in the winter on Parker's Pieces, one of the main park areas in town. It was good fun, although the three boys were all fairly experienced skaters, while Jess had a few unfortunate encounters with the ice. Fortunately as always she was a good sport.

These 3 are the friends I've spent the most time with so far. Andrew (left) and Brian live in my building and are Gates scholars, so they're always around, and Jess is the only female Gates Scholar in Churchill so she's forced into a lot of time hanging out with the guys.

Rowing on the river Cam

2008-12-04T15:45:00.004Z

I hate to admit it, but in terms of popular sports, rowing is #1 here, followed by a toss-up between rugby and football (soccer). Today we went out to watch the Fairbairns race, the biggest race of the fall. Nothing is going to make rowing a great spectator sport, but the setup is nice on the River Cambridge, it's narrow and windy and there is a path for people to bike alongside the boats. Having some friends rowing also makes it fun. Above is the St. John's novice women's boat. St. John's is one of the richest colleges, and the one that everybody hates for some reason. Their race was a struggle.

Churchill, on the other hand, with lots of pride in the pink oars and outfits, put in a respectable strong showing, finishing 18th of 54.

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T23:38:00.003Z

Thanksgiving doesn't exist in the UK in the slightest. I mentioned it to some of the rugby guys and they had literally never heard of it until one of them recalled an episode of Friends featuring the holiday. So needless to say I got no time off work. Still, though, I actually attended two thanksgivings: on Thanksgiving itself, the Master of Churchill college attended all of the American college members to a feast with the master. It was like most formal halls, only they did a decent job making Thanksgiving faire.

Then on Friday, about 20 students put on a potluck Thanksgiving together in our building. After the turkey came out of the oven, a few awkward exchanged occured before people realized nobody knew how to carve a turkey except for me. So the lone vegetarian came to the rescue and carved up the 10 kg turkey. The lone vegetarian also was then tempted to, once again, have some turkey on Thanksgiving.

After dinner we headed to the MCR bar and caught a bit of the Cowboys game on TV. It was nice for the tradition. Made me miss home a bit, but it's nice to have such a great group here to celebrate with.

The NHS experience

2008-11-25T12:28:00.002Z

Been pretty sick for a while now. It was starting to seem like possibly strep throat, due to the excessive coughing, so I decided it may be a good time to try out nationalized healthcare. I registered when I first moved here with the Huntingdon Road surgery, above, an outfit with 5 GP's a few blocks away in an old cottage.

The experience was pretty different compared to the USA. I called in and had no trouble getting an appointment the same day. Going in, there were zero forms to fill out, nobody asked for any ID information or anything, and of course no payment details. It was pretty pain-free, I was in an out in about 5 minutes, and I don't have strep. My feeling is for smaller, routine stuff, the NHS system is going to be much easier than the US insurance system. It's telling that I doubt I would have put up with the trouble at home to go in. Anyway, it was pleasant, although it's not a fair assessment of the whole system.

Two firsts

2008-11-21T00:25:00.002Z

Travelled to Loughsborough, about 90 minutes away, for the day to attend a conference about Electronic Crime. Unfortunately the talks weren't very technical or interesting, and I was quite sick so it was a moderate bust.

I followed that up with my first opera. It was a student production of Suor Angelica, a lesser known Puccini opera in just one act, put on the King's Chapel. So, as far as opera goes it was a tiny production, with a small band, only a few performers and it was done in an hour. That was just about right for me.

A Big Lecture about the Big Bang

2008-11-18T23:58:00.003Z

Took the opportunity to go to see a distinguished lecture by Roger Penrose, a famous physicist from Oxford. He gave a talk about the Big Bang, what could have happened before it, and what his new theory is. Basically, most physics people are sure there is nothing before the Big Bang because they define time in such a way that it didn't exist before the Big Bang, so the very word "before" is meaningless. He's old enough I guess that he's now spending his time challenging this assumption and he gave a pretty interesting talk about it. I followed about 95% of it, there were some surprising corrollaries to information theory that resonated with me.

Really enjoyed it, although it raised a lot of questions about how meaningful computer science research is in the big picture. On one hand, we're not addressing as many fundamentally bizarre and imaginative concepts. On the other hand, nobody is really going to be affected one way or the other by the Big Bang. Interesting debate, one of the hazards of being at Cambridge.

Formal Hall at Peterhouse

2008-11-14T23:11:00.002Z

Getting to eat at formal halls as a guest is a nice tradition, it gets you out of your usual setting and lets you experience the really old dining halls around Cambridge. Tonight I ate with a friend at Peterhouse, which, being founded in 1284, is the oldest college in Cambridge. According to legend, the dining hall here is the oldest building in the world still being used for its original purpose. The grace was in Latin, and all of the lighting was candles as there is still no electricity.

It was an experience. The food was pretty solid as well.

Everything looks better in slow motion

2008-11-13T22:07:00.001Z

Maybe the truest words ever spoken by Dave Chappelle. I think this shot is awesome. I just got a pass from the tackled guy on the ground in the pink and brown and I'm about to juke the guy in front of me and cut back across the field. As I remember it I had a nice run the other way after this, although in my typical style I ran about 80 yards and gained maybe 20. I've become known for this sort of thing.As seen I here I can gain the tough yards as well. Occasionally. Actually I didn't do much in this game, it was pretty rainy and muddy so the ball stayed near the forwards mostly, which was too bad since my friends came to watch. We did, however, win 12-10 on a try for 5 points as time expired, in an incredible ending.

Exploring Cambridge

2008-11-08T20:54:00.003Z

There's so much to see around Cambridge it's pretty easy to spend most of a Saturday with nice weather just checking out the various colleges. Today I visited Emmanuel college, one of the older and as it turned out, most beautiful ones. That's me on their modern art statue.

Here I am checking out their duck pond. They're famous for this. I guess when you have 30+ colleges the available quirks to be famous for are thinning out. But there are some carp in that pond that are probably a meter long.
Turns out not every college is so beautiful. This is, seriously, a dormitory at Christ's college. It looks like either a space station or a cruise ship from the 70's. The interior is just as bizarre. Christ's had some nice pieces but the fact that this thing was constructed is beyond belief.Finally there are some pretty unique specialty museums around town. This weapon is a harpoon cannon which Robert F. Scott's ship took to Antarctica. They have a little museum about polar exploration at the Scott Polar Research Institute. Turns out whales weren't Scott's biggest problem...

Remember, remember the 5th of November

2008-11-05T23:12:00.004Z

Despite the saying, I totally forgot the 5th of November was a holiday, I was bleary-eyed most of the day thanks to the excitement around Barack, fortunately I had a light day in the office broken up with tons of foreigners coming up to shake my hand and congratulate me on the election. This was pretty amazing to see as well.

Anyway turns out November 5 is a holiday here to celebrate Guy Fawkes, a crazy 17th century Catholic radical who tried to blow up parliament and fail. To celebrate, people around England gather for fireworks shows, to remember the failed explosion attempt, and then a big bonfire, to remember how Fawkes and other Catholics were then burned at the stake. Kind of like a bizarro-world Fourth of July in November and with an anti-Catholic undertone.

It was a freezing night and half the town was up all night with the election, so it was a subdued crowd, but an awesome fireworks show.

History from Afar

2008-11-05T06:06:00.004Z

It was easy to miss lots of the day-to-day nonsense of the election being in England, but the final night captivated the entire town, most students stayed up late to watch the returns and see Obama get elected. We watched from the Cambridge union, a packed house that was needless to say not exactly in McCain's target demographics, who were going crazy every time another state fell. I was very impressed with how well versed in US politics most of the British students are, better than the average American. There was lots of celebration on the streets as it was called.

It was surreal of course to see an American with such an incredible impact on Europeans (not just British, but foreigners here all are very impressed by him). Ironically it's McCain's line that sums it up best for me: Americans don't shy from history, the make it. Who knows how the presidency will go-I'm cautiously hopeful although I make a point not to really trust any politician. But sitting in my room thousands of miles away at 5 am, watching Obama speak and watching the crowds singing "Lift Every Voice," I was feeling pretty proud of America.

A "normal" weekend

2008-11-02T23:57:00.004Z

This was the first weekend which, except for Halloween, was fairly "normal" in that I didn't have any big trip or social event taking up the whole time. I actually had some free time, so I started seeing some of Cambridge. I visited the Fitzwilliam Museum, the biggest art gallery in town, which is beautiful and quite amazing for a town of this size, and then visited the grounds of Downing, Pembroke, and Peterhouse colleges. All of the old colleges are beautiful and you can spend a lot of time just seeing them because each has it's own beautiful architecture, lawns, chapen, hall, etc. It's pretty easy to fill a nice afternoon here just soaking up the Cambridge-ness. I also caught the new Bond movie "Quantom of Solace on Saturday night with some new friends here.

Sunday was Rugby training in the afternoon, followed by another Sunday night dinner with friends. We're building this thing, each week it's getting bigger and more elaborate, and we had some amazing food this week. That's me making spicy apple-cilantro-jalapeno salsa there. It killed.

All Hallow's Eve

2008-11-01T14:55:00.004Z

Halloween came and went, British-Style. Which is to say, very similar to American style, a bit more subdued and a bit more dark and scary rather than just wear random costumes. Of course I didn't get the message so I just wore some stuff from Senegal and nobody really got it, but it was brightly colored enough that people appreciated it. Otherwise though this was a normal Superhall/Pav Friday night at Churchill, as I've discussed before. You can even see in this photo, some people wore costumes while other wore normal formalwear. Fortunately this didn't cause any major stress for anybody.

The sport of fine British gentlemen

2008-10-30T17:46:00.006Z

After some consideration of playing a non-English sport I'd be more advantaged at (water polo, frisbee or American football) or trying something off the beaten path like mountaineering, caving, or orienteering, I decided to do the most British thing and try out for rugby. Perhaps football (soccer) would have been more English but I probably wouldn't have made the team.

Anyway, I've been playing Churchill rugby for a few weeks now. I'm something of a novelty to the other players, being the only grad student, the only non-drinker, the only non-Brit, and the only one who didn't grow up watching rugby all the time. Today was our second match, we lost 22-7 to the combined Peterhouse/Selwynn team which are among the stronger teams in the league. I started and played the entire game at wing and fullback, made a few try-saving tackles, and afterwards was named Man of the Match! The whole "man of the match" thing is a rough British version of "player of the game" although it seems to be a bigger part of sports here. The sports section will list for every football or rugby match the teams, score, and man of the match. Anyway it was a nice honor, especially since they've often stated that Americans are hopeless at the sport. Hopefully I'm more or less accepted into the club, which is good because I'm making some friends who are actually British and aren't grad students.

Of course the kicker is that the man of the match is in charge of washing "the kit" before the next match. Kit is another Britishism that's really hard to describe. I've heard people use it to mean clothes, equipment, or just "stuff," without many limitations.

And yes, we have probably the most hideous sports uniforms I have ever seen. We're not starting out with a hot hand thanks to the pink and brown college colors for Churchill, but it doesn't help that we inexplicably added burgundy to the jerseys, with a hot pink side panel. And the socks are a third shade of pink, plus brown, and inexplicable black. At least our coat of arms is nice.

This is what democracy looks like

2008-10-29T20:53:00.003Z

Well, this is what it looks like when you've realized it's 5 working days before the election and you're scrambling to vote absentee at 2 am from Europe. It was amazing how fast the election finally approached after seeming to be a long ways off for a while. Needless to say I've been busy, and soon after coming to Cambridge I really checked out of following the politics much.

So when I went to actually vote I was a bit overwhelmed at this year's ballot, with a presidential election, high-speed trains, gay marriage, abortion notification, redistricting-really something for everything. It was pretty tempting to just turn to the NRA's voting guide and be done with the whole thing in 5 minutes, but I actually attempted to read about all the propositions and come to an "informed" decision.

I was up until 2 but I got it done and our department's secretary was happy to airmail it for me the next morning for just 79p. "I just hope you voted for the right guy," she told me. I hope so too...

This blog is no longer Scot-free

2008-10-28T02:22:00.005Z

First inter-European trip, went to Edinburgh, Scotland for the weekend. Interesting to travel within the UK, technically Scotland and England are separate countries but one nation, whatever that means. The whole system was set up to keep the Scots, who are very proud of their history, happy teaming up with England and Wales. Anyway, on a practical level this means they have their own money in Scotland, but they take English pounds as well, although Scottish pounds can be harder to use some places in England... kinds of sums up the whole situation.

Anyway, Edinburgh is a beautiful city and just a 5.5 hour train ride away from Cambridge. The hilly terrain and coast are great, and there are a ton of beautiful old buildings well preserved. Unfortunately, the weather is just abysmal, and we happened to pick a bad weather weekend. That didn't stop us from climbing up Arthur's seat, the largest hill overlooking the town, supposedly where King Arthur sat once upon a time. It was pouring rain/hailing, freezing cold, and the wind was gusting at over 100 kph on the top. Literally, the most wind I have ever seen and that includes a lifetime in the San Francisco Bay Area. Higher up in the mountain walking was very difficult, Jess was blown completely over by the wind several times. But we made it, you can tell from the photo it was quite a journey. Rest assured, this weather was atypical even for Edinburgh, but not unheard of.

After that we spent more time in town. Edinburgh castle (below) is beautiful and very well preserved, with some great historical exhibits and the crown jewels of Scotland on display. We also saw the National Gallery, a whole slew of monuments overlooking the town, the national cemetery, the cathedral, and factories demonstrating techniques for making Scotch whisky and wool, seemingly the two biggest products. Overall, it was a very nice town with lots to see, although sadly the downtown is extremely touristy.

And of course, a trip to Scotland wouldn't have been complete without having some haggis, which we did manage to order. I ordered the vegetarian haggis, made with lentils and beans instead of internal organs and stomach lining. Honestly I'm not sure how authentic either the veggie haggis or the meat haggis really was, but it was delicious nonetheless.

Matriculation Sensation

2008-10-23T02:14:00.002+01:00

Matriculation dinner is the biggest Churchill event for the start of the year, after which we're officially part of the college and the year is under way. In practice, this is a slightly more formal dinner than the usual formals, meaning more wine, more courses, and a longer welcome in Latin. Also assigned seating, which was okay since I sat next to an 80-year old retired CS professor.

It was a good time to stop and reflect on the year so far, I've been in England for a month now, overall can't complain about much. Some things are better than expected and some things worse, but overall, I've made some great friends (I'm with Jess, Brian, and Andrew in the picture above) which is the most important thing.

And yes, Andrew is sporting a bolo tie, he's singlehandedly convincing dozens of Brits that this is the standard for formals in Texas.

The drill for informals

2008-10-20T14:57:00.000+01:00

One thing I've been pushing for and had some success so far is to get together with friends in a non-formal setting. So we've been trying to organize pot-luck style dinners at our building for the group of Gates scholars who live nearby, which fortunately is a nice little group. First effort, 12/10, above, we had 7 people eat, and we managed to have Korean tofu, lentils, mashed sweet potatoes, salad, and apple pie.

Second round, 19/10, we had 7 people again, this time with some pasta, garlic bread, roast vegetables, stew, couscous, and chocolate-marshmallow cookies. As I said, I'm hoping we can keep this up, maybe every week or every other week, because it's a lot of fun and not much work, and it's a nice break from the formals. We'll see how we do as the year goes on.

I like the formals okay, but for me, having a nice dinner with a small group of friends is about as good as it gets though.

Boat Cruise in London

2008-10-19T12:38:00.001+01:00

The annual Gates Boat Cruise, down the Thames river in London. Ended up being an all day event, since I had to go shopping for clothes for it, and we left campus by bus at 4 PM. Turns out owning a tux isn't enough, you actually need a nice wool coat to wear over it. Actually this was a good thing because it was freezing cold.

Note my other new purchase, my college scarf. Again, with the pink and brown for Churchill College. I actually think it went quite nicely with the pink bowtie.

This picture is a bit deceiving, as by the time we finished dinner we had only 45 minutes of dancing time before heading back, just to get back by 2 AM. Of course this was followed up by some hot cocoa with some Gates people on campus, making it a total of over 12 hours of tuxedo time. If nothing else, the tuxedo fared fantastically in its first extended action. Also it was a pretty awesome event, I was at a table with 5 gates scholars I didn't know very well and as usual they all turned out to be very interesting.

The formal routine

2008-10-18T01:01:00.004+01:00

As mentioned previously, we do a lot of formals here. Just part of the rhythm here, every Friday evening is a formal "superhall" that you throw on a suit for and have a fancy dinner with some ritual toasting and a welcome in Latin (Seems to be just "Benedictus Benedicte, Amen" usually). They're starting to blend together a bit but here are some photos:

First superhall, 10/10.

Exchange formal: 17/10/2008 (yeah I'm getting used to writing dates with the day first now). You have enough formals that, to keep it fresh, you exchange with other colleges. We hosted this exchange so members of Emmanuel College and Hughes Hall came and ate with us. Similarly I did an exchange at Emmanuel earlier in the week.

Really though this photo sums up the experience. This is some of the gang at the MCR after the formal. To recap, the MCR is our own pub for grad students at Churchill, pretty much packed with people after every formal event. So the usual drill for my Friday evenings is research group meeting 4-5, CS happy hour 5-6, formal dinner 7-9, hanging out in MCR 9-11, then dancing at the "Pav" downstairs from 11 on.

Anyway, I'm appreciating the structure more and more, because you actually get a chance to interact with people from around campus this way. I think I've had learned some interesting stuff from the random intelectual conversations that get launched at these things. Of course a lot of people are just in it for the wine, so who knows.

Charging boldly into the world of tuxedo ownership

2008-10-14T22:47:00.006+01:00

Monday was another formal dinner, this time via an exchange with Emmanuel college making it even "formaler." With three black tie events in three weeks I decided it would make sense to just buy a tuxedo and be covered for three years. Besides, I think the tux will hold value better than my Vanguard portfolio has been doing.

Anyway, £180 later, thanks to my man Nick, the salesman at Marks Brothers, I'm now the proud owner of this little number which I was able to wear to Emmanuel's formal hall:

Thanks go also to Emma, pictured below, who came along and helped me pick the tux out:

Yes, I'm wearing a pink and brown bowtie, but you probably didn't guess there were reasons beyond simple fashion for those colors. They're the college colors of Churchill's, patterned after Sir Winston's horse racing colors. You can't tell but I am also rocking some Churchill cufflinks.

It's impossible to really explain the college system here until you see it but it is a big, big deal. The colleges compete on everything, from sports to architecture to endowment sizes, which are frequently mentioned. See, the whole notion of "equality" as a goal doesn't exist here like it does in America, and as a result you have Trinity College sitting on £700 million, more than the University of Cambridge, and Homerton, which actually has the most students, with no endowment at all. The nice colleges downtown are just amazing, with beautiful old buildings and palatial accomodations, while others are way out of town and look like dorms would at Stanford.

Colleges can take whomever they want, so people in the nice ones are comfortable getting much better treatment, they're comfortable thinking of themselves as better or higher class than the suckers out in the "bad" colleges, and that's just part of life here. This would never fly at a US institution but that's a cultural difference I guess.

Fortunately Churchill, although relatively new, has been a success financially and academically, it's around 10th of 31 in endowment, and has the best sports facilities and largest grounds. For me it works great since Churchill is right near my laboratory, and is looser on formality than most while still being nice. Definitely will be wearing the pink bowtie proudly.

Britisher and Britisher

2008-10-12T22:22:00.001+01:00

Fresher's week has come and gone, it was a whirlwind with an activity planned out literally every night. I still haven't had a single "night in" since the very first night I was here. I noticed a distinct trend through the week of increasing Britishness, and me being less and less surprised by cultural changes:

Monday, curry night: Curry is the UK's most popular food according to somebody. Interestingly it is an entire cuisine here, they'll plan to "go out for curry" like we would for pizza.

Tuesday, pub trivia night: Trivia is also quite popular, they love history especially. The new grad students also got a private tour of the Churchill archives, which include not only all of Churcill's papers (like a presidential library), but also Margaret Thatcher and 400 other famous people, including 10 Nobel laureates. Conveniently located at Churchill college 100 metres from my building.

Wednesday, pub crawl: Needless to say pubs are popular. A bit different atmosphere, as last call is usually 11pm. People seem to go out almost every night but don't drink quite as much or stay out as late, less of a binge thing and more of a routine.

Thursday, debate at Cambridge Union: The world's oldest debate society, debating if a "new sexual revolution" is needed. It's a beautiful building with some interesting traditions, and some lively moments of audience participation, but lasted three hours and was amazingly dull given the topic. Still, doesn't get much more British.

Friday, Super hall at Churchill: They have three formal dinners a week, two "formal halls" and "super hall." Dressing up in a suit and eating a fancy three-course meal is pretty much the most popular thing to do here. Churchill is considered an informal college because academic gowns aren't required in the formal halls. They still make a pretty big deal of things, as seen above in the photo.

So I'm getting into the swing of British culture a bit. I'm using metres and kilogrammes without thinking to much about it. 24 hour time is a snap. Celsius is still a struggle.

Biking on the left side of the road is still pretty hair-raising. It's a beautiful campus for biking but it already has everything going wrong for it in terms of bike safety: tons of old bikes with shoddy brakes, narrow one-way streets, impatient drivers, tons of pedestrians, cobblestones, speed bumps (sleeping policemen)... Throwing in traffic on the left side of the road is just crazy.

Anyway hoping for life to slow down a bit after this week... Saturday was a bit more relaxed and Sunday cooked dinner in as a group with 6 new friends in Churchill, and it was a blast.