Between Christmas and New Year's, I decided to take a few days off of my research and visit a friend in Cornwall.

Cornwall, located in the 'foot' of England, is a place of many castles and much coastline.  I wish that I could have spent a week or more here, just walking the coastline and seeing lots of ruins.  I did enjoy the time I had though.  I got to see the main town, Truro, and had a day trip to Tintagel, the legendary (though totally unsubstantiated) home of King Arthur, and Boscastle, which is famous for the flash floods of 2004 that poured mud throughout the whole town but killed no one.

Enjoy the pictures!  Now it's time to get back to work… 

For Christmas this year, as for many years now, My present to my Aunt Sally and Uncle Brian is my Year in Review.  This year, I decided to write it in the form of a dinner party.  Care to stop by for dinner?

PhD Comics is running a series of strips at the moment about getting scooped.  I remember when I started my research that I'd get an idea, only to find out the next day that someone already had it.  That's 'getting scooped', and it's always a let-down.  Until, that is, I realised that there are a lot of people in the world and everyone's talking about the same thing (i.e. experiencing life), so of course we're going to have similar ideas!  My favourite was when I ran into the Spoom at New College and told Kathleen and Nick about this theory I had.  After laying out the basic idea, there was an awkward silence, and Nick said, 'you just invented Marxism, Sam.  Well done.'  *sigh*

All I can say is that at least it only took me a year and a half to figure what my research was called!* 

* Well, ok, it was three years if you count my years as a Visiting Student and MSc… 

Looking for some information on the New College Ball that's supposed to be happening in Trinity Term this year, I stumbled across an article in the The Newt (New College's undergrad newspaper) about what college was like in 1985.  Quite an entertaining little read, if you have a few minutes.

As you know, I had a webcam going during Thanksgiving this year.  In addition to it updating every 5 seconds on the web, it was also saving the images to a movie.  I've stiched them together (and removed a few), and created a little, and quite entertaining, movie of the day.

You can see it here.