If you're having trouble sleeping, you could try downloading a highly exciting readable article called Lattice-switch Monte Carlo for binary hard-sphere crystals. If you don't have access to that journal, you can download the electronic pre-print here. Although that kind of thing has rather little to do with the work I do now, it was good fun and it's nice to see the work getting published.

Well, it's been a hectic couple of weeks, but the work has come along quite well. We've even managed to finish the poster for the AMN-2 conference in Queenstown. I've placed a copy of the poster here, so if you really are terribly bored (or are coming to the conference and want a geeky sneaky peek at the work, which is about as long a long shot as I can imagine) then you can click the on the thumbnail image thar....

The conference is my first proper physics one, so I hope there's some interesting stuff there. And then after that, I'll be off to do the Milford track with some folks from work and my good old Edinburgh chum Suzanne (not that old). So hopefully, this blog might actually get more interesting over the next wee while. You know, with pretty photos and suchlike.

I've recently finished reading Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, and I must say I was very impressed. I've read quite a few pop science books, and it's probably the best one I've seen. The early parts were related to physics, and I found this quite satisfying as the things I know something about were covered well - the analogies never jarred and the explanations always rang true. Generally it was eloquently simplified, always managing to retain the essence of the science...

Here's a slide from the talk I gave to the group last Thursday. It went well, and it was probably the most relaxed talk I've ever given. I used to be horribly nervous about giving talks, so it's nice that (after lots of self-inflicted aversion therapy) I don't have a problem with giving them and indeed winging it. I'll be giving some variation on the talk to IRL while I'm here, which will hopefully go just as well.

The State Of The Hard-Sphere Solid

A journal-club-style-type seminar outlining these two papers:

Stacking entropy of hard-sphere solids

Siun-Chuon Mau & David A. Huse, April 1999: Physical Review E, Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 4396-4401.

Can stacking faults in hard-sphere crystals anneal out spontaneously?

Sander Pronk & Daan Frenkel, March 1999: Journal of Chemical Physics, Vol. 110, No. 9, pp. 4589-4592.

With a bit of the stuff I'm doing as well.

Download the PDF from the link below.

Well, crikey, gave a first-year lecture today. My boss couldn't be there, so he asked me to cover for him. It was all a bit scary, and I fluffed it at the end, but I think it went reasonably okay. It was good talk practice at any rate. Bit of a mumbly bumbler though.

On a somewhat unrelated issue, I must say I'm really impressed with Wikipedia. Its a free online encyclopedia written by randoms, but quite a lot of it is rather good. I've been looking at A New Kind Of Science, Langton's Ant, Algorithmic information theory, Random number and Bayesian Probability.

Time for beer and quiz.