Today is my big swim day - swimming home from work! Sponsor me here if you’d like to, for Amnesty International:
https://wonderful.or … onsoredswim-99f53f29

In other news, my new blog seems to work well with email posts. I prefer this one, but the other gives me more options. Let me know which you like best :)

I in a week or so, I’m heading to Canada for a conference, and hopefully a bit of sightseeing too. I’m not sure quite how good the internet access will be over there, and I’d like to keep up to date more with blogging; so I’ve decided to create an additional site on wordpress, so that I can post by email. This will remain my main site, and in time hopefully I’ll add the same functionality here, but because of the way my site is designed it would be a fair bit of work for me to make my site work like that. In the meantime, so that it’s ready in time for Canada, I’ve taken the shortcut of having someone else do the programming and web hosting, and my wordpress site is here: http://aidanrides.wordpress.com Wordpress partially fund their service through advertising, so the pages I post from that link will have some adverts on - sorry about that! I hope you don’t mind them too much. Please feel free to avoid that site; if the adverts bug you, let me know, and I’ll hurry up with getting the email-to-post feature working with this site :)

Just a short race I did in Scotland last week, at a conference in Glasgow. It was the morning after a whisky tasting session… I wonder how much effect that had on participant numbers! (Not whiskey, as I was reminded - maybe that’s because I’ve spent too much time in Ireland!)

In case you’re wondering why this race was 4.2 km (it’s an obscure reason, so you might well be): 4.2 Kelvin (4.2 K) is the boiling point of liquid helium. Until recently, almost all superconductors have used liquid helium as the coolant, in order to reach the temperatures at which they operate. Having a 4.2 km race is, apparently, a tradition at this applied superconductivity conference. That’s definitely a geeky physicists in-joke… Still, it was fitting I suppose in Glasgow, seeing as we ran the race in Kelvin park, not far from the statue of William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin).
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