Tom Womack

'The appointment of a new bishop is a political act which cannot be delegated to a foreigner'. OK, the mountains between Chengde and the Vatican are wider and higher than the Alps, but I had thought the question of ultramontanism was no longer a live one.

I've put them up as a Facebook album at

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=292059&id=783247428&l=e38c5d9e38

(thanks to LNR for the instructions for how to get a link to a Facebook album that works when you're not logged in) with another copy up at http://www.fivemack.org/china2010 if you like memorable addresses or if your employer dislikes Facebook. Ask here if you want the story behind any of them.

Questions I've been asked:

• This one is looking back from the Forbidden City towards the Photographer's Pavilion in Jingshan here
• I don't know what the characters mean
• I think the shiny metal is some sort of allusion to the Moon, with which the rabbit is associated
• They're auspicious bats
• The fee to beat the drum three times is 10元: a pound
• It is a Tang-dynasty interpretation of a burnous
• The material for the scenes from the life of the Buddha is inlaid polychrome jade
• The Macao pavilion is indeed in the shape of a giant rabbit
• The message is that the Silk Road trade was essentially between Persia and China; no territorial claim was explicitly made
• He symbolises peace through international trade
• A sweet, oaky Argentine white
• He is celebrating the Canadian creative spirit
• Unlike on Wall Street, there is no bear to go with the bull
• I was born in the year of the snake

Shanghai starts out much less alien than Xi'an, or even Beijing: there are buildings not of brutalist concrete, the streets are no more than three lanes in each direction and, a greater miracle, the traffic drives in only three lanes along them. There's a very competent metro: thirteen lines as I type.

And so I took this metro to the Expo.

Imagine a county show or state fair, but exhibiting a country and featuring pavilions from a planet. The fairground is about 3000 acres in the city centre, including three ferry ports, two very substantial bridges across the Huangpe, and many kilometres of multi-lane highway. And this space is dotted with a couple of hundred pavilions; one of the midsized pavilions is a repurposed dry dock of the China State Shipbuilding Company, and there are a dozen or so that size and several much larger.

I've walked round the site for nine hours today and might have seen 10% of it. The Vietnamese pavilion, a temple framed inside and out in bamboo, is probably the best bit of architecture; the exhibition of carpets in the Iranian pavilion the most brain-bending - they had some utterly sublime velvet carpets from Qom, but also a couple of renditions, carefully done, priced at a couple of thousand pounds and labelled as the result of a year's labour, which depicted two badly-drawn ugly kittens playing with balls of poorly-rendered string. I can only hope that these are the work of CNC looms sold as handicraft.

I've got two more day tickets to the Expo: will need to turn up early one morning to get one of the closely-rationed tickets to the China pavilion, though if that fails there is a secondary market - this is China, of course there's a secondary market - and they'll be thirty quid from a tout. Tomorrow I will recharge by looking at non-Expo parts of Shanghai, and trying to buy a 16G memory card for my camera and a couple of nice wall-scrolls for my living room.

Supper was at Old Uncle's Fast Food, which regrettably doesn't seem to have made it outside China: regrettably for two reasons. First, any fast-food place where all orders come by default with a bowl of steamed broccoli should definitely be encouraged, and secondly because they make perfect, glistening, wobbly creme caramel. OK, it's chicken flavoured and served as a starter, but such things can be fixed to Western appetites.

It's a peacock butterfly; it made a loud rustle as it opened and closed its wings, and gripped tightly to my trousers. I really hadn't realised butterflies had that gorgeous black-on-black tracery on the backs of the wings. If you click on the image a couple of times you'll get a version large enough to see the individual scales.

I spent a long time on trains, on planes, and engulfed with various degrees of languor at weekends during August, so managed to finish fourteen books.

A couple I would recommend unstintingly: David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet has everything - exoticism and humanity, lust and longing, mighty crimes and mighty vengeance, and Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth offers a Voltairian narrative of crime, folly and decadent whimsy.

A couple of conclusions to series; Steig Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest is a very fitting conclusion but has a rather surprisingly utopian attitude to Swedish legitimate authority, an almost appeal-to-the-Celestial-Emperor line in which an honourable man can convince the highest levels of government to deal with the misdoings of their minions' minions. Adrian Tchaikovsky's Salute the Dark draws together most of the threads and brings a fitting finish to the great war of the insect-tribes - the series continues but at a different scale and in a very different part of the world.

Greg Egan's Zendegi is a welcome return to form, writing about humans in contemporary Iran and an (again slightly Utopian) near-future Iran rather than illustrating consequences of General Relativity among robots the size of rice-grains orbiting the galactic centre black hole; it's somehow more adult than much of what he's written before, actions have consequences which shake people but not worlds.

NK Jemisin's The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is an interesting example of the ingenue cast into an infinitely complicated web of palace intrigue, in a world where the power-centres include chained gods; rather like Brandon Sanderson's Warbreaker, which I read last month, but enough more subtle (mostly because it's entirely in first-person narration from the often-bewildered narrator) that I rather preferred the Sanderson.

Adam Roberts' New Model Army takes one of Adam's trademark ludicrous premises, and turns it into three hundred pages describing how much fun it is to be a member of a successful guerilla army, beseiging Basingstoke, running rampant through Reading and going to ground in Cambridge. Not a character I want to let back into my head, really.

Ken Macleod's The Restoration Game mixes a certain degree of autobiography with his strong sense of contemporary conspiracy theory; certainly a book to encourage tourism to Georgia. It does have the third deus-ex-unlikely-machina ending in three consecutive books; certainly it's instantly recognisable as being a Macleod, but it's among his weaker ones.

A few to avoid: Louis de Bernieres' Notwithstanding is sentimental to the point of mushiness, Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt is self-consciously gritty but says little. Arthur C Clarke's last co-written book (with Fred Pohl, The Last Theorem) is archetypically Clarke in its utopias but even more devoid of incident than Clarke's earlier travelogues; he's an almost perfect writer of Lonely Planet travel-guides to utopian futures, and it's a genre I like a lot, but I'm not sure about his humans.

Passing to non-fiction, Dan Cruickshank's Secret History of Georgian London is essentially a compilation of the naughty bits of the history of that apparently unrestrainedly carnal epoch; loving descriptions of the more ludicrous spectacles held at the more spectacular brothels of the town, one starts to get a clear image of the author as a somewhat rakish uncle well-stocked with off-colour anecdotes. Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos and Thomas Ricks' The Gamble are an interesting paired read, Rashid showing how American funding to warlords ruined Afghanistan and Ricks claiming that American funding to what are clearly embryonic warlords is going to save Iraq.

The African Jacana may have the silliest feet in the whole Zambezi

It is good that it wasn't the breeding season, because I might have died of cuteness had I seen the chicks (picture from Wikipedia, taken by someone else at a zoo in Japan)

That was a fairly intense conference: talks started at eight and finished at five, followed by a two-hour poster session, followed by organised evening events until eleven. I got to wander up the Magnificent Mile and go to the 94th floor of the John Hancock, which gives a nice view of the city - why do so few apartment blocks have rooftop swimming-pools? - but that was all the touristing available. Tiring enough that I managed to sleep on the red-eye, and all four of us were fast asleep in the taxi from Heathrow.

That's the end of the most hectic part of two hectic months; on the other hand we have to get a new release of the software out at the end of September, so I don't get to relax very long.

The Nobel Laureate speeches on the ribosome crystal structure each showed a video in their own unique style of how the ribosome worked. This was absolutely heroic work; it took two decades to get any structures at all, and even though finding the structure of a crystal with contents very similar to one you know already is much easier, the increment to get a structure of a new antibiotic bound to the ribosome is months of crystallisation effort to end up with the positions of maybe fifty atoms. Tom Steitz is looking at taking pairs of antibiotics that bind in nearby places and constructing composite molecules which bind one end at one site and one end at another; Ada Yonath is looking at pairs of antibiotics that bind in different places and suggesting just dosing both at once, which seems to achieve a similar effect at several hundred million dollars less in drug development cost.

There's a lot of rivalry between the groups; Steitz and the third winner Venki Ramakrishnan appeared on the front page of the Stockholm paper with the crown princess sitting between them; Yonath pointed out that she wasn't in that picture because she had been seated with the king, and showed this rather sweet cartoon.

The talk on Raman spectroscopy was fun: I always like hearing about new experimental methods, and this one lets you (sometimes a photon from an intense laser beam gets scattered backwards with its energy reduced by the vibrational energy of some chemical bond, so you focus a laser on the interior of the crystal and measure accurately the spectrum of the light that bounces back, with a notch filter to take the laser itself out) watch the infra-red spectrum of a protein evolve as it does its job: you can observe 'something interesting happens twenty minutes after mixing in the substrate', you can have a good idea of what it is that's happening by looking at the wavelengths, and then you freeze the crystal at the appropriate time and do X-ray diffraction to see exactly where the atoms are as the interesting thing happens. And the group presenting can do this on RNA polymerase, and (after some pretty fearsome experimental issues - you need all-carbon-13, all-nitrogen-15 nucleotide triphosphates to get the bands out of the way of the bands from all the other nucleotides in the template DNA) you can see exactly how the new nucleotides are stuck on the end of the RNA that's forming.

Can't they at least eat the whole of one sweater before starting on the next? I've lost two sweaters to them this year, and a third has only narrowly escaped ...

[Poll #1586171]