Excitingly, they were filming for “His Dark Materials: Northern Lights” on my street today, and I would have taken some photos, but the camera was batteryless. As far as I could overhear, it was just background shots, and so no shlabrities. I sat for a while and watched, to notice that it is most unglamorous and repetitive, this filmmaking lark. It also contains extended periods of standing around, and misunderstood requests:

“Dave, could you move that to the left, out of the way?”

“Here?”

“No, to the left, Dave.”

The magic of cinema.

Academically, I’ve been all over the place since last I wrote. However all these papers I’m supposed to be consuming don’t seem to dwindle. They are really quite technical, you see, and interesting, but require a fairish amount of working things out for yourself, which in turn requires all the Time there is.

So instead I flit hither and thither learning about things like principal G-bundles and characteristic classes, that you can actually show things with. I did some work on spectral sequences as well, but don’t have anything to apply them to yet, so I think I’ll wait until I do to learn more.

Unsettlingly, I don’t really know what I should be working on. This is a problem.