I know, I know, it's been a while since my last blog.
I wrote a new one yesterday, but since my blog people have been bought out by the google monstrosity, nothing seems to work. I updated to the new version, so I'm hoping that this one will actually post.
I will probably blog about my trip to Australia, and not bother sending email updates to individuals. I hope that this will increase my readership too!
I had a great weekend in London this week. I went to the Tate Modern, (the "Nightmares and Dreamscapes" exhibition was really good.) I know modern art gets a bad press, and it can alienate a lot of people, but even as a lowly scientist, I found some of the work fascinating. The designers of the exhibition had obviously gone to a great deal of trouble to provide history and interpretations of the various pieces that were accessable and interesting to the uninitiated, and I genuinely had a fantastic time.
The whole weekend was awesome, and my expert guide showed me a lot of the sites, before meeting with friends for dinner in the evening. Many thanks to my generous host / guide! I even got a wonderful roast dinner on the Sunday, which would have been fantastic on its own, but was doubly so when combined with a beautiful home-cooked bread and butter pudding with cream!
Workwise I've been pretty bogged down writing my first ever lectures to undergrads. I'm only doing two, as part of a larger lecture series, but that has brought about its own challenges, (eg I felt it necessary to read the lectures that preceded mine to make sure that I fitted in correctly with the flow of the course.) I'm reading a lot of Bruce Schneier at the moment too, as I would like to look at some security applications for my robots, and I wanted to get a good overview of the security field. He's primarily interested in computer security, but most of his discussions are about the philosophy of security as a whole, so I'm getting a quite interesting perspective. I'm finishing off "Secrets and Lies" now, and I'll go on to read "Beyond Fear" before continuing my generic robotic security research. I have some interesting ideas for combining physical security systems with artificial immune systems, I think that there's a lot to be learned from the latter, which could potentially be quite effective.
Right, that's as much as I'm willing to write on a system that I haven't even tried yet. I may even copy and paste the text somewhere to avoid yesterday's heartache!
