Pretty Water

Besides preparing a talk on The Topology of Orbifold Resolutions for wednesday, I'm currently clearing out my office in advance of being booted next friday.

I'm taking the plants home today, and the camp pink watering can is coming as well. It had some water in it -- too much to water the plants and not have them leak -- so I threw it out of the window. It looked very pretty on the way down! That's all.

This place is very desolate now. Hum.

York, Sheffield, and questions of scale.

As you all know, I'm leaving Edinburgh soon to move to Sheffield. I will cease to be a lecturer and I'll become a postdoctoral fellow. This takes longer to say, pays slightly less, and also needs explaining to anybody who doesn't work in academia. Still, I'm looking forward to it: no teaching, and the country's biggest collection of topologists, and -- most importantly -- no boss! I'll be free to research whatever I like.

Over the last few days I've been staying in York and visited Sheffield on Monday to sort out accommodation. I'll be moving in to a house with an old friend from York. This will be very slightly weird, and mostly a great arrangement. I'll just have to learn to tolerate Holby City and ceaseless tutting.

While in York I took this photo of the Windmill. As you can see, it's no longer in a state of disrepair, and in fact they're actually doing some work on it.
Anyhow, the brief trip went well and I got to read lots of interesting maths on the train. Really! I learnt all about stacks and classical Chern-Simons theory.

Finally, my last message has led to much controversy over questions of scale. To be precise, it seems that people were unhappy with my use of a smurf to describe the size of a physics book. I'd like to clear things up so that life can return to normal. As you can see here, a smurf is roughly the same height as a tetrahedron, and approximately ninety minutes tall.