I am … unhindered by talent

Last night we went on an very nice night-time (started at 9:30pm) guided walking tour of Cordoba. Our two hours of walking through the old part of the city included two bits where an actor appeared in the dress of local figures: first the 20th century painter Julio Romero de Torres, then and the 12th century Jewish philosopher Moshe ben Maimon or Moses Maimonides. "de Torres" appeared in Plaza del Potro, which was many centuries where horses were traded ("potro" = "colt"), and which apparently features in Don Quixote. This history and the name are commemorated by a statue of a colt above a fountain in the plaza, which cast this cool shadow on the wall of the building that houses the Museo de Julio Romero de Torres.

Tomorrow we take the train back up to Madrid, and then fly back to the UK, where we have a week with WeatherGirl’s mum before heading back to the U.S.! We’re happy, tired, excited, and sad all rolled up into one.

Ciao!

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Today we went to the justly famous Mezquita de Córdoba, the mosque/cathedral complex here in Cordoba. The mosque is huge and largely intact, a vast forest of columns and red and white arches that really gives on the sense of being in the woods rather than being in a building. As a sense of the size of the thing, after the Christian reconquest they built a quite large cathedral in the middle of the mosque, and you don’t actually see it right away when entering the the mosque. Even Sub-Evil, who’s quite jaded for a 14 year old, decreed that it was one of the most beautiful spaces he’d been in.

I took hundreds of photos in our 2.5 hours there, most of which attempt (usually with limited success) to capture the vast space and repeating columns and arches. As it’s rather dark, however, motion blur and lack of depth of field are chronic problems, and it’s going to take a while to sift through and pick a few that appear to have worked.

Thus I leave you with a little detail shot instead. The mihrab (prayer niche) is a truly remarkable piece of work, with wonderfully rich tile work and calligraphic decoration. In almost any other building it would be a showstopper; the Mezquita, however, is so large that you could almost miss it amongst all the other visual stimuli.

At one point there was this neat patch of light on a bit of the mihrab, so I took it’s picture. (Several, actually, but I’ll only bore you with one.)

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Last night the three of us climbed up into the Albaycin, which is the site of the original Moorish town, and the historical location of the old Muslim neighborhood in Granada. There are wonderful “postcard” views of the Alhambra from there, but unfortunately it was overcast and the light was all “blah”. WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy eventually got bored and headed back down the hill, but I stuck around hoping for the sun to creep below the clouds as it was setting. Happily I was rewarded with this wonderful view for the last 10-20 minutes of sunlight. Absolutely splendid.

The big square tower in the foreground and a bit to the left, along with many of the other buildings and towers in the left and center foreground, are part of the Nasrid (Muslim) palaces, and contain some spectacular rooms and spaces. The church spire in the back center is a Christian church built on the site after the Catholic reconquest. The large, square, decidedly non-Muslim building that dominates the right hand side is the palace of Charles V (the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabella who captured Granada, eliminating the last Muslim kingdom in Spain), and houses some excellent museums.

And that’s only a quarter to a third of the entire Alhambra complex!

Tomorrow we leave Granada for Cordoba, so more wonderful stuff to see and photograph. Unfortunately the internet at the next hotel looks to be stupidly expensive, so there’s likely to be radio silence for the next week…

Ciao!

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Today we spent a wonderful, exhausting day at the Alhambra in Granada, and it’s every bit as cool as the books, etc., made out. Which is good, since that’s a key reason for this entire trip to Spain! I frankly don’t have any idea where to begin. I took over 800 photographs, plus there’s all those from WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy).

It’s like several really cool forts and castles, some spectacular gardens, archeological digs, museums, (Christian) churches, and a complete course in Muslim architecture and culture (complete with some of the finest examples on the planet), all in one (big) place. I’m both physically and mentally exhausted (and exhilarated!).

This shot is from the justly famous "Patio of the Lions" (Patio de los Leones). The lions themselves (part of a fountain in the middle of the space) were missing as they’re undergoing extensive restoration at the moment. Still, the space, the columns, the carving, and the light were enough to take my breath away. And that was after already seeing room after space after room of exquisite work.

I’m going to go sleep now.

Later.

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If you’re never been over to BibliOdyssey I highly recommend a visit. The sub-title for the blog is “Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart” which, well, sums it all up rather nicely. Lots of neat old illustrations, often (but not always) on scientific themes. The themes are interesting, the background info excellent, and the images are frequently just too cool.

The image above is from some of the earliest high quality mapping of Mars in the late 1800’s by Giovanni Schiaparelli, and is part of a really neat set of early modern maps of the red planet. Peacay (BibliOdyssey’s curator) has once again pulled together some great images that are really wonderful to look at in and of themselves, as well as being really cool historic and scientific documents.

Schiaparelli’s (in)famous ‘canali’ turned out to be a kind of optical illusion caused by interactions between light, dust clouds that form in the martian atmosphere, the orbital location and background interference from the planet’s surface itself. If a sketch is made of something that wasn’t really there but you believed it to be there at the time, can you call the result abstract art I wonder? I guess so.

I concur.

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We just finished two consecutive day trips to London (Friday and yesterday) and I’m thoroughly tired, and full of undigested photos. This fellow, one of the few I have processed, is from the Egyptian mummification exhibit at the British Museum (Rooms 62 and 63).

On Friday we started down in Greenwich. It was our first time through the Docklands on the DLR — it would be nice to walk those canals and take photos — and our first time to the Royal Observatory and the Prime Meridian. I wish we’d had more time there - it was a beautiful day and there was a ton of cool stuff one could see. Time was tight, though, so we zoomed off to the British Museum before rush hour hit, and spent the rest of the evening there.

While WeatherGirl wandered the museum, however, Sub-Evil and I snuck off and bought tickets for Avenue Q at the Noël Coward Theatre for the following night. He’s been keen to see that ever sense we got here, and it was nice to finally make that happen, but it did mean two consecutive days into London, which is frankly pretty tiring.

Yesterday Sub-Evil and I started at the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology on the UCL campus. Sub-Evil is very into Egyptian history, writing, artifacts, etc., so he really wanted to see this. It’s a very cool collection, but pretty desperately in need of a new home, with the collection crammed into old victorian cabinets and spilling down an emergency exit staircase! Next was the British Library, which was just tremendous! The King’s Library alone was worth the (free) price of admission, and the display of the treasures (Magna Carta, illuminated manuscripts, handwritten scores, drafts, diaries, and letters by amazing folks) was really wonderful.

After all that we grabbed some dinner and then headed off to Avenue Q! We both had listened to the soundtrack about a zillion times, so there weren’t a lot of surprises. The production was tons of fun, however, and watching the puppet masters sing, dance, act, and run the puppets at the same time reminded me of the line about Ginger Rogers doing everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels :-).

Now we pack and organize, for tomorrow we’re off to Methwold Old Vicarage for our first stay in a Landmark Trust property!

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Our friend Jenny Nellis had a really nasty fall recently, and Jess Larson suggested we send her a happy photo or two. I thought a few shots of WeatherGirl and Jess when we were at the Tate Modern might help :-).

The photo above is the two of them being silly and fun with their hard sweets. The one below is WeatherGirl (on the right) photographing her bare foot with Shibboleth by Doris Salcedo, while Jess is photographing WeatherGirl. We had way too much fun with Shibboleth, which is a wonderfully experiential piece of sculpture, and took a gazillion photos. As you can see, WeatherGirl even took her shoes off in the name of art :-).

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As mentioned earlier, our paper “Semantic building blocks in genetic programming” with Brian Ohs (UMM ‘08) and Tyler Hutchison (UMM ‘07) was nominated for Best Paper at EuroGP 2008 in Naples, Italy.

We won!

That a paper co-authored with two undergraduates from a small, public, undergraduate liberal arts institution like the University of Minnesota, Morris, could win an award like this at an international science conference is just too damn cool. Well done to both Brian and Tyler!

In the hectic melee of the conference, most folks don’t have time to do anything more than skim the nominated papers, and usually not even that. This makes the talks a crucial part of an award like this, as much of the voting is based on them. Tyler (pictured above at Castel dell’Ovo in Naples) was a huge help in that regard. He flew over to the UK several days early so we could work on our talk, giving us the time we needed to revise and practice. He also produced a super cool little six page comic with a nifty introduction to our work that the audience could follow along with. We did a joint presentation, each covering about half the paper. Our talk was well received, and Tyler’s comic was incredibly (and deservedly) popular, and there’s no doubt that his participation was a huge help.

(And all this is on top of Brian and Tyler’s hard work and contributions on the paper itself. Obviously without that content we never would have had the paper accepted or nominated in the first place. So they both deserve huge kudos for that as well.)

Friday morning our paper was voted Best Paper by the conference attendees, and we were presented with a certificate, a box of Italian lemon cookies, and a box of Irish chocolates. All the Best Paper winners from the various EvoStar conferences and workshops also got to choose a free book from the Springer table. Tyler got a really cool book enitled Leonardo’s Lost Robots, and I got The forgotten revolution: How science was born in 300 BC and why it had to be reborn. (It was all terribly liberal arts of us - pretty much everyone else took evolutionary computation/artificial intelligence books of one form or another.)

Tyler upheld a fine tradition of our students making UMM look really good at conferences like this. From his deportment and grasp of the material, most people assumed he was a graduate student, despite the fact that the looks like he’s about 16 :-). He’s currently doing contract work as a web developer and designer, but is seriously interested in going to graduate school in the near future, and he definitely impressed the folks at the conference. I’ve been really lucky to work (and co-publish) with a string of great UMM students, and am looking forward to continue that with a very sharp student named Sara Lahr when we get back.

The trick for me (sometimes) is remembering just how good our students can be. The room we spoke in was this grand space of inlaid wood and marble that was quite a surprise in several ways. This was made worse by the fact that we were in the first session, so we had very little time to adjust and adapt. I was worried about running long (we had a lot of material to cover), and started to lose my nerve about having Tyler wandering around the room at the beginning handing out the comic. Tyler was really calm and collected about it, though, talked me down, and everything did in fact go really smoothly. The moral? Handouts are Good, really cool comics handous are Even Better, and I need to remember to listen to my students :-).

Thanks a ton to Brian and Tyler and all the people and offices at UMM that supported our work, and everyone who voted for our paper at EuroGP! Special thanks also to Riccardo Poli for hosting me on this sabbatical at the University of Essex. I’ve gotten a ton of cool work done here with Riccardo, including “A linear estimation of distribution GP system” at EuroGP, which was also nominated for Best Paper (and which I suspect was also strongly in the running).

I’ve dumped all the photos Tyler and I took in Naples onto my events account on Flickr. I’ll try to clean up a few to post to my main Flickr account in the next week or so.

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I’ve been sitting on this for a while I waited for EuroGP to get their web site updated; they have, freeing me up to do a little unabashed chest-thumping, leavened with some praise for UMM’s excellent students.

A few weeks from now the Eleventh European conference on Genetic Programming (EuroGP) will happen in Naples Italy. The only other time I’ve been to EuroGP was in 2001 when we were here on sabbatical the first time. I really love the conference, and it’s small and intimate and tends to have a really high signal-to-noise ratio. Unfortunately, it’s also an expensive flight from Minnesota for a three day event, and the timing tends to be really awkward in my teaching schedule, so I’ve never made it back. One of my many fond memories of that conference was winning the best paper award with Riccardo Poli for a pair of papers we’d written together as part of that sabbatical visit. (Oddly, both times I’ve attended have happened to be the only two times it’s been in Italy. The little photo is from the 2001 event at Lake Como.)

The best paper nominations for this year’s event have been released, and I’m quite excited that both of the papers that I submitted this year are on the list. One is another join project with Riccardo, and the other is a paper with two UMM undergrads: Brian Ohs and Tyler Hutchison.

That’s Tyler in the photo up top, presenting some work he did with Andy Korth and I that won the best student paper award at MICS a year ago; Tyler also did the cover illustration for the forthcoming book Riccardo, Bill Langdon, and I are just wrapping up. In a big happy, Tyler was able to pull together the funds to fly out for the conference, so we’ll be able to do a joint presentation enlivened by his presence and cool drawings. Unfortunately Brian can’t make it, but it’s cool that Tyler can; this will be the first of my students co-authors that’s made it to a European conference with me.

The competition is gonna be tough for the best paper award, including a very nice paper by one of Riccardo’s students (Stephen Dignum). Fingers crossed!

The full program is also now on-line (as a PDF) — it looks like some cool material. I’m quite looking forward to the conference, although I must say I’m a bit nervous about the ongoing trash crisis in Naples (here and there).

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You all know I stay up late at night worrying about possible career opportunities for Our Fearless Leader upon his impending retirement from the Oval Office next year. Given his broad-minded and impeccable taste and his keen intellect, I’d rather fancied him as a gallery director, maybe for something like MoMA, which would benefit from both his gravitas and sense for the cutting-edge.

This video, however, pretty much scuppers that plan. Never good to be caught making up completely fictional and inaccurate provenance for a painting, especially one that has pride of place in that most public of home offices.

I’ll obviously have to get my thinking cap out and consider the matter further. Ideas?

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