rio and dancing
Back from a meeting of the
International Astronomical Union in Rio. Rio is a wild place. It's almost too idyllic: beaches (not crowded at all during the week), mountains, lake, restaurants, culture. Here are some pictures:
The conference itself was held near here: a rather nondescript part of Rio, further in than the glorious beaches. But you can see the famous statue of Jesus ("the Redeemer") far off in the background (I couldn't help it but all sorts of blasphemous thoughts passed through my head, like trying to fix him up with the Statue of Liberty...)
Here's another view of the mountain with the statue, from the "lagoon" in the Ipanema part of town, celebrated in song. It was really quite striking: as it turned dark, the mountain was lost in clouds, but the very peak with the statue was lit up with artificial lights, and at first when I looked towards it, it appeared as if it was floating in the sky.
More from the lagoon:
From the rooftop of my hotel (the 30th floor, with pool and bar):
That's towards the direction of Ipanema. The hotel itself was on Copacabana beach. Here's the view of Sugarloaf mountain (tourists go up on cable cars, but I was too lazy--I was on vacation, damnit!)
I also went to the Botanic Gardens. Here is a picture of the fountain of the muses:
You know that acai juice which is so big among health food nuts (and Oprah) here in the States? It's native to Brazil. They have juice bars on every corner selling acai smoothies. After spending hours running along the Copacabana beach (there are lanes in which people do this--and stations of pull-up and dip bars as well) I'd order an "acai proteinato" (acai with protein powder) to replenish. Also great mango smoothies. And a whole bunch of other delicious exotic fruits. Problem was, the menus were all in that bullshit language Portuguese. I was excited at the possibility of tasting the fruit that chocolate beans grow in (which I've heard is quite tasty on its own--the name "theobroma" or food of the gods, being applied to both the bean and the fruit)... Only when I returned did I verify that the "cacau" smoothie I had was indeed this fruit! (And I had a sample of some fruit from a street vendor I believe to have been this fruit as well... it had a bean in it which was kind of like chocolate.)
So here are photos of the morning of my last day in Rio. The view is from my hotel room:
* * *My regular work has a little more context for me now that I've met the researchers involved in the same subfield. However, I'm still plodding through a detailed analysis of a whole bunch of galaxies. The program gets stuck... some galaxies are slightly odd and need to be treated as special cases. That gums up my programs.
Making more progress on my X-ray binary work. Colleagues have quickly written a paper and made me a co-author (I did some work too of course, but I was not primary author). The paper on the Cygnus X-1 system, which I've written mostly myself, is about ready to be submitted for publication. At the last minute of course I've thought of some improvements.
I've been doing some speed dating. The first round, all-Jewish through jdate, wasn't so bad--I got a date out of it--but maybe I dressed too informally or was too burnt out from my trip to Rio on the second round of speed dating I did.
I may have also been outclassed as there was another scientist (actually two others) there, who work in similar fields--and one in particular has some prominence in the field and is associated with some cool ideas (that I only putter around on in sekrit). I'd kind of like to talk with this guy some more about his work--he touches on that community of cool speculating that includes Garrett Lisi (who I mentioned in a recent entry.)
* * *I woke up kind of depressed today but I'm going to sleep in a good mood. Partly that's from dancing.
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winters_chill, who works at the dance club, encouraged me to post these photos of Rio. After a long night of very vigorous dancing, I noticed local poet and personality JS walking through the dance floor. I never interrupt my dancing to speak to anyone, but made an exception in this case--jumped off the stage and introduced myself. Didn't take quite as much balls as challenging Obama to an Oxford-style debate on health care, but good of me to take initiative in meeting someone--she seems kind of a wild woman, but young attractive and gifted is a combination that gets attention. She's releasing a book of poetry next month.
* * *More random thoughts:
It feels kind of strange to be so muscular these days. I've been working out a lot at the gym, and after 20 years of being vegetarian, vegan, or pisco-vegetarian, I'm eating meat again, and that helps me build muscles too.
It's strange in a few senses. It's strange in the sense that changing one's body always is strange, whether it's passing through puberty, or aging... Growing a beard, changing one's hairstyle, etc., change one's appearance but having more muscular bulk has a different and more basic feel to it...
In high school I was used to thinking of myself as the smart one (or the strange one--but there were stranger, and not as many smarter)... But one oddity of a typical professional life arc is that you end up with other people with similar strengths. I work in a building with hundreds of other professional scientists, people with PhDs as well. I live in zip code 0213fucking8, the smartest zip code on the planet. (Though I often get the sense that many people in the Harvard area are more about class than intellect.) (Yes, Skip Gates lives down the street from me.)
So it's strange to feel that someone's first impression of me might be that I'm muscular.
Also, there's been a kind of groundswell of respect for nerds in the popular culture. The younger generation thrives on computers and hi tech devices--to be good at programming, when I was in school, marked one as completely nerdy, and nerdy wasn't as hipster cool as it is now.
But now people seem more into the shell of nerdiness than its core. On dating sites one will find women write, "Oh, I love nerds! The way they are so tall and thin and awkward..." When I, a robust muscular metamorph, am the actual soul of nerddom... Or substitute "nice guy" for nerd...
I think also some of the function of being muscular is also not to attract women so much as to intimidate rivals. I recently met the current boyfriend of a woman I'd been interested in for 20 years--feeling like I could either cry or beat him to a pulp, I suspect being buffed up made the latter seem more plausible.
* * *I daydream a lot about history too--in browsing the news aggregators on the web, I'm surprised at how much interest I find in human prehistory.
I think as I age I become more backwards-looking. I have more of a history of my own to contemplate, and less of a future (still, I hope, a substantial one--just less than when I was a kid!) When I was a kid I was fascinated by the future, by optimistic Star Trek like visions. My generation has been pretty disappointed that space travel hasn't panned out as much as we'd hoped (2001 saw no moon bases), but the iPhone is science fiction of our youth.
But now I'm fascinated to read of the diets of early humans: baking mussels, heating stone tools to make them more easy to fashion. That 70,000 years ago humans nearly went extinct. That Neanderthals roamed Europe once seems strange and surreal. Europe's human history seems so fixed to me--we turn places into their maps by putting signs on streets with their names. But Europe was once covered with forest (the only remnant, in Poland, is the beautiful
bialowieza puszcza...
And Neanderthals may, like humans, had diverse populations that could either taste or not taste bitter foods like broccoli... May have had at least one human speech gene (FOXP2)... May have been routinely killed by humans...
It's all very fascinating, and I'm sometimes tempted to think like evolutionary psychologists or practitioners of "paleolithic diets" who argue that what's best for us is what we evolved to find best for us tens of thousands of years ago...
