Yo tengo una tía que toca la guitarra

Apparently that's a Spanish proverb. It means "I have an aunt that plays the guitar". Mmmmmm, wisdom.

Well, paper is finished and submitted to the editors, so I can relax now and start to plan my trip, which commences in less than 48 hours. Weee!

The only thing I know so far: lots of Tapas!



What?

Mozzies, Sunsets and Ω-limit Sets

Update: and the survey says... Hello Bert!

Also, for anyone who thought I just took a photo of a regular mozzie, and scaled it up in photoshop, here's one I nailed (with an elephant gun) next to my mobile:



Also, no thanks to the internet, I solved the quiz problem. Turns out my boss was right, but for the wrong reasons. And I was wrong, but right about the reasons why his reasons were wrong. But there are other reasons, which as far as I can tell so far are right. Updated paper.


Nine months ago, on the night of my farewell party, young JennyLuise gave me a gift. A gift which confused me. She gave me a can of insect repellant. And several mugfulls of vodka. The second part confused me in the short term, especially the parts of me that usually keep me in a vertical standing position. The first part confused me on a more intellectual level, and for a longer period of time.

But, with the coming of the Swedish summer, my confusion has vanished, or rather, it's been stomped into oblivion by Jurassic-Park-esque sensations of terror. The mozzies here are freakin huge.

I caught this little bastard trying to sneak into my room the other night:



To give you a sense of scale, it was roughly the size of a dinner plate. Okay, not really, but it was bigger than a 50 cent coin. Significantly bigger. They look like those big daddy-long-legs spiders, except they fly around and bite you.

Secondly, as the title of this post promises, or at least implies, here's a picture of a sunset from last night:



I took that at about 20 minutes after midnight. Yes, we've passed the summer solstice, and the sun is again setting. It still doesn't get dark, but the sun dips down and does a sorta sunset/sunrise dance medly before heaving itself back up again and shining down on us for another 22 odd hours. I think it must have signed one of Howard's AWA's (as a blog writer, I feel that I ought to have at least some poorly-thought-out and unimaginative left-wing vitriol on here).

Lastly, a quiz to keep you on your toes: is the statement of the theorem in this (draft) paper still true if the integrand of the persistence of excitation condition is squared? My boss thinks so, but I'm not sure. (Mat - this is an example of parameter estimation with a nonlinear model.)

In actual news: 4 days until I go to Spain!!

Robbed

Another Update: An interview with Grella, which I bring to your attention chiefly for his response to the question about "justice" and his excellent use of the phrase "quietly confident" towards the end.

After this update, I think soccer and I need to spend some time apart, and this blog will return to its regular programming of "Sweden is a kerazy kountry" and/or slash "I-Rock travels the world and then writes stuff on the internet".

Update: some little champion had the forethought to prepare this sign before the Oz-Italy game:





That's all I can say.

As a doctor, I recommend we all take two of these and lie down:

Fuck yeah!

you know what I'm talkin 'bout.

If you are completely retarded, here's a hint:



I had a lot riding on this game, being in a soccer-mad country, and being known to almost everyone here as "the Australian".

But we were sleepwalking along the road between abysses

A few hours after the pistol shooting on Sunday we had a bbq at a pristine lakeshore on the edge of town. It is clear from the above photo that I remained what you might call a broad-spectrum violence enthusiast.

The hapless lad soon to meet my flying foot of fury is Uwe, from Leipzig, in (formerly East) Germany. It was his birthday last week, hence the bbq. Some may remember past blog discussions about the insipid and/or perplexing nature of communist humour, well he's the man that started it all. He's also now serving as a proxy for my abuse of the German ref of the Oz-Brazil game. He's a good kid, though.

In tonight's game I discovered that I was definitely backing Sweden. Whether the seeds of patriotism have taken root, or its just that they were playing against England, I can't be sure.

I saw a stupid TV show before the game, where some Swedish kids went on a "wild adventure". I think it was called "Fatty and Wart-Eye flail about on a raft on zero-risk waters". Seriously, this kid was like a little sumo wrestler. First time he came on screen, I thought my TV might overbalance and smash on the floor. Afterwards, I actually had to scrape up the lard that had dripped down and congealed below the screen, but then I used it to make a wicked gravy so there are two sides to every coin.

doobie doo, busy at work, papers to write, blah de blah, just a week and a half until Spain and Austria!

Another pic from the lake. So much serenity!

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun

Warning: This post contains possibly the least intimidating wielding of a 44 Magnum since the 80's classic feature film "Stop or my Mom will Shoot"

A guy I work with, who likes guns to a degree bordering on questionable, took a few of us to a shooting range today.



(Yes, I'm wearing my old touch footy shirt. And I still think we should have called the team "I touch my elf")

The 44 Magnum



has a hell of a kick



The hole I made. Not bad for a first try.



Perhaps most impressive: the cool yellow goggles, and that not a single person present attempted any Dirty Harry impressions.

In other news, a friendly Norwegian med student who was once almost chosen by an african tribal chief to be one his numerous wives/sex-slaves told me (in the interest that I could perhaps close the deal where she fell short) the exact hormone required to promote the growth of boobs in men. Hopefully she can swipe a few cartons of it from the hospital for me, then I think I know what my wedding present to Steve will be!

(I love you the way you are, man, but a little extra up front is never a bad thing)

In other, other news, when booking my Spanish/Austrian jaunt, the girl at the travel agent asked me if I was a student and I said "uuhh, kinda, not really". To my surprise, not only did they give me the student prices, they also mailed me an international student card!!
Sweet. Lots of half-price touristy stuff in Europe, and no more problems like this.

You little ripper!

Onya socceroos!

Our research group is currently hosting an Aussie visitor. He's an emeritus professor of maths at UNSW, so he knows Savkin etc, and in fact he lives in Maroubra, just a couple of hundred metres from my old abode. (Oh, I miss the bra).

He worked in Denmark for 30 years, until last year, but has still retained his Aussieness to an admirable degree. E.g., he's only visiting us for two days, but there was absolutely no question that thisarvo we would be planted in from of the TV in the break room with a couple of cold ones.

Some comments from him during the match:

1. On a certain Japanese player: What kind of man plays football wearing pink boots??
2. To the referee, after the controversial Japanese goal: You'd better not show your face in Cronulla, mate.
   
3. After the match, when asked by the German "well, should we get some work done now? it's only an hour till dinner": Yeah, I guess so. We've drunk all the beer, right?
   

Anyway, now it's only half an hour until dinner. A nice all-expenses-payed dinner (with celebration beers) on a converted restaurant-boat down at the river.

In other news, it's definitely summer now. It doesn't get dark at all anymore. It's kinda funny seeing a weather prediction that says "Monday morning: sunny, 20 degrees. Monday afternoon: sunny, 25 degrees. Monday night: sunny, 22 degrees".

A recent pic of Umeå summerlife:

But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies

It's time to blow this popsicle stand, and I'm doing it the only way I know how: by blowing a hefty wad of cash on airfares. Having done so, I hereby refuse to do any more blowing.

• 2nd - 15th of July I'll be in Spain, beginning and ending in Madrid, but inbetweenies through pamplona and barcelona, and whatever I pass through in doing so. At various points meeting up with Jo S., Tori D., and Gay Dodgy Steve.

• 15th - 26th of July I'll be in Austria, where I intend to do some hiking in the alps and hook up for a beer or many with old mates Robbo and Sabine. Possibly also purchase some lederhosen.
  

Then it's back to Umeå for a couple of weeks of work, then:

• 16th August, 6:12pm, I touch down in Las Vegas
• Charging white A-Team-van jubbliness through Calexico and Mexifornia
• wedding-style action wearing "enhance your fancy dance pants" in San Diego
• Hot soapy jubbliness of a nature not yet fully understood up the California coast
  
• 31st Aug, 8:00am, I fly out of San Fransisco

Back in Sweden on the 1st of Sept. Same day, my pares arrive and stay until the 6th.

I think the next few months are gonna just fly by in one of those warp-speed scenes where the stars turn into lines and chewbacca groans for he is once again saying goodbye to a place where he didn't belong and felt like a big hairy alien, because that's what he was.

Not yet sure who will play the part of chewbacca.

If you see anything unusual or suspicious, just enjoy it while you can

Update: while I'm nerding it up with robotic cranes and convergence plots, in a rare moment of procrastination I found this site which tracks family trees of PhD supervisor-student relations in mathematics. Turns out I come from quite a distinguished pedigree:

All the engineers ought to know Chebyshev polynomials and Markov chains, but some of the more mathematically inclined may also have heard of Lyapunov functions, Voronoi diagrams, the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, Sobolev spaces, and the Kalman-Yakubovich-Popov lemma.



I'm beginning to suspect there is a grand conspiracy, possibly masterminded by the airlines as a post-9/11 recovery strategy, for everyone to wait until I go overseas and then get married with intervals of a few months between them.

Congratumalations to Gus and Liz, who have just got engaged and intend to tie the knot in November. God knows where I'll be then, but if I could be in Australia that would be smashing. General message to everyone else: Wait! There's no rush in these modern times, wait til I'm back in oz, or actually earning money (if either of these ever happen). Sweet merciful cheeses, I'm not wonderwoman.

(For those who are humour impaired, or just retarded, the above faux-anger is not to be taken seriously. I'm of course wonderfully happy for Angypoo and his wooz, and hope I can make it to their nuptuals)

If you don't know Gus and Liz, there are middle and right in this image, recently featured on this here blodge:



Does the engagement oblige Liz to rein in her wandering nipple cripples?

In work-related news, we had a string of visitors to our lab over the last week, one group of industry bigwigs from around Sweden, and another group of academics and businesmenn from Japan.

Overall, things went very well, and the upshot is that I will quite likely be spending 1-3 months in Japan late this year or early next year visiting various robotics labs and schmoozing and building synergy and consuming sushi and such-like.

One of my recent projects: networked control and VR visualization of a robotic crane. Looks pretty, but the tricky part is behind the scenes, for which I'm implementing a variant of this piece of wisdom from the Sav-man and his pal.



me explaining it to the Swedes:



Also, in my other main project, I have figured out a way to observe all the important physical parameters of the cerebrospinal fluid system simultaneously and in real-time, which no one has known how to do before, so this could be quite significant. Convergence plots from simulation:



(second graph is converging, but slowly)

We will be testing it on real data from patient diagnoses next week.