Korean Barbecue

I happened to share a room for two and a half of months with a
Korean PhD student. One of the "cultural experiences" I had during this
time was trying a meal denoted as "the most accessible Korean food for
European". In Korea this type of meal has its own type of restaurants
where you choose pieces of raw meat and grill them yourself.

Since our room is far from being equipped with a grill, using just a
frying pan made us sufficiently satisfied as well. What is the secret
of the Korean BBQ besides grilled meat?

The ingredients are essential:

• sesame oil
• a type of soy paste called "Ssamjang"[Samdja(n)]
• some kind of "big-leaf-lettuce", iceberg-lettuce is not the best choice since the leafs break easily, maybe romaine does better.
  
  
• vegetable: leek, onion, garlic. Probably there are other good choices.

Piece of grilled meat is dipped in sesame oil, put onto a lettuce
leaf and vegetable with soy paste are added. Wrap it and eat it.



Wonderfully simple and tasty.



Moreover, I find sesame oil and the soy paste worthwhile for other
experiments. Seeing some specialized shop will be most likely
necessary, but reward of gaining very good rice and good quality soy
sauce is waiting for you as well. By the way, it's interesting to compare the ingredients of Korean soy sauce and the one by Heinz:

"Water, soybean, salt" versus "All possible chemistry, a trace of soy might be there as well"

To tell the difference in taste is really not difficult.

Crimes and Misdemeanours

I am  surprised that I came across this Woody Allen's movie only after I saw so many other movies by him.
Really great. Why? I don't know exactly why I found this movie so comic, maybe it was a vision of Woody Allen laughing when he was writing the script. He decides to crush the character played by himself in the most complete way. You would not  imagine such fancy "Job's disasters" even in your worst nightmares. Why is it funny? I can't say, check it yourself.

SOME PLOT ELEMENTS ARE CONTAINED IN THE FOLLOWING:
I disliked the simple fact that the whole idea of one of two parallel halves of the story is fully involved in a recent Alan's movie "Match point". If you saw none of them I slightly recommend the "Crimes" because it has another parallel half (the comic one). 
Then I disliked a goof at the point of murder: the experienced mobster, brother of Judah, does not realize that the there are many letters and other leads to Judah at victim's apartment. Judah realizes this himself and does the cleaning by which he makes his bother only upset.


For comparision, my approximate ranking of (my favorite and seen) Allen's movies:

1. Last Part of "Everything you wanted to know about sex..."
2. Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona
3. Crimes and Misdemeanors
4. Annie Hall (not pretty sure, since it was long time ago but I liked it)
5. Match Point
6. Manhattan
   
   
7. Hollywood Ending

Friday Night Skate BCN

After more than 6 month nightskating again. Suprisingly good oranization with street blocking (in contrast to warnings I heard about Barcelona), and similar number of skaters like in A'dam. Yet there is some difference: http://www.fridaynightskate.com/ (A'dam) states "20:30 start but we gather since 20:00" and so it is, while http://www.patinar-bcn.com/ says "at 22:30 start" and at 22:30 happens the gathering and the start is at no earlier than ten to eleven. An "evidence":) :

That's a pity the skate does not start in the daylight, one could see more (and the photos would be better).
Still, going along the see, seeing interesting buildings at the end of Diagonal

suddently arriving at fundations of the Sagrada Familia and at Arc de Triumph makes the skating interesting. Unfortunatelly, for Inglés-speakers it is much harder to chat with locals then in Amsterdam.

Museu Picasso

Surprisingly I was able to get up before noon today (I don't want to specify why surprisingly) and, moreover, found an idea of going for mass into the old cathedral of Barcelona nice. Of course I would not understand (which, on the contrary,  might be sometimes an advantage :) ) and would not stay for the whole time. But seeing the nice place again after a year and spending little time "alone" was attractive.
Since it is a long journey (35 minutes by train) I of course wanted to make use of my visit to BCN center and planned to join Eddie and others at swing dancing place in Parc de Cuitadella (and possibly do something else with them afterwards).
For some reasons I don't want to specify I was only able to come to the Parc 15 minutes before the end of swing dancing and nobody was there (already?), maybe because of slightly rainy weather.
My plan included two options: Casa Batló or Museu Picasso. Since the museum was on my way first, I checked it out and it turned out that I hit by accidence the only day of the month, when the entrance is free (first Sunday of each month) which saved me either 9 or 6 Euros! Nice!
The temporary exposition was the best of the museum. It showed a period of Picasso of mixing humans and nonliving objects together in a way that you cannot recognize one from another. Among nonliving objects almost always was a guitar so the museum is very recommended for all lovers of this instrument (or lovers of the shape of the guitar as well).
Beside that there were some sketches of Picasso projected and they showed that besides being the founder of Cubism, Picasso was the founder of the graph theory as well :).  The pictures were exactly like from graph theory textbooks! Some of the sketches (or proofs?) included really really huge graphs, probably some extensive case analysis:) Despite the prohibition of taking the photos, I include here one very small "graph" of, as you can easily guess, guitar.

Sorry for the "mobile" quality, in reality it's much better.

Me, Mathematics and others

One has to keep asking. Among others questions, the choice of profession will never leave me cold. Where did I end up? My (in some small aspects random-based) choice of prof. Matoušek meant to come to the edge of hardcore mathematics while still keeping hold of the solid rope of computer science. Nonpoeticaly it should be probably classified as computational algebraic topology + algebraic topology in combinatorics. Great. What is my view of my job?
Why is the field important? Algebraic topology is romantic and beautiful branch and at the same time it involves many "engeneering ideas" that, what at least my intuition says, necessarily have to appear in the nature of algorithms.
Pros:

• This was actually my first-rate criterion in my last year's choice of the PhD position but now I of course have doubts whether it should be on the first place: I have got a top-class advisor that I can talk to.
  
• With exaggeration, I was created for this area. It is geometric imagination, where I feel strong in mathematics. This field can be basically researched by two kinds of people: computer scientists - who usually have poor knowledge of algebraic topology - or by mathematicians - who usually don't find algorithmic questions interesting or (at the same time) have only basic knowledge in complexity. I am capable to become an exception.
• Two high quality semesters of algebraic topology taken at VU Amsterdam (probably incomparable to what I could get in Prague) give me a front position in our research team.
• A first "love affair" with (combinatorial) topology dates back already to 2nd year at Matfyz:)

Cons:

• Although I can still consider myself to work in mathematics that "stands behind computers", it is a bit too "far from earth" (theoretical) to be in harmony with my engineering soul.
  
• This is a hard-core-mathematical area miles away from the programmers lifes, that programmers cannot be taught. This will split my profession into two disjoint (orthogonal!) parts: teaching and research. Advances in research will not push me forward in teaching and the other way round. (In previous two points I compare my situation with my alternative-universe profession cryptologist)
  

• I got to a department I have very little common interests with. The last Homonolo in Jizerky was a almost a shock: I was able to find very little passion for things my colleagues do! (Here I can compare with the group of Lex Schrijver at CWI, Amsterdam.)
• I can hardly talk about my work with others. Not with normal people, of course, but, for exmple, not with my almost-computer-science-PhD brother and,  in the end, not even my department's colleagues (besides my advisor).
  

That was a short review of my attitude to my job.
It leaves the question of profession fairly unanswered. I'm almost sure already now that if I
stay in mathematics, I'll do its wonderful and amazing
part that "drives computers".
But what are the alternatives? To pack my stuff and go outside my beloved Republic to do the cryptology? (Amsterdam would not be a bad place, besides that Germany, Switzerland..).
Or quit academia? I feel confident to be able to bring inovations in the field of software developement, but am I able to preserve my mental health while dealing with computers of flesh and blood? (Google in Zurich sounds pretty nice. Just get the job! I should come up with more alternatives if I want to think about it seriously.) Or take the usual trail of mathematics students and work in finances?

Let's stop boring suggestions! Become a cook. Run a bakery. A journalist.
In the end, isn't it way too restrictive to admit only single profession for the only single life we live?

Poděkování sponzorovi

Prakticky téměř po roce se vracím k editačním okénkům weblogů. Činím tak jednak kvůli sobě, člověkovi s bídnou pamětí, který se přesto chce učit z vlastních chyb a nezanechat v zapomění výrazný momenty svýho žití. Pak chci nabídnout publikovatelný sondy pod povrch mojí planety, zajímavý informace nebo případně moje tvůrčí počiny všem, kteří o to mají zájem.

V neposlední řadě chci vyjádřit poděkování "sponzorovi", jehož "sponzorský impuls" mě zpět k blogování dostal. Možná si představoval výsledek svýho snažení jinak (a více "sponzorských impulsů" se mi nedostane), to už je ale riziko podnikání (u obou stran).

K poděkování i k slavnostnímu otevření přikládám dvě fotky ze svýho současnýho barcelonskýho pobytu, zároveň zobrazující činnosti, který mám v poslední době asi nejradši a kterých se mi tady v kampusu UAB (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona) na předměstí katalánské metropole dostává vrchovatou měrou: matiku a sportování.