Musical weekend in Coventry

Last weekend Dave and I  joined the British Police Symphony Orchestra for another weekend of music... the rep was a bit cheesy, with lots of John Williams movie music and poor (literally inexpensive) arrangements of British classics like Crown Imperial and Enigma, but the concert was meant to raise money for a children's charity and the crowd, young and old, seemed to like it. Coventry is NOT known for being a lovely place to visit: it is generally derided as being dirty and crime ridden and a bit ick. It was entirely rebuilt after being leveled in World War II, and although I can admire the initiative to pedestrianize most of the city center, its architecture isn't aging well. Still, it had its moments, and the weekend was an interesting venture.

Lady Godiva, of Coventry (did you know that?)

Excellent Lady Godiva that appears on the hour, complete with skeevy onlooker

The remnants of Coventry's medieval cathedral, now a powerful memorial for WWII

A new cathedral is built adjoining the destroyed on, with amazing etched glass. How many new cathedrals are built? The scale is impressive, and the architecture perhaps not my favorite but still has its merits.

Statue in the old cathedral

Dave in the cathedral

Some gorgeous medieval buildings remain, despite most of the town being entirely rebuilt from rubble post-bombing.

Sent this one to my mom... Gerontology in medieval Coventry

The friendly clarinets in the Police orchestra

Flute and horn moment in the Star Wars medley in the Sunday rehearsal

Dave underneath art?

Those buses... can't be trusted.

Settling in satisfactorily

To assuage the guilt of such a long absence, here are a bunch of pictures from life in Nottingham!

Sian and Kris were our first dinner guests! Dave and I had been watching lots of Treme on HBO, so we ended up spending all day cooking gumbo, buttermilk biscuits and cornbread muffins (oh, yes, yum).

My bit of the UK had a pretty decent 95% solar eclipse, and I got in on the action (here's half way through, via a pin hole camera). Some had eclipse glasses, some medics brought out x-ray film, and physicists had lots of fun kit to view the event with. I was lucky and tried a bunch. Mainly, it was super cool to see just how many hundreds of people spilled outside to "watch"

Start with an eclipse, end with a sunset...

My first musical gig in Nottingham, playing 3rd oboe in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms: a damn good piece for orchestra and choir that I had done while in Cardiff. The music was satisfying and I hopefully made a few contacts for future gigs. It won't be as easy to find musical opportunities in Nottingham as it was in Cardiff, but I'm still optimistic.

I traveled southwest to Bristol to give a lecture; the train station featured Holland-ic levels of bicycles and, um, a steam engine train? This was my first guest lecture at this level, as there aren't many obvious teaching opportunities for me. I stressed, but it went very well: I had fantastic social media analogies to explain brain network structure that seemed to work well 

Seeing as I was most of the way there,  I headed back to Cardiff after the Bristol course, where spring was waiting to greet me.

I got to see some lovely familiar faces in Cardiff; here's the end of the night out... thanks especially to Kevin, my ex-boss and continuing friend, who hosted me :)

Nottingham has lovely people too! Here is Sian, demonstrating her epic unicycle skills just out of frame.

And Ben with his crazy bouncy stilt legs. I *did give them a try, although I needed a lot of ground support...

And Matt, going a little crazy towards the end of his PhD, with unintentional coordination between copies of his thesis and his socks.

So yes, lots of fun things bubbling along in the background! In science news, I had a paper accepted (finally! we first submitted in July 2014!) and it's causing a bit of a stir. It was picked up by perhaps the biggest Neuroscience blogger in the UK, who writes for Discover Magazine. I was initially freaking out, because he got something wrong and wrote something misleading, and the take-home message was already getting misinterpreted across social media. But I used twitter, talked to the blogger, made corrections, and hopefully things are more accurately represented now. I'm even starting to enjoy the little bit of buzz that the paper has garnered! Totally new territory, reinforcing my science-love for the twitter (@BrightMG, anyone?).

Here's the blog post:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2015/04/18/is-fmri-noise-really-noise/

It's also an open access paper, if anyone wants to chance a reading!
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811915002669