One of the things I'm responsible for in my day job is a phenology webcam at our experimental site at Puéchabon. The idea of this is to observe colour changes in the canopy of the forest up there, with a view perhaps eventually to replacing manual phenological observations with information drawn from digital photos. In this sense, phenology means things like when flowers come out, when fruit forms, and so on. The Quercus ilex (holm oak) forest at Puéchabon is evergreen, so you don't get the same spectacular seasonal changes in leaf colour that you see in deciduous forests, so we're not sure whether this is going to work -- the changes we'll be looking at will be a bit more subtle.

Carnedd Llywelyn, North Wales. January 2006.

Some interesting things that passed through my RSS reader recently: Food pairing and flavour networks This is kind of interesting. Why do cheese and bacon (if you eat that kind of thing) go together so well? Or asparagus and butter? Or caviar and chocolate? (Apparently. If you're…

For a brief period some years ago, I worked for an engineering firm that did sonar work for the (UK) navy. Many of the people in the company were ex-submariners, who had served both on the Swiftsure/Trafalgar attack boats and on the Vanguard missile boats. These were all pretty solid people, and I remember one in particular who delighted in telling stories about his time working his way up from a "baby sailor" to naval attaché to the British embassy in Washington, D.C. His most amusing tales included a reenactment (with actions) of the joys of carrying soup tureens around crowded submarines, and the entertaining ability of US spy satellites to dip into the atmosphere to take a closer look at interesting sights, like Soviet mini-subs stuck on their motherships in their pens.

A slightly less amusing story revolved around the hubris of submarine commanders. He sent some of us a photograph showing £20 million of towed sonar array snarled up around a mooring buoy, all because the sub commander couldn't be bothered to wait for the divers to help reeling the thing in. A sad navy man with a big beard stood gazing at the pile of expensive spaghetti, looking like he might burst into tears at any moment. Not the navy's finest moment.

Along with a lot of other people, I'm a big fan of cephalopods. I've dived with squid and cuttlefish and have watched octopus while snorkelling. I particularly remember following one cuttlefish across a reef in the Philippines, watching its mesmerising pattern display, until it…

I've been thinking for a long time, mostly privately in my idle moments, about the sort of house I'd one day like to build for myself. I have some ideas that I think are pretty cool: multiple small wooden buildings, connected by walkways, with the main building on a slope with a…

Uh-oh. Getting a bit behind on this 30-day challenge. Time for some shorties...

Not really a "past life" as such, but something interesting I did a while ago that was brought back to mind by the Costa Concordia cock-up. I've not spent a lot of time on big ships, indeed until 2007, I think the only larger vessels I'd been on were ferries, cross-Channel or around the Greek islands.

In April 2007 though, I went to Canada for a big trip, mostly to visit some potential future places to live and work and to attend a workshop at the Banff International Research Station. I flew out to Vancouver, took a ferry to Vancouver Island where I visited UVic (ended up working there for a couple of years afterwards), then travelled east by train. I made it as far east as Halifax, Nova Scotia, all by train. That was a pretty cool experience in itself, but I'd had a wacky idea for how to get home from Canada to the UK. It's possible to book passage on container ships under some circumstances, which I decided to do. It's a tricky process, not super cheap, and the logistics of making the rendezvous with the ship turned out to be a bit more "interesting" than I expected.

Mt. Cain, Vancouver Island. New Years, 2010/2011.

I'm a sucker for nature photos. One of our annual outings when we lived in Bristol was to the Nature Photographer Of The Year exhibition at the city museum. Going by the crowds there, we aren't the only ones who like this stuff.

So, here's some eye candy.

Yesterday evening, we had a meeting with Martine, the dog behaviourist who's helping us with Winnie. Winnie has come a long way from the terribly frightened little dog that we picked up from the animal shelter four months ago. She's no longer terrified of everything in sight, she runs around with her tail up, likes to play with other dogs, likes to sniff in the bushes, likes to run crazily through the fallen leaves in the forest. She's still jumpy and easily gets scared of people in the street or sudden noises, but she's come a long way.

I've been very lucky so far in my life, and have had many opportunities to work and study in interesting places. I'm not sure I've made the best use of those opportunities -- there's much that feels unfinished or that didn't quite work out the way I'd hoped it would -- but these "past lives" have given me a lot of experience working in different fields, living in different places, hanging out with different kinds of people.

Blogging is inherently self-indulgent: you have to assume that someone out there is interested in reading your maunderings. (Not really. Honestly, I do this for my own amusement.) The ultimate in self-indulgence has to be autobiographical blogging and reminiscing, where some old fart bends everyone's ear about the "good old days". Anyway, since this is for my own amusement and for a bit of writing practice, I don't really care. I'm going to be brazenly self-indulgent and start writing "Past Lives" articles to see if I can dredge up any interesting memories.

In 1998, the mathematical physicist David Ruelle wrote an odd little article, entitled Conversations on Mathematics with a Visitor from Outer Space, which appeared as a chapter of the very interesting looking book Mathematics: Frontiers and Perspectives, published by the IMU in 2000. I've not read the whole volume, although I think I've read at least one of the other chapters as a preprint. Most of the 30 authors seem to have written more or less "straight" articles, but Ruelle's is different. He wanted to explore the constraints imposed on human mathematics by the structure and capabilities of the human brain. Perhaps constraints is too strong a word -- "predispositions" might be better: human mathematics is necessarily tied to human brains, and human brains have evolved to their current state to solve problems that are quite different from the problems encountered in mathematics. One might thus expect human mathematics to have followed the "fault lines" in the Platonic edifice of Mathematics that are most easily appreciated using the mental tools that evolution has given us.

To explore this idea, Ruelle introduces the conceit of a visitor from outer space, a "galatic mathematician" pursuing doctoral studies investigating the nature of human mathematics. She describes some of the characteristics of the human mental apparatus that are relevant: limited short-term memory, and hence inability directly to execute complex algorithms; predisposition to see symmetry and pattern; human brains operate very slowly, even compared to human computers; the importance of geometrical and visual reasoning; and so on. Ruelle comments that despite our limitations, humans have managed to do some fairly complex mathematics, but the question is always: how much further could we go if we could transcend the limitations of our history?

A couple of more substantial (in length) books I read over Christmas were Neal Stephenson's latest and the first of Tim Powers' Fisher King series. I liked them both.

Door, Kairouan, Tunisia. April, 2005.

I was born in the UK in 1972. The "world leaders" who defined my youth were Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev. This may have something to do with why I am so bitter, cynical and generally misanthropic nowadays, although the star turns we've seen in the US, UK…