Cosmic Zoo

Back in the water

2011-10-09T20:07:00.000Z

Due to the flat purchase and renovation it's been almost a year since I was last out kayaking on a river (I didn't think it was that long, but the blog doesn't lie!), but yesterday I got myself on one of the club freshers trips. There are a few standard beginners rivers and for this trip we headed to my first river - the Lower Orchy. It seems we weren't the only group to think this as there were about 40 people from Edinburgh's club too.

It was good to be back out on a river with the knowledge that I shouldn't be able to get myself into trouble. I was able to get a good amount of practice ferrying across the river and breaking in and out of eddies, which were things that I needed to work on. All our freshers got on pretty well despite a few swims, although unfortunately early on one of the news paddlers dislocated their shoulder. They also got to experience generally standard of having to change out of their kit in the pouring rain. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and I had a lot of fun.

I'm definitely going to try and get out on far more trips this year than the last.

Changing rooms

2011-08-20T19:13:00.001Z

By popular demand I've decided to post some "after" photos of our new flat. I hope you enjoy our handiwork.

This is the "red room" and was the first room to be painted (see here for comparison) - the fireplace is gone and the hole it left was plastered over and covered by a bookcase. As can be seen it is supposed to be the cats room.

The "blue room" - this was our main bedroom for the first few months in the flat (see here for comparison).

The living room - there's a brand new fireplace and the fancy engineered wood floor that we laid (see here for comparison)

The bathroom - the first major job to be completed in the flat was toilet and sink going in (see here for comparison)

The kitchen (see here for comparison) - this was taken just before our flatwarming, which is why there's a food spread out. It's a Magnet kitchen (but bought from Andersons for far cheaper than the standard Magnet price, so we'd definitely recommend them). Note the range cooker - there's a story to that which probably warrants a whole blogpost to itself, but here I'll just say that it was interesting getting it into the flat on an icy day last December.

The hall - the same flooring from the living extends through to the hall. It's taken from the opposite angle to the comparison picture, but where the hall narrows on the left there used to be a blocked off ceiling cupboard/loft space that extended to level with the pantry cupboards. The far door goes into a cupboard that was originally only accessible from the kitchen, but which we knocked through.

Last, but not least, the main bedroom - we actually did least to this room (see here for comparison). We painted the whole thing, but didn't do anything to the floor (this is a potential future project). Note that the cats appear to have claimed the bed as their own!

The flat

2011-08-14T22:31:00.012Z

Thought I'd post something about the flat my girlfriend (actually fiancée now) and I bought seeing as it has been one of the reasons for the sparseness of my blogging. When we bought the flat we knew that it would require quite a bit of work - every room needed redecorating, a new bathroom and kitchen were required and the flooring in every room had to be replaced. All this might have been quite daunting, but my fiancées dad was keen to lend a hand. While we got on with the important jobs of painting and wallpapering, he was able to fit the bathroom, kitchen and flooring, so you can see it was a fair distribution of labour!The renovation is pretty much entirely done now (it took maybe slightly longer than we'd originally anticipated) - it's really only a few radiator pipe collars that are needed, but to show where we started from here are a few photo's of the flat before we got working on it (it may not look too bad in the pictures, but they don't do the true state it was in justice):

The living room - note the lovely carpet and fireplace! These have since been replaced.

Spare room 1 - this is now blue. This was our main bedroom whilst the room that was to become our bedroom was being used as storage space for all the renovation material.

Spare room 2 - again note the carpet, wallpaper and horrific fireplace. All these are gone. It is the cats room now.

The kitchen - this had to be gutted. We (well mainly my fiancée) redesigned it ourselves!

The hall - this photo looks far less grotty than it was. More had to be done in this room than you might expect.

The main bedroom - this room actually had to have the least done to it. We repainted the walls and covered up some bizarre rag-rolling on the ceiling and cornicing. However, for the first few months of moving in you couldn't see the floor as it was covered in tools and other renovation paraphernalia. It also now contains a bed.

The bathroom - obviously! This was also completely gutted and a new bathroom suite installed.

I might post some of the after photo's later, but as you might expect we spent a lot of time in the local B&Qs and travelling to and from the tip.

Stepping off the ladder

2011-08-01T13:53:00.010Z

After a long break from posts I thought I return with a proper science-based post. A few days ago a couple of friends of mine posted this very interesting paper on the pre-print arXiv:

Measuring a cosmological distance-redshift relationship using only gravitational wave observations of binary neutron star coalescences

Chris Messenger ¹, Jocelyn Read

Detection of gravitational waves from the inspiral phase of binary neutron star coalescence will allow us to measure the effects of the tidal coupling in such systems. These effects will be measurable using 3rd generation gravitational wave detectors, e.g. the Einstein Telescope, which will be capable of detecting inspiralling binary neutron star systems out to redshift z=4. Tidal effects provide additional contributions to the phase evolution of the gravitational wave signal that break a degeneracy between the system's mass parameters and redshift and thereby allowing for the simultaneous measurement of both the effective distance and the redshift for individual sources. Using the population of O(10³-10⁷) detectable binary neutron star systems predicted for the Einstein Telescope the luminosity distance--redshift relation can be probed independently of the cosmological distance ladder and independently of electromagnetic observations. We present the results of a Fisher information analysis applied to waveforms assuming a subset of possible neutron equations of state. We conclude that the redshift of such systems can be determined to O(10%) for z>1 and in the most optimistic case accuracies of 2% can be achieved.

It's a very interesting paper as it could provide a way to get round a reliance that has been at the heart of various aspects of cosmology - the cosmic distance ladder (you might also want to read Phil Plait's description of this). If you want to know the distance of an object that is very far away you need to be able to measure some aspect of that object that has a well know relation to how far away it is. For example, if you have a 100 W light bulb that's 10m away you know that the flux (energy per second per unit area, or basically how bright it looks) that reaches you will be 100 W / (4π x (10 m)²) = 0.08 W/m². The same light bulb at twice the distance will be four times dimmer as you know that the flux falls off as the square of the distance - the famous inverse square law. In this case you know the actual power output of the bulb, so by measuring the flux that you receive you can easily work out the distance. Things are a bit more difficult for objects in space as unlike for a light bulb, which tells you its power on the box, they don't come with a instructions! So a bit more inference is required to make some so called "standard candles" for astronomical distance measurements.

For the Sun, we know it's distance very well and we can also measure it's brightness, so if we see other stars (much further away) that look a lot like the Sun (things like their spectral type/colour can tell us this) then by measuring their brightness and assuming they emit the same power as the Sun we can infer their distance. There is another way of telling the distance to nearby stars (within a few hundred light years of us) called parallax, which involves geometry - this uses the fact that as the Earth orbits the Sun the position you observe a star at will shift with respect to distant background objects (like how a close object will appear to shift if you close one eye then the other). The size in the shift and the well know size of the Earth's orbit gives you the distance to the star via simple trigonometry. So for these stars you can measure their distance and brightness (giving their intrinsic luminosity or power ouput) and their spectral type. Again you can use these now well defined stars to calibrate a distance scale for further away stars of the same spectral type that are too far away to get a parallax.

These distance measurements work relatively nearby e.g. in our galaxy, but as you get further away it gets harder to resolve individual stars to get their brightness and spectral type. There is a special type of star called Cepheid variables that allow you to measure distances a bit further. These stars are intrinsically bright (you can see them at further distances) and they have a special property - they pulsate - and the period of the pulsation is related to their overall brightness. So, if you can measure the period of some Cepheids nearby where their distance can be measured by looking at other close stars then you can calibrate the relationship and then stretch the distance ladder out further. A type of event that is even brighter and can be seen out to even greater distances is a Type Ia supernova. These events occur when a white dwarf star (the Earth-sized remnant of a star like the Sun after it has run out of fuel to burn) accretes (gravitationally pulls) material off a companion star. White dwarfs are only stable if their mass is below about 1.4 times that of the Sun and if enough material is accreted to exceed this limit they will explode! As all these stars are the same mass when they explode it is assumed that they will all emit the same amount of power. So again, if you can measure some of these events nearby, where other distance measurements are valid, then they can be calibrated to use as a cosmological distance measurement.

This is called the distance ladder because you can see it relies on several steps. There are other things that need to be taken into account, for example extinction (the dimming of light as it passes through the extremely tenuous, but nevertheless present interstellar/intergalactic medium between us and a source), which makes things appear dimmer than the should be and could lead to their distance being overestimated; or the small possibility that the physics of Type Ia supernovae is be different over the course of the universes history, so they won't all have the same intrinsic luminosity.

So why is this important for cosmology? Well cosmology is all about working out the history and geometry of the universe, so how the universe evolves over time is essential to this. Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is expanding and the further away you look (from Cepheid distance measurements) the faster that expansion (as given by a redshift) is happening - know as Hubble's Law. [Redshift is causes by the Doppler effect - light, or any wave, will appear to have a longer wavelength (i.e. be redder) if its source is moving away from the observer than if they were stationary with respect to each other.] In Hubble's Law the relationship between the velocity and distance is constant, but working out the Hubble constant's value (or indeed whether it is constant) requires well known distances and redshifts. [Redshift can be measured by looking for certain features in the spectrum of a star and seeing how much they are shifted by, or by seeing how much the overall spectrum is shifted to the red.] This also relates to the geometry of the universe - is it flat, or curved on the largest scales? One of the major recent(ish - well late 90s) discoveries, using observations of Type Ia supernovae, showed that distant supernova appeared dimmer (e.g. further away) that would be expected from the simple Hubble relation, suggesting that the expansion of the universe has started accelerating in its relatively recent history (the last few billion years!)

The above discussion has talked about using electromagnetic radiation to work out the redshift vs. distance relation, but now we'll switch to the crux of the paper I mentioned which instead uses gravitational waves. The paper is trying to provide a way to get the distance vs. redshift relation without relying on the standard distance ladder of Cepheids and supernova. This could either independently confirm the current cosmological models, or show up systematic errors in the distance scale, both of which would be very important to know. The basis is that certain sources of gravitational waves, namely the inspiral of two neutron stars (the ultra dense remnants of massive stars the cores of which collapse during a supernova [described in a bit more detail here]), are "standard sirens" - like standard candles, but a sound-based analogy is generally thought more apt for these gravitational wave sources as they are in the audio frequency range of around 10-1000 Hz. In these systems the pair of neutron stars will orbit around each other gradually losing energy (and shrinking their orbit) via emission of gravitational waves - this was demonstrated to be true by the Nobel prize winning discovery by Hulse and Taylor of a pair of neutron stars behaving in exactly the way predicted. The amount of energy released via gravitational waves increases as the orbit decays, but still would only be observable with planned ground-based gravitational wave detectors in the very final stages of their evolution - when their orbits have decayed so much that they're about to collide and merge together. This signal is useful, because (as shown by Bernard Schutz) the strength and evolution of the signal gives the source distance directly, independently of the distance ladder - the way the frequency evolves gives the system's redshifted mass, whilst the amplitude contains a combination of the redshifted mass and distance, so the former can be used to get the systems distance from the latter.

Unfortunately the signal doesn't directly enode the source's redshift, it gives a combination the the source mass and redshift that cannot be unentangled, so independent measurements of the redshift are required using a regular telescope. Unlike regular telescopes gravitational wave telescopes are omnidirectional, which means they see the whole sky all the time (although their sensitivity is not equal over the whole sky due to their antenna pattern), but on their own they cannot pinpoint a sources position. You need multiple detectors to get positional information by working out the differences in a signal's arrival time between detectors and triangulating the source's position - and many detectors have been built to give such an array. However, even with several detectors the positional information is not great (even if you can pinpoint a small patch of sky, say the angular size of the moon (or about half a degree), it contains a lot of galaxies that could have been the home of the gravitational wave signal), so finding the home of the signal and measuring its redshift is difficult. In some cases the gravitational wave signal is coincident with a gamma-ray burst that helps localising the host with follow-up observations, but this is not be the case for all events.

The holy grail is therefore to find a way to get the distance and redshift information from the gravitational wave signal alone, and that is what the paper provides. How you do this comes about by including some extra physics in the how the orbits of the binary neutron stars decay. For the majority of the binary lifetime you can calculate the gravitational wave signal by assuming that the neutron stars are both point particles i.e. all their mass is in a single point. However, neutron stars are not point particles and there will come a point when they get so close that their very strong gravitational fields will start to distort each other and pull the stars apart. This distortion will be encoded in the gravitational wave signal and give information about the stars' masses. As noted before the combined mass and redshift can already be measured from the signal, so this other mass measurement can unentangle these and give you a redshift. So, voila! Distance and redshift can be measured all in one go.

Unfortunately (again!) there are some caveats. For example: the accuracy that you can measure the redshift depends on redshift - due to how the strength of the signal changes, and how the gravitational wave detectors work, there's a sweet spot at about redshift 2; the accuracy depends on what exactly the neutron star is made of (the star might be stiff or soft and therefore harder or easier to distort), and what a typical neutron star is made of needs to be know beforehand (currently there are many theoretical models, but no conclusive evidence for which is/are correct); and finally these measurements require a gravitational wave detector called the Einstein Telescope, which is currently only a design concept although hopefully will be built some time in the 2020s. It's still very interesting work though and I think the above caveats are by no means insurmountable in the not-to-distant future.

[Update: another similar interesting paper has also been recently posted.]

[Update: I should just note that the method works because the known neutron star radius can be used as a reference length in the waveform, which is kind of analogous to knowing the rest wavelength of a particular spectral line and therefore working out the redshift by measuring the difference from the observed wavelength.]

¹Chris was the instigator and lead guitarist in our famous bands Corpse Full of Bees and Look Up for Danger

Waiting for the envelop (sic)

2011-03-15T16:55:00.000Z

Read this if you want to find out what's being keeping us gravitational wave types occupied for the last few months. At some point I might elaborate a bit more in this. (The title of this post will become clearer once you've read the link)

Apologies for the interuption to service

2011-01-31T18:04:00.001Z

Before the end of the first month of 2011 I thought I should at least get one post out. My blogosphere hiatus has mainly been due to the new flat I mentioned nearly two months ago, but there's also been lots of work things to keep me busy.

Working on the flat (which among other things, and thanks mainly to the efforts of my girlfriends dad, now has a fully functioning bathroom) has meant neglecting other things that have been a mainstay of my blogging life, like kayaking (I've not been to a pool session for a couple of months and no rivers have been paddled this year - although the cold weather had it's part to play in that regard), football updates (although I'm pleased to say that Watford have had a good start to the year) and travel (although I've, for me, had a rather long spell without going abroad), but I'll try and put a bit more into it soon. You may even get to see some before and after photo's of the flat, which will be exciting!

Keys

2010-11-22T15:26:00.000Z

On Friday my girlfriend and I picked up the keys to our new flat. It's exciting to have a new place, but there's plenty to do to it to get it ready for habitation (well it is/was [before we started attacking it] in a livable state, but we're doing it up). So far we've stripped wallpaper, painted some walls and started ripping out the bathroom, and this has actually been very satisfying, but it'll still be many a week before things are looking as they should be. Tonight will see the back bedroom walls being set upon with the matt white emulsion.

Aargh-and diagrams

2010-11-22T15:09:00.000Z

While eating lunch I was browsing the BBC News website and started reading this article by Marcus du Sautoy on how diagrams have aided and furthered our understanding of scientific concepts. All fine.

Recently the BBC have become quite good at providing hyperlinks within their articles (potentially in part due to Ben Goldacre), but in this article they seem to have let themselves down a bit in the choice of links. About half way down the article there is a section about visualising complex numbers - these are numbers that consist of a real part (a standard number between -infinity and +infinity, like 1, 4, 1097890624 or -0.78524385 say) and an imaginary part (a number that is a multiple of the square root of -1, or i, e.g. plus or minus the square root of any real negative number). It describes that you can plot these complex number on something called an Argand diagram, but the link it provides for this is bizarre - true that the linked to page does have an Argand diagram on it, but the rest seems to consist of bizarre pseudo-science nonsense about the nature of consciousness! Now I don't know how whoever was editing the article (presumably not du Sautoy) found that page, but a quick google search for "Argand diagram" provides some slightly more reputable sources that they might have chosen. After noticing this I didn't actually get to the end of the article and instead wrote a comment to get the link changed, so I'll see if that worked.

But, anyway enough petty pedantry for today.

The Leny

2010-11-22T14:25:00.000Z

This is just a quick (but rather late) post aimed at continuing the documentation of the river's I've paddled. A couple of weeks ago we had a trip to the River Leny - the original plan (made the morning of the trip) was to head to the Tummel (which I've done before), but minibus issues (i.e. its cutting out all the time) meant that nearing Stirling we decided not to risk driving it any further and headed to Callandar and the Leny (luckily on this trip I didn't have to drive).

When we arrived there it was a frosty start and not pleasant for changing or standing about waiting for the guys who'd driven the minibus to the get out to come back. However, it was good to do a new river and this one turned out to be good for an intermediate level trip - we'd been worried that the river might be a bit low, but it turned out to be fine. The Leny's a fast river, with quite a lot of waves trains and some good rapids, but the speed meant that it was important to be able to get in and out of eddys when needed - this was good for me as this is something I really needed the practice doing. The main eddy that really needed making was the one above the Falls of Leny - a grade 5 waterfall that looked particularly menacing. Everyone managed to get out (although we had one swim, after which the swimmers boat did run the falls, but survived) and check out the fall, then a few people went back in and ran it, but I wasn't one of them - I've since read about people being cut to shreds by the rocks in the falls, so was glad I didn't swim down it. After the falls the were a couple more good rapids on which I took a bit of a beating, but stayed upright and in the boat.

It was good fun to get on a bit more of a challenging river, so the Leny rates as one of my favourite trips.

Back on the ladder

2010-10-11T19:38:00.000Z

It appears that after three and a half months out of home ownership I'll soon be back on the property ladder. My girlfriend and I decided a month or so back to buy a place together, but hadn't actually seen that many properties in that time. We did see some reasonable properties, and a couple that we liked, but nothing that we'd settled on. However, last week we did see something that we thought was very promising and this morning put an offer in. We were surprised to hear back very quickly that our offer had been accepted. We now just need to sort out the finances, look at kitchens and bathrooms, think about decorations, etc...

Help desk

2010-10-08T14:02:00.001Z

I'm down in London at the moment it's transpired that I've spent the last two days working in the cloisters (and student union, and quad) at UCL (my alma mater). While sitting in the cloisters with my laptop it's seemed that I've become some sort of student help desk. Yesterday, first up I provided vague directions to a room in the physics department and I then had to help a chemistry student to find out his course timetable (it turned out that he'd missed the lecture he was supposed to go to by a day!), and today I've had to help out a Czech girl use skype to phone Westminister Council about her council tax bill, and another girl to find the UCL computer services department. I wonder what I'll be called upon to help with this afternoon?

Awe-some

2010-10-08T13:55:00.000Z

Last weekend was my first canoe club trip of the new academic year. As it's the start of new term this was a freshers trip and we had a good contingent of beginners (about 6 of them to the 5 of us seasoned paddlers) - I managed to get a place on the trip by volunteering to drive the minibus. Despite the beginners nature of this trip we set out to a river that's new for me - the Awe - this goes to show up the lack of rivers I've actually paddled.

We managed to get the bus packed with gear relatively quickly (which hopefully bodes well for future trips). I'd like to say that the drive went without incident, but I did managed to slightly damage the minibus when attempting to squeeze past a large bus coming in the opposite direction on a particularly narrow bit of the A82 - all that happened was that the left wing mirror popped out when it clipped the rock wall at the side of the road, but it was annoying for this to happen on my first trip of the year (and just after we'd had a meeting about looking after the buses). The weather conditions weren't great either, with unpredictable heavy rain showers happening out of nowhere.

When we got to the Awe the weather was behaving better and we were able to get changed without getting wet. We didn't have anyone else who'd driven up in a car, so I then had to drive the minibus to the get-out 3 miles away and work my way back to the put-in. After jogging/walking about a mile back I managed to hitch a lift off a kindly old lady who took me the rest of the way.

The river is a dam release river, and despite all the rain there's been no release, so it was pretty low. This made the paddle a bit more interesting as there were lots of nice rocks about to help people capsize! The river's pretty tame, but there were enough level 3ish rapids to test the freshers. We had quite a few swims on the first rapid, but no-one was too disheartened by going into the river that early on. I was generally managing to takes lines down the river that found every rock in the way, but I was in the big Dagger Mamba, which is so big that it'll just ride over most rocks (I did suffer the odd pin, but was either able to extract myself, or get helped out, and I managed to stay upright). The rocks also managed to pin a few of the freshers causing further swims.

Despite the quite tame nature of the river it was still a lot of fun after a few months off the water. There were a few small waves to play about in, although I was quite tentative on these, and I was able to practice my rolls and ferrying across the river. All the freshers seemed to enjoy it, and even those that swum quite a bit, didn't seem put off (there were none of the hysterics that we've sometimes had in the passed). The weather stayed ok as well and the water wasn't too cold, which I think helped. I'm not sure what my next trip will be, but I'm looking forward to it.

Sur le Pont

2010-10-01T21:26:00.000Z

I was away travelling a couple of times last month, but have been remiss in writing it up, so here's a brief roundup of where I got to.

My first trip at the start of the month was to Nice and was an actual holiday rather than my standard work trip (my girlfriend was there for a meeting, but I just tagged along). I got to spend the first few days relaxing in the Sun, wandering round the city (in particular the old town) and sitting on the beach. The was no lack of places to eat and in general the food was very good - I didn't take a note of anywhere in particular that we ate, but there were a lot of place round the Marche aux Fleurs.

After Nice we got the TGV up to Avignon (home the the famous pont) - there are some great views over the Côte d'Azur from the train, but despite the trains famed speed it has to go pretty slowly between Nice and Marseille before hitting the high-speed lines as it heads inland. We got to Avignon in the late afternoon and after getting our bearing's with a brief wander around the Palais des Papes managed to stumble across a great place for dinner. We found La Vache à Carreaux - a place that specialises in cheese and wine (so very French) - and the it was very, very nice. I had a duck dish with a manchego cheese sauce I'd definitely recommend to anyone.

The next day we went into the Palais des Papes and found out all about Avignon's 100-or-so years being the seat of Popes (and antipopes) - unsurprisingly it's a very impressive building with an interesting history and definitely worth a visit. We followed this with a trip to the famous bridge, although the room dedicated the song was closed. We then got a ferry across (part of) the Rhône and had a walk around Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

The next day we started off with a trip to the Pont du Gard - a Roman aquaduct that's still in great condition. We then headed to Châteauneuf du Pape (which means new castle, rather than castle number 9 like we thought!) - the old Papal holiday home and now a famous wine region. It was excessively windy there, but there was a great view over the whole region and you could see back to Avignon. We got to do some wine tasting, but despite the fame of the wines (and the high price) we weren't too impressed by them (the Rose wine we had over dinner were very nice though). The for the afternoon we went to another very impressive Roman artifact - the theatre in Orange, which is one of the three best preserved Roman theatre in the world (although much of it has had to be restored and it's had a lot of uses over the last couple of millenia). Again it's a site that is well worth seeing, but the rest of Orange didn't seem to hold much else to do or see.

The next day we headed back Nice to fly home. We got to spend some more time by the beach, but were mainly surrounded by leathery old people wearing far to little. It was a very good holiday and the weather was great for the whole time - Provence and the Côte d'Azur will probably be getting a return visit at some point.

My other trip for the month was my first to Poland, but this time it was work trip with a collaboration meeting in Krakow. I didn't get to see much of the city, but what I did see was very nice. Food-wise there wasn't quite the refinement of the French cuisine - more of a meat and potatoes approach - but it was good and certainly very filling. I also found out the interesting story of the Wawel dragon.

Stood up

2010-08-30T20:55:00.000Z

For my birthday some of my friends grouped together to give me money to get some drum lessons (not that I really need them of course given my already excellent drumming skills, but it would be ungrateful not to accept them). A local drum school was found in a very convenient location for me (above a Starbucks!) and I was booked in to have my first lesson this evening. I turned up expectantly at the given location, but no drum teacher appeared! I waited and waited, but still no-one turned up to teach me how to perfect my drumming. I phoned the teacher, but got no answer. Eventually I had to accept that I'd been stood up.

Later on I did get a message from the drum teacher. Apparently all lessons had to be cancelled due to "location problems" - whatever they may be!? I'm not sure whether these "problems" can be solved, but I may have to find myself a new drum school.

Fringe round-up

2010-08-26T18:41:00.000Z

I thought I'd quickly round-up the shows I've been to see at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to which I went twice over the last week. This is more a reminder of what I went to see than any attempt to give proper reviews of the shows (like the last couple of years) - I will mainly be using phrases such as "it was funny", with maybe a sprinkling of my favourite adverbs "quite" and "very", so the level of review will not be particularly insightful.

The first trip was last Tuesday, and first up on the bill was As It Occurs To Me (or AIOTM [AIOTM] as it is know by all the cool kids). This is Richard Herring's sketch show that's performed in front of a live audience (of geeks - and how true that was!), but then gets put out unedited in podcast form. This was the first performance of it outside of its two previous London runs. I very much enjoyed the show, although prior to it had been worried about it's quality given the fact that Richard Herring had been tweeting about how little time he'd put into writing the script (it's normally written in a huge rush in the day or so prior to the performance, but this one had been cutting it even finer than normal!) If you'd never listened to the podcast before the whole thing should be complete nonsense, but there were a few AIOTM (AIOTM) newbies in the audience and even they seemed to go along with it and enjoy everything too. It was fun to see how it worked live on stage compared to my normal method of listening to it via the podcast - one problem with the live performance though was that I couldn't make out some bits (which I expect were picked up by the microphone) when the audience were laughing or cheering, plus Richard's Scotch accent could become unintelligible at times. At the end, of course, we had the return of the dead Tiny Andrew Collings, and also the real Andrew Collins, which provided the highlight that all the regular fans of the show were after. Another highlight was Tam Dalyell and Susan Boyle's duet of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life".

Next up I went to see the follow on to a show I saw last year: Two Episodes of Mash - which consists of selection of short sketches. Last year we'd seen this show with a pretty small audience, but the room was far fuller this time round. It was enjoyable show with a consistently good level of jokes - often you could see the punch line coming, but it was still very amusing to see how it would be delivered, or whether it would be subverted in some way.

The day was capped off with seeing spoof hospital radio DJ Ivan Brackenbury. I'd noticed this show in the Pleasance on several previous years and had seen it get consistently very good reviews, but had never been to see it. This time Tim Binns (the comedian behind the character) had decided to just do a best bits show as he was also doing a another show with a new character. I should have been to see this show in previous years, because the very good reviews were well justified. Essentially the act consists of giving shouts out to, or requests for, hospital patients with various ailments and then playing an (in)appropriate song based on that. This sounds like it may get a bit same-y and repetitive and just descend into bad punning, but it's done in such a good and likeable style, and with such good timing, that I was laughing along all the way through.

On Saturday a crowd of us went through for some birthday celebrations for me. We kicked things off with the mildly amusing Big Comedy Breakfast featuring three stand-ups (Marc Burrows, Sarah Pearce and Barry Ferns). It's quite hard to do comedy at midday and the audience generally weren't really ready for laughing hard, but each set had it's moments and a memorable joke or two. One of my friends even managed to make a name for himself during the set (he bonded with Barry over both their parents poor choices of first names), and I was closely beaten in an audience game of rock-paper-scissors and denied a chance to play TME (Tape Measure Extension - although it's a game I have played myself in the past). The show has also given further amusement to a friend of mine who was being told about one of his officemates spending the weekend "canoeing".

This was followed by Itch: A Scratch Event in which a variety of comedians/performers are given a stage to try out some new material such as a sketch, mini-play, or character - it's a different line-up during the festival, so you don't know who you're going to see. This was good value show and provided some interesting and funny performances - we did get told at the end who all the performers were, but I can only remember that the first sketch had Simon Munnery in it, and the Segue Sisters did a couple of song. I'd recommend going to this show in the future as there's a decent chance that you'll see at least one thing that's really good, and it's definitely value for money.

Finally we went to see The Roaring Boys Will Set you Free, which had a 5 star review in Chortle! The main premise was that depression had driven Danny, one of the two performers (Danny and Jonny), to start watching The One Show, which he soon realised was a source of unending mundanity and had to be stopped. We then saw him formulate a plan about how it could be stopped and his attempt to carry it out. I don't think we got quite the show that got the 5 star review (there was not corpsing from the performers), but it was still a very fun and funny show. There was a level of audience interaction that worked very well and added to the show, rather than making anyone in the audience feel awkward or picked on. There were several songs too (the theme of their show is still stuck in my head several days later) mainly performed by Jonny and based around his failed romance. Despite the premise being routed in depression it's a very upbeat show with a lot of energy, which rubs off on the audience.

That's my round up for this year. There was obviously a lot of stuff I couldn't see that I'd have liked to, but there's always next year.

Decadal survey

2010-08-15T18:54:00.005Z

Today is the last day of my twenties. The weather's been glorious and I should have been out frolicking and cavorting, making the most of my final flush of youth, but what have I been doing instead? I've been inside on the internet writing blog posts is what! I don't deserve to be young if I'm going to waste the opportunities it gives me in such a flagrant way.

Anyway, I should probably thank my twenties. They've given me a couple of degrees, one of which enables me to be called Dr. They've seen me move from London to Glasgow - in fact I've lived the majority of the decade in Scotland. They've seen me visit far flung parts of the world as part of my job. And they've seen me buy, and then move out of, my (part) own flat. There are many other smaller things as well from my recent life (chosen because I've blogged about them), for example learning to kayak, snowboard, buying my own bike, learning(ish) to drum and being in a band, and probably far too much drinking (but that's probably brought about some of the most fun times even if my own memory of several is vague).

What could my thirties bring? Well if many of my friends are anything to go by it seems that 30 is pretty much the time to get married. Buying a house is also on the list, but as I said that's something I got our the way earlier in a way. There are also kids. But, who knows? I'll settle for getting a few more scientific papers written for now. And hopefully this'll be the decade in which I get to actually detect some gravitational waves.

[P.S. if you managed to get to this post looking for information on the US Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey 2010 (probably more likely now I've written this postscript) then sorry, this isn't what you're looking for - instead maybe try here and here for US perepctive, and here or here for more UK oriented views.]

Balloch to Tarbet

2010-08-15T17:56:00.001Z

Yesterday my girlfriend and I did our first cycle ride for a while (not counting our recent cycle round Munich) on our bikes - I forgot to blog about our last ride some time last month from Glasgow down to Lochwinnoch, which was a good, but quite tiring ride.

This ride was actually a rather tame ride, which was fine giving that we weren't feeling too energetic. We decided to do the West Loch Lomond Cycle Path starting at Balloch (which we got the train to) and unsurprisingly heading up the west bank of the loch. It in part just follows a path along the A82, occasionally splitting off from the road, but after Inverbeg it seems to mainly be along what must have formally been the main road along the loch before the A82 was built - you can see it in this aerial photo. We had a nice lunch in Luss, which was surprisingly quiet giving that it was a reasonably pleasant afternoon in the middle of August. We made it all the way to Tarbet in pretty quick time, even at a relatively slow pace, as it's only a 16 mile ride. Our plan was to get the 18:01 train back to Glasgow from Arrochar, but struggled to find the station (we were there in plenty of time, so this wasn't too much of an issue) - we went all the way into Arrochar, and almost beyond, before we found out that the station was actually half way back to Tarbet. We found it in the end and had enough time to go for a pint in the nearby pub. Due to just going along a main road it wasn't the most fun ride, but it's probably better as part of a slightly more challenging route.

Munchen Glad-to-be-bach 3: Too Much Luxury

2010-08-15T14:08:00.002Z

On the morning after the wedding we again managed to make it up just in time for breakfast at the hotel. I think I wasn't feeling too bad, although there was definitely some hangover there. At around midday we left the hotel and got taxis back to Plattling - not everyone who'd been with us on the way out was heading back at the same time though. Our return train to Munich was huge - a double decker with loads of carriages - so we had plenty of space to spread out. Why they'd not put on such a train on the Friday afternoon when we'd been travelling out I don't know! This time there were no unexpected stops.

For the next couple of days in Munich we were going to be staying in the Sofitel - a very fancy hotel (if you left your shoes outside you room at night someone would take them away to be cleaned overnight!), that my girlfriend had managed to get on a cheap deal from lastminute.com and which a some other friends had also decided to stay at. It was right next to the hotel, so was easy to find when we arrived. We didn't get too much time to indulge in the luxury to start with through, as a couple of my friends had to leave for the airport that afternoon and wanted to see at least a bit of Munich before they left. We wandered into the centre of town towards the Frauenkirche (Munich's main cathedral) and found a place to have lunch next too it. Most people had the roast pork, but I decided to go for a wurst dish that sounded quite nice (as far as my translation of the menu went), although didn't realise until it turned up that the sausages were boiled in a bizarre oniony vinegarette - it was ok, but not something I'd go for again. Luckily one of my friends wasn't able to finish her pork and crackling, so I was able to clean her plate.

After lunch our two departing friends had to head back to the station, so the rest of us went back to the hotel. Getting back there we realised how tired we still were after the exertions of the wedding the day before, so managed to fall asleep for a couple of hours on the extra large and comfy bed. That evening those of us that were left met up again and headed to the Löwenbräu beer garden, which is set in a pretty park (it's pretty if you can avoid the few local alcoholics that hang out there). It was a nice evening, warm with clear skies, so we were able to sit outside for a couple of hours with a Maß or two and a flammkuchen.

The next day my girlfriend and I decided to go exploring on our own by hiring a couple of bikes. Last year during Oktoberfest I'd done a bike tour, so I basically followed the same route we'd taken in that tour. After taking a slightly convoluted route we got to the Englischer Garten and had a look to see if any surfers were about again - there weren't any. We headed up back passed the Chinesischer Turm and out the north of the gardens. We then headed along towards the Olympic Park (home of the 1972 Summer Olympics). We had lunch (I had Currywürst) at the restaurant at the base of the Olympic Tower and then went up the tower itself, which has a great view of Munich. By this time the weather wasn't great - it was overcast and had started raining lightly, so we actually didn't get that great a view (the postcards seem to suggest that on a good day you can see out to the Alps) - last time when I went up it was similar weather.

From the Olymipic park we travelled further west to the Schloss Nymphenburg, an impressive Palace with massive gardens. We briefly wandered into the gardens and had an ice cream (not that the weather had really improved to make ice cream particularly appropriate), but didn't stay long as we needed to get our bikes back and meet up with others. We headed back toward the station where we'd hired the bike, taking a brief detour through the Hirschgarten (the biggest beer garden in Munich) - last year we'd stopped here for a drink, but this time decided not too (it was very quiet anyway, and the rain didn't make it that appealing).

After returning our bikes we decided to take advantage of the spa in our hotel. It was all very fancy with a bizarre shaped swimming pool. We decided to avoid the sauna though, being as it was
in the "Nude area" and us being prudish Brits.

The evening we decided to try to complete our visiting of the four major Munich brewery pubs (Hofbräu, Augustiner, Löwenbräu and Paulaner) by going to the Paulaner bräuhaus. This place had a reasonably small beer garden (although still massive by UK standards) and was described in our guide books as being "cosy" - it wasn't what you might term cosy, i.e. small, over here, but was very nice inside. Despite speaking pretty much no English the waitress managed to tell us that we were in on the all-you-can-eat buffet night - almost everything on the menu was done in buffet form for only €12.90 (or there abouts). We all decided that was the best way to go, along with another Maß. It was all very good - roast pork, wurst goulash, beef, fish, chicken and even plenty of vegetables - but general overindulgence from the previous few days meant none of us quite made the most of all the food on offer. However if you are in Munich on a Monday night I'd very much recommend it as the place to go.

The next day was my girlfriend and my last day in Munich - our flight was about 6pm that evening - but we tried to see a bit more of the city before we left. We walked from our hotel to the River Isar, where we'd previously been to the Deutsches Museum, and crossed to the Müller'sches Volksbad - a public baths - were we had lunch in the cafe. We then walked through a park along the Isar towards the state parliament building - the Maximilianeum. From here we walked to the Friedensengel (Angel of Peace), and then headed back across the river towards our hotel. We did get caught in quite a downpour on the way back, but managed to shelter in a department store. We got back to the hotel and sadly said goodbye to the luxury to head back to our normal lives.

That was it for our trip. We had an uneventful flight back and no-ones bag got lost. It was really nice to be able to see Munich again (and not with the Oktoberfest crowds about) and of course the reason for the trip, the wedding, was fantastic. The next holiday will be to Nice next month (although, airport strike willing, we're going to another wedding in a couple of weeks time in Cork), which I'm very much looking forward to.

Munchen Glad-to-be-bach 2: The wedding

2010-08-15T12:34:00.001Z

Here's a follow-up post to my earlier Munich post.

Following a day of exploring Munich it was time to head to Auerbach for the wedding. There were a few of us planning on getting the train from Munich to the wedding location, but we had to wait until early afternoon until our whole group had arrived in Munich (not that we were in a particularly good state to have actually done anything in the morning). When at the station we went to get special Bavarian tickets, which each allowed 5 people to travel and only cost just under €30. After some help from one of the station ticket agents, we managed to negotiate the various screens on the ticket machine and come away with enough tickets for us all to travel. A good start to the journey at least. After this we took over a station cafe for a couple of hours, whilst waiting for our the final arrival to join our group from the airport. During the wait two of the best men (there were three in total, but the other one had travelled out separately) took this time to go over there speeches and I got a sneak preview of one.

By 3:20, once everyone had arrived, we were able to get a train to Plattling, from where some lifts onwards to our hotels had been organised. The train was quite busy, especially the front half of it (which would prove to be telling later on), but we just about managed to all get seats (one of our group decided to sit on the floor, but it wasn't entirely necessary). The journey was going smoothly until we pulled in to Landshut where everyone seemed to be getting off our carriage. Initially we thought that this was good - we'd be able to stretch out round the carriage a bit - but it soon became apparent that we probably should be getting off too (a man had tried to explain this in German to us, but we'd not really been able to understand a word of his explanation). On getting of we realised what was happening - the train was splitting in two with the front half carrying on to where we wanted to go and the back half that we'd been in heading back to Munich! However due to our tardiness getting of the train there was absolutely no way we, with all our luggage, could squeeze onto any of the front carriages. So we had to call ahead and say we'd be delayed about an hour and a half waiting for the next train. Luckily the station we were at had a bar in it, so we were able to occupy ourselves there by having a beer.

We were able to squeeze onto the next train and eventually got to Plattling. The group then split as half of us were staying in Auerbach (where the wedding ceremony was taking place), whereas the other half, myself included, were staying in Hengersberg (which was the where the reception was taking place - and in my opinion therefore the sensible place to stay). We got a lift from the bride and therefore got a bit local information on the drive. Our hotel was a nice place called the Hotel Erika.

After getting settled into our room it was soon time to head through to Auerbach for the evening for some pre-wedding celebrations. Auerbach is a small and pretty village (farming and hunting country) where the bride is from, and where a lot of her family still live, so we got to meet many of them - and also some of the brides ponies. It seem that it's a Bavarian tradition that on the evening before the wedding guns should be fired to scare off any bad spirits - the bride and groom were wearing traditional Bavarian dress of a dirndl and lederhosen respectively. So, to this end we had a lot of explosions being set off during the evening, but rather than guns being fired we had milk churns - milk churns with gun powder added, then a plastic football wedged in the top, and then the bottom being lit, firing the football 50 metres or so and making a very loud bang. Unfortunately the bangs didn't scare off the many mosquitos. There was also beer.

The next morning we were up in time for the hotel breakfast and decided to have a quick walk around Hengersberg before having to head to the wedding. The weather was sunny and hot, with only a few clouds in the sky - perfect wedding weather. It's a small town, and therefore there's not a great deal to see. We walked up to a church, which had a good view over the town, and then back to the small town square where we had an ice cream. It was then back to the hotel to get our wedding gear on.

We arrived in Auerbach just before the first part of the wedding took place - the official state bit involving signing of papers and such - during which time we went for a quick drink (although I stuck to diet coke for the time being) in the local pub/hotel/butcher shop. Then came the church ceremony part of the proceedings. This was the first Catholic wedding I've been to and I was quite worried that it could last quite a while, and I didn't know if I'd be able to make it through awake - the vast majority of it was also going to be in German. I needn't have worried - we were having to stand up and sit down so many times, and there were many hymns sung and readings given, that it would have been hard to catch any sleep. I thought the highlight of the ceremony (other than the fantastic looking bride and groom) was the singer (a friend of the bride), who had a great voice - there was also a very good choir and band (we couldn't see the choir and band as they were above us, and when I first heard trumpets with the choir I thought it might be recorded until I saw one of then pocking over the balcony above my head). During the ceremony there had been several people dressed in full lederhosen sitting at the back of the church. Just before the end of proceedings they all got up and filed out - the reason became apparent when we all got out. On leaving the church there were more load bangs - the lederhosen-ed group all had big pistols (wood and metal with a big blunderbuss-like end) that they were firing into the air - this went on for about 10 minutes. There was the standard photo time and then time to head to the reception - the bride and groom had a special white Citroën 2CV to take them there.

The reception, back in Hengersberg, was held in a big converted barn and courtyard - from the outside it looked slightly like a building site as not everything seemed completed, but once inside the courtyard it looked great. There was an Oompah band and lots, and lots, of cake - I think having cake at the start of a German wedding reception is another tradition. Chocolate cake, cake with fruit on it, and all very nice too, but quite light, which was necessary given the amount there was. The groom then had to tap the first beer barrel and the drinking could properly begin!

The whole reception was great. After spending a while in the sun in the courtyard listening to the band, socialising, drinking a few beers from the barrel, and trying not to eat too much cake, we headed inside for the meal and speeches. It's not normal in Germany for there to be best men speeches (in fact I don't even know if they really have best men), but seeing as this was a multi-national wedding we had them. These were only read out in Enlgish, as none of the best men were particularly well versed in German, but they all went down very well (each of the best men had there own take on the groom from the different times of his life that they'd known him) and the bride was able to translate some of the most salient points. The groom also gave a speech, but this time in both English and German, which was very impressive and very well pitched - it got a lot of laughs in both languages. Later in the evening there was a surprise "speech" - as a way of getting round the dual language problem some of the brides friends has put together a silent play enacting out how the couple met and got together. It was very well done and everyone enjoyed it. The beer flowed quite readily the whole night - and despite apparently later that evening telling my girlfriend "I don't like dancing or singing" I was quite eager to get on the dance floor and was energetically throwing myself (and her) around, occasionally causing some near misses with other dancers, and singing at the top of my voice to the cheesy, but wedding-appropriate, band - without too much persuasion we got them to play 99 Luftballons. Not content on just having beer (which was all free) we had to end the night with rounds of schnapps (the only booze that wasn't free) - I can't say that it was particularly good, but I did manage to keep it down. I forget if this was before or after we did the limbo-ing! Unsurprisingly my memory of the end of the night becomes vague-to-non-existent, but my girlfriend managed to guide me back to the hotel despite my "outer wibbles" which threatened to wibble me into a river.

As I've already said, and without wanting to sound too gushing, it was a great day and the perfect way to celebrate the newlyweds.

Newly discovered pulsar

2010-08-12T21:47:00.003Z

Today it was announced that Einstein@home has made it's first discovery (a public version of the paper can be found here) - unfortunately not a gravitational wave signal (as it was initial designed to solely search for), but a radio pulsar spinning at 41Hz with the snappy title of J2007+2722. This is still very exciting news as it's "...the first time an astronomical object has been discovered by this kind of distributed-computing project,". In brief pulsars are neutron stars, which are the ultra dense, rapidly rotating, remnants of stars several times more massive than our Sun leftover after they have ended their normal life via a supernova explosion.

The Einstein@home project was set up in 2005 as a distributed computing effort (like the more well known SETI@home, which has a screen saver that searches for extraterrestrial life in radio data) to make use of the public's spare compute cycles to search for gravitational waves from pulsars using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detectors. It's since become one of the largest distributed computing projects there is. The sensitivity of data from the LIGO detectors is currently such that the chances of Einstein@home finding a gravitational waves from an unknown pulsar are quite slim (although more sensitive data in the next few years will give far higher chances), so it was decided a couple of years ago to turn some of Einstein@home's computing power towards searching radio data for pulsars.

Surveys with large radio telescopes are the prime way of finding pulsars (although some can also be seen in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum) - radio data from these surveys is searched to look for regularly spaced pulses, although these can be weak and the pulse time of arrivals at the telescope will be dispersed over different observation radio frequencies. The spacing of the pulses will also change due to the Doppler effect as the Earth revolves and orbits the Sun, or also if the pulsar is itself in orbit around another star in a binary system. For pulsars in extreme orbits, where the objects are very close together and circling each other with periods of minutes to hours (the current smallest binary orbital period for a pulsar is about 2 hours), the Doppler effect can be very large and cause the pulse spacing to change rapidly. Standard radio pulsar search techniques, which assume that the pulse spacing is only slowly varying, have a hard time time finding these objects. The Arecibo radio telescope has been conducting many surveys over the last few years, but there hasn't been the computing power to exhaustively search this data for these extreme binary pulsar systems. It is data from these surveys that has now been passed to Einstein@home, which is able to use it's large computing power to search for many different sizes of changing pulse spacing, included the rapid changes caused by the extreme systems.

Since starting searches for radio pulsars in Arecibo data with Einstein@home it has been able to find almost 120 pulsars that had previously been known about (although none are in extreme binary systems). However, this new announcement is for a pulsar that had not previously been known about - Einstein@home was the first search to find it! Using this initial discovery they were then able to get follow-up observations using the Green Bank radio telescope to confirm the pulsar signal and further study it. The pulsar itself isn't the most exciting object - it's not in a binary system, but it is reasonably rare as it's an isolated recycled pulsar. A recycled pulsar is one that has been "spun-up" from a slow spin-rate (probably about 1Hz, or one rotation per second) to a much faster rate by accreting material from a companion star (gravitationally pulling material from the other star onto itself). The only way for a pulsar to have a rotation rate as fast as this newly discovered pulsar is either for it to have been "recycled", or for it to still be spinning fast after it was born - this pulsar is slowing down it's rotation rate very slowly indicating it has a weak magnetic field, which generally is expected to not be the case for young, newborn, pulsar i.e. it must be an old, and therefore recycled, pulsar. However, as we saw above for a star to be recycled it must have had a binary companion, which from looking at the pulse spacings we know is not the case for this pulsar - so what's up? There are other known recycled pulsars that are isolated, i.e. not in a binary system, and it is thought that the system must have been disrupted due to the companion star going supernova and kicking it's own remnant out of the systm.

Anyway, this is the first discovery and it's a great boost to the Einstein@home project. Hopefully this will get more people to sign up. It should lead to more pulsar discoveries (maybe at the rate of a couple per year) and possibly some in extremely fast orbits. Ultimately we obviously hope that Einstein@home will also give us some gravitational wave discoveries.

Top of the league

2010-08-07T16:35:00.000Z

I knew that the Championship season started today - or at least that's what I thought - but when it came to watching the results come in this afternoon I was surprised to see that Watford weren't playing. "Did we have a Sunday fixture?" I thought, but teletext (yes I checked that before going to the internet as I had the remote control to hand) told me "no". Further teletext-ing showed me that in fact the league started last night without me knowing, and Watford had been playing away to Norwich as the first game. Not only that but we won 3-2. That meant that up until the about 4:45pm today Watford have been top of the league! Unfortunately now that more fixtures have been played we're back down to 8th - 6 teams got a better goal difference than us, and one (Crystal Palace) seem to have got above us due to starting earlier in the alphabet. Hopefully we can restore our place at the top next week, when I know we will be playing on Saturday in a 3pm kick-off against Coventry (although we play Aldershot in the Carling Cup on Tuesday).

Munchen Glad-to-be-bach

2010-08-06T17:40:00.002Z

The other day I arrived back from my second trip to Munich. The first was time was last September for Oktoberfest (which for some reason I didn't really document on this blog) and this time was also to commemorate a wedding, but that of my friend rather than between Ludwig I and Princess Therese.

My girlfriend and I arrived in Munich a couple of days before the wedding (which was actually taking place in the brides home village of Auerbach) to have a bit of a holiday - as our guide we'd bought this book to give us the low-down on things to do whilst there. Our plane arrived in Munich quite late, and unfortunately without my girlfriends luggage (the reason for which was obviously due to my baggage curse - although my bag arrived with no delay), so our first night just involved getting to our hotel and sleeping rather than drinking any beer (we would make up for that later in the trip). Our hotel for the first part of the trip was the very pleasant Kings's Hotel "First Class" (only the best for us!), located close to the main train station, and also opposite from the aptly named b^o_obs table dancing club.

Our first day mainly revolved around waiting for my girlfriends bag to arrive (which due to reasons beyond anyone's comprehension took far longer to get from Munich airport to the hotel than should be physically possible). However, we still managed to get out and about and see a lot of sights. The first use of our travel guide was to find a good place for brunch - we ended up at a place near the university district - I ordered the "Ham and Eggs" from the menu, but my girlfriend was more adventurous and went for "2 Ei im Glas", which with my very basic grasp of German was able to translate as "2 Eggs in a glass", but we were still a bit confused as to what it would be like. The service wasn't the most lighting fast that it could have been, but I eventually got my food, and echoing our baggage arrival my girlfriend had to wait quite a while longer for hers - which was indeed 2 eggs in a glass (an ice cream dish by the looks of it). Despite the wait the food was good and the place was very nice.

Following this we explore a bit before checking back at the hotel for the bag situation. We walked through towards the university and into the Englischer Garten, to the Chinesischer Turm and then checked to see if there was anyone doing any surfing (there an artificial wave at one point on the stream that runs through the garden, which from last years trip I found out that people surf on) - there was only one surfer and he seemed to be struggling to stay on his board for more than a second or two. We then headed back to the hotel via the Hofgarten and Residenz - during which time I tried to act as tour guide by part-remembering information a real tour guide has told us during my last visit.

The bag had not arrived! So we went out again to meet up with some friends (nursing hangovers from the excesses from the Hofbräuhaus from the night before) also out for the wedding and then go to the Deutsches Museum - this is one of the worlds largest science museums, so naturally I wanted to go. It is a massive museum, with far too much to see in one afternoon visit. Our first plan was to try and see a massively scaled version of a cell that they have, but I managed (unintentionally) to get us waylaid in the physics section. I was very impressed with the displays they had (a large number of which, although not all, had English explanations below the German versions) especially the detail and quite technical information that they gave - this definitely wasn't a dumbed down museum, and probably wouldn't really be the kind of place to take small children, but I thought it was great. We did eventually find the cell, then went on to see the astronomy exhibits and just before closing managed to see an Enigma machine.

Again on returning to the hotel the bag had still not arrived, so pre-going out for the evening we had to head to the clothes shops. Given that we'd already been on our feet all day, and hadn't eaten since brunch, this was quite an arduous task (going to the shops is arduous enough for me at the best of times). We were then able to head out for dinner and drinks. We met up with the others at the Augustiner bräuhaus for dinner and had a couple of half litre of their Helles beer, and despite their overindulgences the night before our friends decided that it would be a good idea to go back to the Hofbräuhaus (who's other famous patrons included Hitler) - so that my girlfriend and I could see it of course (although I did go there last year). The Hofbräuhaus is very impressive and must be one of the largest pubs in the world, even so it was packed (on a Thursday night) as we had to sit outside in the internal courtyard. We decided that it wouldn't be right not to have a couple of litre Maß's and play some drinking games. We made it home somewhat worse for wear, but did find that the bag had finally arrived.

I'll try and soon write more about the trip (maybe just updating this post or in subsequent posts), but I'll leave it for now - you'll have to wait for the exciting stories of how not to get a train to Plattling, the joys of an Anglo-Bavarian wedding, and how we managed to complete collection of drinking at the four of the big Munich breweries.

[The blog title is a hilarious play on words based on the German place Mönchengladbach, which to be honest prior to looking it up on wikipedia I had incorrectly assumed was part of Munich, but is in fact quite far from Bavaria in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia - the title was too good to pass up though, so it stays as it is.]

I've now written up some more of the trip:
Part 2: The Wedding

Installing Adobe AIR (and AIR apps) on Ubuntu

2010-07-23T13:05:00.003Z

The vast majority of the many twitter clients that you might like to use require you to use Adobe AIR. Installing AIR should be fine for whatever operating system you use be it Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux as you can download an installer for them all and follow the instructions (for which many people have written about).

Myself, for example, who uses the Linux distribution Ubuntu at work (version 9.10 karmic koala at the moment) should be able to download the Linux installer (the site should automatically detect which kind of operating system you have and direct you to the correct download) as a binary file (although .deb, .rpm and YUM files are also available) and install with:

>> chmod a+x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
>> kdesudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

and then by following the on-screen instructions. This should work in theory given that I have su access on my machine, however in practice it doesn't work. This is down to the fact that Adobe AIR wants to install into the /opt directory, which in my case is not actually located on my machine, but is instead a network directory that I can't write to even as su. There seems to be no way to tell the installer to put the installation elsewhere. So, after much hardcore googling I eventually came across someone who'd had similar problems and had found a way to kind of install AIR and get AIR applications working - I found this information over a year ago and have no idea what the site was, or how to find it again (the combination of search words and how many google search pages I had to scroll through to find it escape me), so I though at least for my own benefit I'd write down what I did.

Rather than downloading the standard Adobe AIR instead download the Adobe AIR SDK (get the Linux version) - the Software Development Kit for people who want to write Adobe AIR appications. This will come as a bzipped tarball - AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2. Then just un-tar this in your directory of choice e.g. /home/username/AdobeAIRSDK:

>> cd ~
>> mkdir AdobeAIRSDK
>> mv my_download_dir/AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2 AdobeAIRSDK
>> cd AdobeAIRSDK
>> tar -xvjf AdobeAIRSDK.tbz2

That should be about it!

Now if you want to install a twitter application, for example my current choice of DestroyTwitter, then download that application, which for DestroyTwitter comes as a .zip file, and un-zip it to your location of choice:

>> mv my_download_dir/DestroyTwitter202.zip ~
>> cd ~
>> unzip DestroyTwitter202.zip

If you then look in the DestroyTwitter202 directory you will find a .air file - this is actually also a zipped file containing all the application code, so you will need to un-zip this too:

>> cd ~/DestroyTwitter202
>> unzip DestroyTwitter202.air

Now (assuming like above you've put everything in your home (~) directory) to actually run the application with Adobe AIR you can do the following from the command line:

>> ~/AdobeAIRSDK/bin/adl -nodebug ~/DestroyTwitter202/META-INF/AIR/application.xml ~/DestroyTwitter202

and all should work! (I've put the above command line into a custom application launcher in my gnome desktop panel - you can use the icons from ~/DestroyTwitter202/icons for the launcher.) When you run the application the metadata should be put into a directory within ~/.appdata.

In general it would be far easier if Adobe allowed you to install the standard AIR in a location of your choice, or it just installed into the default location of /usr that most other programs are installed to on my machine. I've also had this problem with installing chrome i.e. it want to install in /opt, which is why I just use chromium instead

...until tomorrow I'll just keep moving on

2010-06-28T22:59:00.001Z

Tonight is the last night I'll be spending in the flat that's been my home for the last four and a half years. Soon after starting my post-doc position back in 2005 I decided to embark on the property ladder and (after some deliberations about whether to buy somewhere on my own or not) along with my flatmate bought a newly built flat in the salubrious Ruchill district of north Glasgow. After just over seven years of living together (counting the prior time we rented together) our flat sharing partnership is now coming to an end, ending my longest home sharing partnership outside my parental home. It's sad to be leaving a place that's been my home for the longest period other than my 18 stay at my parent's house. It's also sad to be leaving somewhere that I've part owned, which adds more of a personal element to leaving than just getting out of rented accommodation. However, I am looking forward to finally, after nearly 30 years of life, having my own place as I am moving into a flat (albeit renting) alone.

Anyway, here's to Ruchill Street and all who sail within her. I will miss you and wish you well.

It's a knock out

2010-06-27T17:10:00.000Z

So there we go! The England team have been knocked out in the second round of the World Cup in a 4-1 thrashing by Germany. It was a very deserved win by the Germans too, although they didn't have to play much outside themselves to beat the team they were up against. We've been consistently poor this World Cup and there'll be a lot of blame to spread around - I'm sure the newspapers will have a field day tomorrow, and Capello's definitely going to be parting ways with his job (in his post-match interview he seemed to think we'd played well, which is taking trying to be diplomactic to a new level). The over exaggeration of our performance that followed our slight upturn in form from the Slovenia game hid what was clear to see from the earlier games - the team didn't seem to know how to play together. I have to mention it (although I'm not using it as an excuse), but the game did produce a howling error from the refereeing officials for not seeing Lampard's goal, which may or may not lead to a FIFA rethink on introducing goal line technology (I've argued against video ref decisions before, but in these situations I can see it probably should be introduced).

In the past in tournaments we have generally upped our game playing against the better teams, but that didn't happen at all this time round. It's very disappointing to see, but it actually lessens the blow of our failure quite a lot (for me at least) - it's far harder to take going out when we've played well and deserved to progress. The blow was also lessened by watching the game at home rather than in a pub in Glasgow, where in many places I'm sure there was much delight in our defensive failures and inability to make any sort of coherent attack. I think now I'm going put my support behind Germany - despite their young team they have some very good players (Özil and Schweinsteiger in particular) who could do well (although they may have to face Argentina in the next round). It's also a bit less humiliating(!?) to go out to the eventual winners.

King of the mountains

2010-06-21T22:58:00.000Z

Last weekend saw the third bike ride of my new cycle ownership regime. This time, as promised in my last post on the subject, we took a route that didn't just go along nice flat canals and did indeed have some hilly elements to it. The ride was up to Mugdock Country Park. Prior to the cycle we'd had a look on sustrans for the route and thought we had a good idea of where to go - basically follow the River Kelvin up to near Bardowie Loch and then along another bit of cycle route towards Milngavie. We did start by following the Kelvin before having to move onto a road-bound section of the route at the West of Scotland Science Park. We then never actually regained the Kelvin and just ended up cycling up the main road to Milngavie (home to the starting point of the West Highland Way). This is one of those places that are very close to Glasgow, but I'd still never been to, so it was nice to see. After wandering through the centre of Milngavie trying to work out the best way to the park, which we new should be just to the north, we happened upon a road called Mugdock Road, which we figured should take us in the right direction. Indeed it did, although it also meant going up the steepest climb we'd yet attempted - I started to have to properly learn to use my gears. We entered the park at a random point and tried heading towards the visitors centre. Unfortunately it turned out that to get there you had to traverse lots of steep uneven slopes (done via pushing rather than riding the bikes), only to get near the top (but still about a kilometre away from the castle and visitors centre) to find it impassable to bikes (and fat people) due to a very narrow and awkward stone stile-thing. This was probably done to stop mountain bikers using the route, but is was rather annoying. We headed back down and just randomly cycled round to bits of the park that were accessible, stopping for a packed lunch near a river.

We headed back to Milngavie, but wanted to try and find a different route home - maybe even the one we'd tried to travel up. We attempted to follow some signs to Allander Water, which also pointed to Glasgow, and involved a nice (flat) route along a river on which we saw a Kingfisher (or at least a bird that had a bright blue back and orange tummy and looked incredibly Kingfisher-esque). Unfortunately this just led us to a main road with no sign of a continuing cycle route - sustrans seemed to be lying (although the route it seemed to be showing us on Saturday seems to have disappeared from the websites today - suspicious!) We decided to just head back the way we came.

The cycle wasn't as long as our previous two, but the was some actual climbing of hills and offroad action, which provided a bit more of a test than before.

It starts (again)

2010-06-13T12:53:00.003Z

The World Cup is back with us! It'll be a fun month. Fun, but also filled with intensely nerve wracking, heart in mouth, excited, nauseating tension when watching England play (hopefully I won't work myself up into this state again). So far I've seen at least bits of all the games except the South Korea vs Greece game - not too much spark in the tournament yet, but I'm sure it'll pick up.

Yesterday saw England's first match of the tournament with a game against the USA. Our group is, or at least should be, a relatively easy one to qualify from (unlike group D, who's teams are playing today, which may be this World Cup's group of death!), but as usual we want to make it hard for ourselves. Before the game started I managed to get myself into the normal pre-match bundle of nervous energy, which everyone knows is best tempered by beer. When the game kicked off it was hard not to fear the worst, but after a goal from Steven Gerrard in the fourth minute (which due to ITV HDs slight hiccup, we missed) things settled down a bit and I could relax slightly more. We generally seemed to dominate the game from then on, but up front weren't producing much to test the US keeper. The nightmare struck when a reasonably long range effort on our goal by Clint Demspsey was woefully mishandled by keeper Robert Green and carried on into the net just before half time. We made a good attempt on the break after the restart, but went in at half time 1-1. There were some good pieces of play by England in the second half, but still we lacked anyone able to finish - in fact the US were closest to getting a goal, only denied by the ball luckily rebounding off Green (or maybe he produced a save, but I don't know how much he knew about it) and onto the post rather than into the net. We pressed forward more towards the end and kept the ball in the US half (which was good as we could easily be outpaced at the back, especially if they took on the aged, and now rather slow, Jamie Carragher), but it ended 1-1. It's not a score that's the end of the world, but it would have been nice to start with a high. From the looks of the other two teams (Slovenia managed a 1-0 win over Algeria earlier today, but it was through another goalkeeping howler) they should pose too much threat, but then again who knows what might happen!

Standard service

2010-06-07T07:45:00.004Z

Yesterday I travelled out to Hannover for a collaboration meeting. As per usual I checked luggage in at the airport. I probably could have managed to get away with having hand luggage only (it would have required a slightly more conservative packing attitude than I normally have, but was easily possible), but despite certain previous problems I like to entrust my luggage with the airline and let my bags travel unaccompanied in the belly of the plane (I'm sure bags are more comfortable in this environment, travelling with their baggy brethren, rather than being stuffed into an overhead locker) - everyone else I was travelling with was less trusting/more sensible. My lack of luck with bags making it to meeting's with me has become legendary, although is probably now exaggerated beyond reality, so when we were waiting at the baggage carrousel my travelling companions were less than convinced I'd be reunited with my luggage. I was still optimistic to the last, but my bag did not appear. I knew the drill that I had to follow and left my details for forwarding my bag when it undoubtedly would arrive - the best case was that it would just be on the later flight from Amsterdam. And indeed it was - I was reunited with my clothes later that evening after returning from the pub. I am not cursed!

Flight to the lakes

2010-06-02T22:55:00.002Z

Several months ago I heard that Flight of the Conchords were playing in Glasgow at the SECC. I'm a big fan and thought it would be very nice to see them. Tickets went on sale at 9am on a Friday morning and I knew that they'd be popular, but still I stupidly didn't go online straight away to buy them. I went to the gym instead. It was about 10:30am before I made my attempt to purchase tickets, but alas every site I tried was sold out. My dream of seeing the Kiwi comedians was over...

But wait! My flatmate hadn't been quite so lax in his ticket buying and had been online at the right time. He bought ample tickets with a spare one that he kindly offered me. So it was the case that a few weeks ago I was able to go to see them in concert. It was a very good gig. I was very impressed by Bret and Jemaine's singing voices and the way in which they (seemingly) improvised around technical problems. They played the majority of their classics, bowing down (or so it seemed) to audience pressure for a couple of songs. There was a bit of playing around with some of the songs, which didn't work on all occasions, but mainly added to the show. It wasn't just a show of song after song (it kind of a comedy gig too) and inbetween songs there was a lot of banter with the crowd and even jokes designed to run through the show. The gig overran, but no-one minded and the finale was pretty awesome.

Now for a change of story...

I had to run away from the gig pretty quickly as I had to get to bed to be up early. My girlfriend and I were travelling down to the Lake District in the morning to stay at a holiday home owned by her parents. We were up at 6am for the drive and made it down to Ambleside just after 10am. We weren't due to enter the cottage until 4pm, so started the holiday with a walk up Loughrigg. This has great views down over the Langdale Pikes and Grasmere. It wasn't the most challenging of hill walks, but was certainly challenging enough for two people not used to getting up a 6am. However, we made it over Loughrigg and down the other side to have lunch at Chesters - a nice, if slightly pretentious, restaurant-cum-interior decoration store, with very nice cakes. Getting back to Ambleside we were able to get into the holiday home, which was very nicely done up. We had to have a brief snooze before heading out for dinner at Ambleside's (if not the UK's!) finest Vegetarian restaurant - again very nice.

The next day saw us take a walk up to Grasmere (I think I'd been before on a school trip back in 1994) - we were attempting to follow instructions from my girlfriend's dad to give us the route, but we failed to take the planned path and ended up walking mainly along the main road to Grasmere. Grasmere was very pretty, but (in a similar way to Ambleside) seems entirely based around tourism - it's all lovely cafe's, restaurant, outdoor gear stores, or quaint crafty shops. It's great to visit, but isn't necessarily a taste of the real Lake District. We were able to get a very nice lunch there though (I forget the name of the cafe) again with particular note of the cakes - this place was famous for it's lemon meringue pie, which I had. We took a more scenic route back via some caves and hilly bits - we didn't see much wildlife, but saw many sheep and lambs, including a lamb that was a bit too adventurous and got stuck behind a wall next to a river.

We only had the weekend away, but the start of our drive back to Glasgow saw us stop off at a really nice pub called The Queens Head near Troutbeck. I was able to get a proper Sunday roast after a weekend of mainly being vegetarian/cake-arian [Update: I have been corrected by my girlfriend who reminded me that I had actually had a sausage sandwich for lunch that day - and very nice it was too]. It set me up for the drive home.

I want to ride my bicycle

2010-05-31T21:02:00.003Z

Last weekend my girlfriend and I used our new bikes to go on a trip to the Falkirk wheel.

First let me go back (for the record) to our first trip on the new bikes. Four weeks ago we started our new cycling life with ride up to Balloch in the sunshine, up part of National cycle route 7. The ride initially goes up the Forth & Clyde canal through some of the loveliest parts of north west Glasgow! Due to the nice weather the canal path was pretty busy, there were a few of the standard groups of semi-drunken neds standing around (although not too many and they were generally quite benign), but also plenty of other cyclists and walkers. Once we got to Bowling, and the River Clyde end of the canal, thing got prettier and slightly less busy. We had to leave the canal here and head towards the River Leven, which we could follow to then follow to Balloch (you also have to go through a couple of towns and we did manage to get a small bit waylaid at one put, before re-finding the cycle route. Balloch was pretty mobbed, but we only stayed briefly to sit by Loch Lomond and have our lunch. I'd been feeling pretty good, with no aches and pains, on the ride up, especially given that that last time I'd cycled that far must have been a long time ago (in fact I don't know if I'd ever done a longish cycle journey). However, having got off the bikes and rested my legs during lunch they weren't liking working again when we started heading home - my knees in particular were protesting a bit, and also more strangely my wrists. We made it home in good time without collapsing from exhaustion, but certainly felt the journey afterwards. Our bikes had also survived well, although I had had to re-attach my chain at one point. In fact as it had been so dry they looked pretty much unused.

For this more recent ride the weather was more inclement. The trip to Falkirk goes entirely along the Forth & Clyde canal starting pretty much from just outside my flat (basically we just went the opposite direction to our first trip). With only a few locks between here and the wheel the ride is pretty much entirely on the level, but the weather and our lack of regular cycling meant it was quite tough going. The ride goes through the lovely Possil marshes, up through Bishopsbriggs, Lenzie, Kirkintilloch, Kilsyth, Bonnybridge and then the wheel. We had rain showers of varying severity hitting every so often, and inbetween (especially on the outward ride) were inundated with flies and other bugs, which on a positive note meant there weren't too many people out on the path to get in our way. I'd never been to the wheel before so it was interesting to see it and it is a quite impressive piece of engineering. But unless you actually take a trip on it (they put on many sailings every day to take you up and down) there's actually very little to see or do - they have a visitor centre (looking like a mini Glasgow Science Centre), but it lacks any real information. I was expecting it to be more like a musuem, with displays about the history of the canals and the engineering of the wheel, but there was very little except for a shop and a cafe. We didn't go on a sailing and just ate our lunch and had some tea and a cake in the cafe, whilst waiting for the latest rain shower to abate. Contemplating the ride back to Glasgow wasn't fun as we both had felt like we had no energy and were considering the idea of just cycling to Falkirk station and getting he train back. But we didn't give up and once we started riding again, with our energy levels restored from our lunch, things picked up. I definitely wasn't aching as much as I had on the return journey of our first trip. We also made far better time on the way back, cutting about 20 minutes off our outward journey. After this trip our bikes definitely now look used - the puddles and mud have given them a nice spattering (as well as at the time giving us, despite mudguards, a similar look). There was no chain slip this time, but my front brake callipers do seem to have moved meaning that one of the brake rubbers is stuck against the wheel rim.

Who know were our next trip will be - we might even venture off the canal paths and try a route with some sort of hills!

Etive again

2010-05-31T21:01:00.004Z

Last weekend saw our annual canoe club camping weekend up to Glencoe to paddle the Etive. Two years ago saw glorious weather, but a very low river and an insane amount of midges. Last year we had rain and cold weather, which wasn't fun for camping, but gave a decent amount of water in the rivers and no midges. This years was another with good weather, and possibly an even lower river than two years ago, but fortunately no midges.

The weekend's boating got off to an inauspicious start on Saturday morning when we had a minor accident with one of our mini-buses (I wasn't driving), which mounted a rock and sprung a leak from it's hydraulics. This meant that we had to shuttle all our boats to the river (about 3 miles from the campsite a the Kings House) with our working, but smaller minibus, delaying the paddling by a couple of hours at least. Not that we were missing much, as getting to the river showed it to be little more than a stream. Still we persevered and all got kitted up at the standard get in of Triple Falls. The low river probably was good for encouraging Etive newbies as it's far less daunting when there's only a trickle going through. We spent the day going up and down Triple Falls, which including a lot of boatless activity of jumping into the deep splash pools from the rocks. We also had a few boat-a-cross (like motocross or ski cross) races down the falls (my involvement mainly bringing up the rear, which was probably for the best as I would most likely have caused some pile-ups). Despite not being able to paddle that far it was good to get back in a boat as this was my first time on a river this year (the cold weather and other commitments kept me away since last December). The evening saw the standard trip into the Kings House for dinner and drinks, and being old I retired quite early and fell asleep quickly.

I woke up to the rain. This was a blessing and a curse - it might mean more water in the river, but it also meant packing up a wet tent. Unfortunately the blessing wasn't very blessed as the rain had only marginally increased the water level, but I still had to pack up a wet tent. We then had a major amount of faff deciding on todays course of action. The busted minibus had to be loaded up with half our boats, so that it was ready to be towed back to Glasgow later that day, which meant not everyone would be able to get on the river. We also weren't sure whether to try something different than just redoing the Etive (with the tributary Allt a' Chaorainn as an option). The one bit of fortune was that another bus had been requisitioned from GUSA (although lacking a roof rack) meaning that people weren't having to hang around to travel back in the tow-truck with the other bus. It was eventually decided to just do as much of the Etive as we could, with as many people as possible.

On getting to the river it was looking a bit more promising. Some people got on to do a few runs of Triple Falls, whilst me and a couple of others decided we'd swim (and clamber) up and down (jumping) the falls. Then the group headed further down river - with mainly beginner's in boats to give them the experience. We didn't do the first drop after Triple, which is Letterbox, after hearing that someone from Dundee Canoe Club had broken their ankle going off it the day before (not enough water in the pool at the bottom), but carried on to Ski-jump, which saw no casualties, or swims. Crack of Doom was also successfully negotiated with no swims (I think), after which I was able to get in a boat. We did the standard seal launch to avoid trying to boat down Crack of Dawn, and at Rock Slide I manage to avoid the normal pitfall of heading straight into the wall after the drop. At Right Angle there was the usual umming-and-erring about whether to so it, but most people (including myself) who'd boated down there went over. For only my second time I didn't swim at the bottom - in fact I landed pretty well and didn't really even have to brace. I was actually quite a successful day despite the problems.

In other kayaking news last Thursday was the last pool session of the academic year. It was fairly empty, so I managed to get in a boat for about an hour. I was able practice rolling and bracing to my hearts content - and I seem to be pretty consistent and competent at it now! I even managed one (my second ever) hand roll. I'm going to attempt to get out on a river over the summer if there are others about, although due to work commitments I'm missing out on a trip to the Alps starting this week, and also won't be able to go on a trip to Wales later in the summer.

Happy Birthday Hubble

2010-04-24T12:07:00.003Z

Today is the 20th birthday (of sorts) of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was launched on 24th April 1990 in the Discovery Space Shuttle, although it wasn't actually deployed until the 25th and it's first light image was released on 20th May 1990. It had some teething problems to start with (a flawed mirror that blurred images meaning that the telescope could not be used at it's maximum resolution), but was specifically designed so that it could be serviced by astronauts and fixes applied. Since the fix it has been one of the most iconic and most importantly scientifically productive instruments ever (a "top 10" of its major discoveries can be seen here, although there are many others). Several servicing missions have gone on to improve its scientific capabilities by adding new detectors, and also greatly extending its lifetime. It also takes a great picture or two (certainly prettier than anything we'll be able to produce by observing gravitational waves), which has helped endear it to the public and make it some famous.

These images have been released to celebrate it's birthday, and hopefully they'll be a lot more to come before it finally closes its eye.

Source: Hubblesite.org

Academe

2010-04-22T13:57:00.001Z

In all my time in academia I've never been to Oxbridge - no meetings, conferences, or work-related visits - so I've never had the opportunity to see the dreamy spires of Oxford, or punt down the Cam. This is even more surprising given that I've lived in the South East (reasonably close to both) for the majority of my life, and have had friends go to both universities, and never even went as a tourist (I think on a family holiday or two we may have driven past Oxford, but never stopped there). Well I decided I should rectify this during my current impromptu holiday and yesterday took a trip to Cambridge. From my parents house it's a very easy trip (again, why have I not done it before!) - just a quick drive across to Hatfield (using the parents as a free taxi service) and then on an hour-long train journey direct to Cambridge.

You go to some places and they are quite different from how you'd imagined them. Cambridge definitely isn't one of them - it's exactly as you, or at least I, imagined in. On arriving I wandered round the Fitzwilliam Museum grounds, before going into the first College I came across - Peterhouse. I was very impressed by the college buildings and especially the grounds and beautifully maintained and manicured gardens behind it, but later saw that it was actually rather small and understated compared to some of the others (in fact it's the "oldest and smallest" of the colleges). Soon after I found my way to the Cam, where I saw my first punts although no one was out on them at this time.

For lunch I met up with a friend who works at the Centre for Atmospheric Science and we went to a very nice vegetarian cafe called the Rainbow Cafe (recommended by none other than Gillian McKeith!). Unfortunately, given that it was a lovely day weather-wise, the cafe was in a basement and had no natural light. After lunch we went into the King's College Chapel - staff and their guests can get in free, but otherwise there's a charge. The Chapel is probably one of the most recognisable buildings in Cambridge and I think must have been used in many a TV or film based in Cambridge. It's not what you might think of as a chapel, i.e. a quite small church, as it's massive and probably as big as many cathedrals. Inside there's some great stained glass windows and masonry, in particular the many greyhound and dragons on the coat of arms above each arch.

After King's I decided to do what I normally do at any university and seek out the Astronomy group - in this case the Institute of Astronomy (IoA). This required about a half hour walk out to West Cambridge and unfortunately away from the nicest parts of the city. After about 25 mins of walking I hit the Cavendish Labs, where the Department of Physics and some astrophysics groups live, along with other labs. There were some quite nice new buildings, but in reality the whole place looked and felt like an out of town science park rather than part of a historic university. A short walk further and up across Madingley Road got me to the IoA, which again was a bit underwhelming, but still good to notch off on my list of astronomy department I've been to (last month when I was in LA I had a snoop around the new astrophysics building at Caltech, which I was very impressed by, but I decided against just wandering into the IoA - at least at Caltech I had the excuse that I knew people working in the building, but I no longer know anyone in the IoA).

From the IoA I wandered through the grounds of one of the newest colleges - Churchill - which contained sports pitches, grass and clay tennis courts, and a cricket oval! Heading back towards the centre of town I accidentally found myself going passed the quite funky new (opened in 2005) Maths buildings. I then walked round the outside of two of the largest and most impressive colleges, Trinity and St Johns (although pretty much from the being at the maths buildings I'd been walking past the massive area of Trinity and St John's property and ground). Both these colleges (like most) charge for the public to enter them, and although there were several points were I could probably have got into both unchallenged (if I couldn't pass myself off as an academic then I'd probably look enough like a student) I decided not to risk it. Out the back of these colleges there were some great bridges across the Cam and there were now quite a lot of people out on the punts.

After all this exertion I went for a pint in the Eagle Pub, which I thought I recognised the name of, and was later told by my friend that it's where Crick and Watson announced their discovery of the DNA double helix. I then saw a few more of the colleges (and the Corpus Clock, or Chronophage) and had a wander around the Fen area before meeting up with my friend again for another couple of drinks.

The visit did make me wonder what it would have been like if I'd applied (and got into) Cambridge for my undergraduate degree or PhD. It does look like it would be a fantastic place to study, but I'm not sure if I'd have felt that after three or four years there. It's got a rather unique, fairy-taleish, bygone era, feel to it (as I said before, it's kind of like you imagine it) that you just don't get at other universities. That makes it great to visit, but may become too much after a while. Maybe someday I'll get to spend a bit more time there and find out, or maybe I'll give Oxford a try.

Science case

2010-04-20T12:12:00.004Z

On Saturday night I got involved in a drunken discussion/argument with another astrophysicist over facilities for future astronomy. As I said it was a drunken argument (from my side at least - the other guy could have been completely sober) and I was probably not too coherent, got slightly tetchy and aggressive (sorry) and took it a bit more seriously than I should have, but I thought I'd go over the main thrust of the disagreement as I vaguely remember it.

In general I thought that funding the two major planned astronomical mega-observatories, the optical/infrared European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) and the radio observatory the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), was a very good thing for advancing science. Whereas the other guy (TOG) thought that funding these two projects would drain too much money from smaller current telescope facilities, and they would be produce insufficient new science to be able to justify us losing access to these smaller class of telescopes. This is particularly prevalent in light of the recent funding crisis in which the UK astronomy funding agency (STFC) has been squeezing funding for various projects, in particular saying it maybe withdrawing UK membership/funding from things like UKIRT and Gemini. TOG was also worried (I think) that all ESO resources would be put into the E-ELT at the expense of their other facilities.

Science-wise I think TOG was being overly pessimistic. His basic premise was that these new telescopes wouldn't really be opening up any major new discovery space and they'd just allow us to confirm what we already know, but maybe with a bit more precision. A summary of the science case laid out for the E-ELT can be found here, and that for the SKA can be found here (with each chapter available for free on arXiv, e.g. here). These cases do obviously say a lot about what we can do to expand upon current knowledge (it's far easier to write a case based on what we currently know), and in fact I think their ability to do this gives a sufficient jump in sensitivity that the increase in science in these areas is very worthwhile [I'm going to cop out here and not give any specific examples, but see the above links]. However, I also think that there is a major new discovery space that will be opened up and lots of unknown stuff to find out.

The science case wasn't really the main thrust of TOGs argument thought - it was the funding side of things that was the main concern (you might be interested in telescoper's post about different people's ideas about what should be funded, and I think in this comment he show's similar concerns that TOG has). He said (if I remember correctly) he'd love to have access to an E-ELT/SKA for his research, but not necessarily at the cost of not having access to other facilities. No astronomer is going to have access to unlimited time on the E-ELT/SKA, so they'd obviously like to have access to other telescopes and be able to carry on doing productive science and there's a worry that this may not be possible in the future. I again thought that this was a bit too pessimistic, and maybe I'm being a bit naive, but I can't see how such a decimation of smaller facilities would be allowed - smaller class telescopes may have to find more novel ways of funding though (e.g. the LSST and ATA), or by partnership with smaller countries, or groups of universities. Importantly, I think that developing the E-ELT/SKA (via its pathfinders and precursors) is very important for providing technical innovations and pushing boundaries of observational techniques, which will feed back into making smaller class telescopes cheaper [maybe I have this the wrong way round, so someone can correct me] and able to do better science themselves.

I do have a skewed view of this kind of issue though. As a person working on gravitational wave observations we have a few (relatively expensive) detectors that create one data set for use by everyone (or for the moment at least those inside the collaborations that built and maintain the detectors), and don't have to compete for observing time on individual telescopes. I'm mainly making my decision based on my view that these new mega-observatories will produce far more novel science than the current technology is able to (and in small part that they look so cool). I might have different ideas if I felt I'd be unable to get new data myself due to limited observational chances on fewer telescopes, and consequently produce fewer papers and probably therefore have a diminished competitive edge in the academic jobs market. We do have some vested interest in having smaller class telescopes though in that when we see gravitational waves it's important to do optical follow-ups to get the most information about the sources. We're unlikely to be able to get the E-ELT and SKA to go quickly into a follow-up mode, but the smaller class telescopes will be vital.

Anyway, maybe I'm talking rubbish, what are your views?

[Update - on a related note this paper briefly reviews big versus small science/instrumentation in physics and astronomy.]

CANCELLED

2010-04-20T09:13:00.004Z

I taken an executive decision to cancel my trip to Germany. My initial flight, which was scheduled for 11:45 today flying from Heathrow to Amsterdam, was obviously cancelled and the KLM website was having issues when I attempted to re-book another later flight. So I decided the best option was to cut my losses and not travel at all. My trip's not essential, so I think it's best to leave any seats on flights that do make it to people who are in more desperate need than me (see it's a selfless act that I'm doing), which leaves me in the horrible position of having to have a few days of unexpected holiday! Even if I had been able to fly out to Germany I don't think there would have been any guarantee of being able to return on Friday evening, and spending time stuck in a foreign airport is not high on my priorities, so my decision is highly sensible.

Extended stay

2010-04-19T21:57:00.000Z

Following the hectic activities of last weeks' NAM2010 (actual news from which can be found elsewhere, especially twitter, as I didn't really have the time to blog about it) I have taken a short break. It looks like my break may become a little longer than originally planned though.

On Saturday my plan was to fly from Glasgow to Heathrow for a trip to St Albans to see friends and family for a few days. The flight was obviously a no-go, but I was rather surprised to be able to get a last minute train ticket, and in fact made it down without any bother - I even got a seat on the train after having expected to be squeezed into a space between carriages with tens of other desperate travellers. However, tomorrow I am meant to be flying out to Hannover for a few days of intensive code review at the Albert Einstein Institute. This is looking increasingly unlikely given the current ash cloud status. Up to about an hour ago there had been some optimism with some flights expected to resume tomorrow, but just a few minutes ago there was a new update saying that the Icelandic volcano has started to up its output again. If I can't fly out by Wednesday morning the trip will be pretty pointless, so will just have to be rescheduled for a less volcano-stricken time. I put my current chances of getting to Germany at probably about 5% - I've not done a proper Bayesian analysis on this and have plucked the figure out of thin (ash-free) air, but it feels about right. For me this isn't a major disaster as it means I have a few more days of holiday before going back up to Glasgow, but I do have friends trying to make it back from Europe, and one who's trying to move out to the US, who are quite a bit more inconvenienced than me. Here's hoping they make it to their destinations.

NAM2010 - the countdown

2010-04-05T13:39:00.004Z

As I briefly mentioned last year we're hosting the National Astronomy Meeting in Glasgow this year. It's now only a week away, so the coming 7 days may be a bit frenetic getting the final things organised. It's looking like it should be a great meeting though.

I've been charged (along with Iain) with organising Posters, Visuals and Banners (you can see a slightly altered version of some of my handy-work here), which has had its moments, but generally hasn't been too arduous a task. One thing I need to do though is produce the research poster that I'm presenting - better get on to that now really.

You can follow the NAM2010 meeting on twitter at @nam2010. I'll probably tweet and maybe post a few (astronomy-based!) blog entries during the week if I'm not too busy.

New spring collection

2010-04-05T13:37:00.000Z

Over the long Easter weekend I've managed to chalk up doing a few new things (although I'm currently sitting at work, and was also in the office last Friday, so today probably won't involve anything novel).

On Friday night, after almost two years of planning (yes, really, Hazel and me have been discussing going clubbing for that long without actually ever getting round to going out), a few of us went out clubbing. Our impetus was due my friend Hazel having successfully passed her viva the day before and that fact that she'll be moving to San Francisco in a couple of weeks - if we were going to go to a club it was basically now or never. Going out to a club wasn't the new thing, but we did go to a place, the Sub Club, that I'd not been to before in all my 8 years in Glasgow. It wasn't a particularly happening club night and the place was quite quiet, but it was good to get out, have a dance and see somewhere new.

The next day my girlfriend and I both went out and bought bikes. I've not owned my own bike since I got a Red Raleigh Racer (from Halfords obviously!) for my birthday when I was about 8 (therefore it's a tad small for me now), so getting myself one was very exciting. In the intervening time since my RRR, whenever I've cycled I've had to borrow either a parent or siblings bike. This is the bike I got - "...the only true hybrid bike on the market, our Crosstrail™ owns the title of "singletrack-capable commuter bike." For riders who want one bike for all terrain, with the versatility to handle road, mountain and everything in between". I also had to buy all the accessories that go along with bike ownership - helmet, lights, lock, gloves, bike clips. I say we bought bikes, but really we don't actually own or have them yet. We've gone though the Cycle to Work which get us the bikes and equipment tax free, although frustratingly means we have to wait a while until the whole thing gets processed - hopefully this won't take too long.

The final new thing I did was again kind of club related. On Thursday we spotted a poster for the Hinterland Festival - a multi-venue music festival happening in Glasgow on Saturday. We decided to give it a go. Most of the festival was taking place in the Arches, which is another Glasgow venue I'd never been in before, so I was interested to see what it was like. There were bands playing from 6pm, but we were running a bit late and were mainly only interested in seeing the two main bands, British Sea Power and The Mystery Jets, who didn't start until 8.30pm. I was a fun night and I was impressed by the venue. Both bands took a bit of time to really get going in their sets, but picked up a lot towards the end and were a lot of fun - British Sea Power even had a monster turn up to dance. I knew quite a lot of the British Sea Power songs as I have one of their albums, but I'd assumed I must heard more songs by The Mystery Jets when in fact only knew one of them. There were several DJ sets happening after the bands played, which would have been fun to go to, but old age and the effects of several night of my heavy drinking got to us and we had to leave.

I should try and do some new things more often - many of them in the future will probably now involve bike rides to places.

YACM

2010-03-27T18:55:00.003Z

Rather than waiting 5 months before writing about it, I may as well mention I was out in Los Angeles (Arcadia again) just over a week ago for Yet Another Collaboration Meeting. Nothing major of note about it (spending all day in windowless rooms listening to talks, networking, discussing science, and then drinking at the complementary bar in the evenings), but I will just say that if you're flying to LA from London (or Aukland) I would recommend flying with AIr New Zealand. They gave me one of my most pleasant flights out to the US, they didn't lose my bags, and they were actually the cheapest flight on offer!

During the trip I got to see my LA-based friends Ben and Erin, who treated me to a screening of the classic film Birdemic - it's a masterpiece - and some very good pizza. Unfortunately as I was struggling with jetlag I don't think I appreciated the true brilliance of the film.

Like last year I had another celebrity spot in Heathrow on this trip - another footballer to. I struggled to recognise who the guy was at first (in fact it took me about a week until I figured it out) and initially thought it was someone like Ray Winstone, but knew it wasn't him. It was in fact none other than Neil "Razor" Ruddock.

The late, late travel show

2010-03-27T17:27:00.006Z

My reason for having to pay $5 per year is that I've finally got round to uploading my photos from Vancouver and I needed the extra space. My trip to Vancouver was in October last year! I'm not too quick.

At the time I didn't write up anything about the trip other than mentioning I was going, so I'll write a brief (excessively late) report now. The trip was just after my time SciMon-ing at the LIGO Hanford site in Washington state. As I was up in the Pacific North West, and had never been to Canada before, I thought I do a quick weekend road trip across the border before driving back down to Seattle for my flight home. On finishing my final SciMon shift at 4pm on Saturday 24th October I drove to Pasco Airport to exchange one hire car (paid for by work) with another (paid for by me) for the drive. Then followed an uneventful 6 hour drive up to Vancouver, which surprised me only for the fact that I actually didn't feel too tired during it.

I only had two whole days there, so on the first I decided to just explore the city via a standard bus tour and get my bearings. Unfortunately it pissed down the whole day and I had a stinking cold, but I forced myself to stay out wandering the city and not just retreat back into bed at the hostel I was staying (I'd booked a private room, so that I wouldn't have to share with the more scummy backpackers). Despite the rain the city did seem to have a lot to offer and I tried to walk round as much of the centre as I could. It was a real shame that I was feeling so shit as I think I could have seen and done a lot more.

The next day I decided to head out to Vancouver Island. I was feeling marginally better and the weather had improved a lot. I managed to miss the ferry I was originally intending to get and had to hang around at the ferry port for an extra 2 hours before the next sail. This left me with very little time to see anything. On arriving on the island I got a bus straight to the state capitol Victoria. In the approximately 2 hours I had there I was able to walk round the state government building and see a small bit of the city - many totem poles and Orcas. I also went in a Scottish pub for a drink. I also got to bask in the sun a bit, which was a great treat following the previous days weather.

That was about it for my trip (there was a bit more to the trip, but seeing as this account is so late it's probably not worth recounting in detail). I wish I'd been able to see more of the area and Vancouver's nightlife, especially if I'd had some company there and wasn't ill.

Paying the man

2010-03-27T17:27:00.000Z

After several years of using a variety of google products (Gmail, google calendar, picasa, blogger and of course their search engine) I finally started giving them money directly. Despite my Gmail account having an ever increasing storage capacity (nearing 8Gb now) the picasa account only has fixed 1Gb of space. I filled that up a while ago and finally decided that I needed more space. Frustrating you can't share all the free space you have in Gmail amongst other google sites, so my only option if I wanted to continue uploading to picasa was to pay up for more space (I also have a flikr account, which I could just upload to, but I like having all the photos in one place). I now give a massive $5 per year for 20Gb of space. Now to upload some more photos...

Boarding In Glencoe: the Return

2010-03-04T15:20:00.001Z

What a difference a year, and a decent level of snowfall, makes. After a rather cold and damp trip up to Glencoe to go snowboarding last year I (and a few other Glasgow astronomy folk, and one sibling of astronomy folk) returned there yesterday. This winter's seen Scotland getting it's best snowfall in probably at least a couple of decades and the ski centres have been doing very well from it. This combined with the rather nice weather over the last few days meant taking a trip up to the slopes seemed like a very good idea - and so it proved to be. The one downside to this trip was the early start, but we got over this quite quickly. On the way to Glencoe there was slight confusion between our convoy of two cars over a stop at the Green Welly - the car I was in ended up stopping there for about 25 mins waiting for the others, when in fact they'd already reach the ski centre - but this didn't hold us up for too long, and we were probably up the chair lift and on the slopes by just after 10am.

The contrast with the previous year was pretty staggering - it was dry, there was barely any wind, you could (kind of) see the Sun, and most importantly there was a lot of proper snow rather than mounds of slush, with patches of mud poking through. My ability to use the Poma tow was also greatly improved, and I got up the slope first time (and only fell off once thereafter)! We all started off with a few runs down the main beginner slope to reacquaint ourselves with boarding (and skiing), although the two Swiss in our group were quick to head off to the more challenging slopes up the top of the mountain. We soon moved on to a slightly more difficult run, up the top of a small chair lift, and stayed on this until lunch. I think it was just prior to lunch that I peaked in my ability, and was being pretty competent at heading downhill, turning and reaching reasonable speeds, all whilst not falling over!

After a lunch of roll and sausage and chips (following on from my pig in bread-based breakfast of a bacon roll at the Green Welly), and a needed rest, we headed back up to the slopes for about three hours more. Our Swiss contingent, who'd been on all the blue, red, and even (accidentally) black runs, up the top of the hill, suggested we be more adventurous and head up there too. This required negotiating the first tow, the chair lift, and a rather painful T-bar lift (these really aren't recommended if you're on a snowboard). It was worth it for the view that you got of the surrounding Glens from the top, and I managed to cheat my way to bagging a Munro (some might say it doesn't count though) by walking to the peak. After taking in the view we had to make it down the mountain though. We took what looked like the easiest of the blue runs and tentatively made it down. In the end it turned out to not be a particularly tricky run, but being as it was the first time the non-Swiss of us had run it (and given that we'd tired ourselves out in the morning) it proved a bit troublesome and more intimidating than it should be. If we'd gone up earlier in the day and tackled it a few times I think the knowledge of the route (and that we wouldn't die by falling off the edge of the mountain) would have made it more fun. We also didn't help ourselves by discussing the recent avalanches that there had been on the slopes right by where we were.

We finished the day by taking a few more runs down the easy slopes, although by this time people were aching and levels of boarding/skiing ability were diminishing rapidly. Still Marina, Hugh and myself decided that rather than take the chair lift back down to the car park we would board our way down to the bottom (Marina and Hugh had done this prior to lunch too, but we decided to take a different, less scary, route this time). There were a couple of runs down to the bottom marked on the map, but these weren't very easy to spot when you tried to go down them. There were a few other people doing the same thing, so we tried following them, but soon had to make our own route. The initial part of the run was very nice, and there were some areas of untouched powder that were great fun to board through, but nearer the bottom things got a lot bumpier and icier. For the second half of the run Hugh and I were generally traveling about 10 metres maximum before falling on our arses. Needless to say that part took a bit longer than planned and I, at least, was completely knackered and drenched in sweat.

In all it was a great day and a proper treat to see such good snow conditions in Scotland. Hopefully we can have some more seasons like that in the years to come (although I've not been a freezing weather that has lead to these good conditions).

[I forgot to mention that on the way back we saw some runners with a torch. We thought this might be the Olympic torch (a bit early I know, but who else runs with a torch?), but going passed them we saw it was the World Harmony Run. This is apparently an organisation that runs in an attempt to promote world harmony - they aren't trying to raise money, just be more harmonious. A bold and noble aim, but I'm not sure how much more at harmony with the world I was after seeing them. Maybe you have to run and hold the torch to feel the harmony.]

Planes, coaches and automobiles

2010-01-12T15:39:00.000Z

I'm becoming quite the regular seminar giver now, as last Friday I went down to the University of Southampton to give a talk to the General Relativity group in the School of Mathematics (this time I was invited to talk myself, rather than standing in for my boss, which was the case for the last talk). It was nice to go down there and giving the talk was enjoyable - I think it was quite novel for the group there to have a non-theoretical maths-y talk, which I certainly was never going to be in danger of giving. I also got to have a useful chat with Ian about his paper, which gives a mechanism for getting gravitational waves from a neutron star at the spin frequency (rather than twice the spin frequency, which is where we normally look).

However, getting there proved to be a bit more hassle than planned. I had the ambitious plan of getting there and back in one day, which isn't too difficult a task normally, but I was doing it in the current weather conditions. I was booked on the early morning flybe flight direct from Glasgow to Southampton, and due to arrive at 8:15. The plane left on time, however at about 8pm, probably as we were approaching the south coast, it was announced that snow in Southampton was going to prevent us from landing, so we did an about turn and diverted to Birmingham. Due to the fact that flybe don't do flights between Brum and Soton they put on a coach for us, which took about an hour to arrive (not too bad a turn around really). The main problem was that it was 10am when the coach left Birmingham Airport and my talk was scheduled for midday - luckily I had the seminar organisers number and we were able to reschedule the talk for 3pm. There's not really a motorway link directky from the West Midlands down to Southampton, so the coach trip took us towards London, round the M25, and then down south - all the roads were completely clear of snow and the traffic flowed freely, but it was still a 3 hour ride, getting me into Southampton Airport for 1pm. The coach trip was useful in that it gave me a chance to read a very nice review article (which I should have read ages ago) on constraints to neutron star equations of state, but hadn't been my ideal journey.

The trip back was less eventful and my flight returned me to Glasgow directly, although about 50 mins late (but I can't really complain too much about that).

New year email

2010-01-11T23:25:00.003Z

Hello 2010.

My first (belated - as is standard now with this blog) blog post of the New Year comes via email. I just decided that I should set up the ability to email and text posts in to blogger, and this is my first test (other than my previous post from about a year ago via Posterous). My ability to text things in (via MMS rather than SMS, as that's not set for non-US numbers yet) appears to not be working successfully, which I've also found when trying to set up texting into my twitter account - this may be an O₂ thing rather than blogger or twitter's fault, but it's a bit annoying.

[Update: Again, as with the posterous post, I've had to go in and edit this as the email didn't like maintaining the html I added. Booo.]

[Update 2: This small, and largely unanswered, thread seems to suggest that the mobile blogging will not work with O₂. Booo again.]

Did they see it?

2009-12-18T02:14:00.005Z

Has dark matter been detected (rumours were abound)? The CDMS (Cryogenic Dark Matter Search) experiment has detected some potentially tantalising evidence for the first direct detection of WIMPs - it saw 2 events! (I think the paper will be on the arXiv here.) However, they make no claim for detection, as they say:

In this new data set there are indeed 2 events seen with characteristics consistent with those expected from WIMPs. However, there is also a chance that both events could be due to background particles. Scientists have a strict set of criteria for determining whether a new discovery has been made, in essence that the ratio of signal to background events must be large enough that there is no reasonable doubt. Typically there must be less than one chance in a thousand of the signal being due to background. In this case, a signal of about 5 events would have met those criteria. We estimate that there is about a one in four chance to have seen two backgrounds events, so we can make no claim to have discovered WIMPs. Instead we say that the rate of WIMP interactions with nuclei must be less than a particular value that depends on the mass of the WIMP. The numerical values obtained for these interaction rates from this data set are more stringent than those obtained from previous data for most WIMP masses predicted by theories. Such upper limits are still quite valuable in eliminating a number of theories that might explain dark matter.

so these results can't be heralded as a significant for a while (with the events having a one in four chance of being background you're not going to convince anyone), but there is maybe room for some excitement - and setting upper limits is still fun! Right! It's nice to have definitive results in science, but in new discovery fields like this (and probably as will happen in my own field of gravitational wave detection) you need to take your time.

What's particularly ironic (from a UK perspective) is that yesterday's STFC funding announcement dropped the Dark Matter experiments at Boulby mine!

Administrative error

2009-12-16T11:49:00.002Z

After posting about the current financial woes of the physics and astronomy community I saw some other depressing fiscal news. It seems that Watford may be facing administration! We're being asked to pay back almost £5 million in loans (from a salad supplier!) by close of business today, which looks kind of unlikely. If we do fall into administration then the Football League will automatically deduct 10 points from us, and leave us just above the relegation spots - not a fun place to be. I really hope we don't go the way of Luton.

[Update: We seem to have been saved from administration after our major shareholder Lord Ashcroft stepped in and agreed to pay off our loan. We out of the worst for now, but there may be other problems going into the future. Unfortunately we lost our game today.]

Tomorrow, tomorrow

2009-12-15T22:49:00.003Z

Tomorrow sees the announcements from today's STFC science prioritisation meeting (hilariously title "Investing in the future: 2010-2015" [my emphasis]), which will describe how UK funding for Astronomy, Particle Physics and Nuclear Physics will be distributed over the next few years. Due to certain issues there are likely to be some big cuts in many areas where the UK has been doing excellent science, and many people are on tenterhooks waiting to see if their area (and in many post-docs cases their jobs) are on the line. Other people have written in more informed, and better ways, about this, so I'm not going to add anything other than the obviously selfish thing of hoping that my area of gravitational wave research fares well. I hope things aren't as bad as predicted and most people (in all STFC-funded areas) see their funding at least kept at its current level, but that's probably hoping in vain.

[Update: The report can be found here. Gravitational waves fared well, but even we can expect to have to deal with cuts of order 10% (maybe more) - I think we'll do this through various efficiency savings. There is a lot of discussion online of the aftermath of this report and its effects over all the STFC areas (for example see the comments on Peter Coles blog, or the #sftc tag on twitter.)]

Heading south for the winter

2009-12-06T22:03:00.000Z

Another week, another kayaking trip. This time we sought out warmer climbs by heading south to the River Nith - this is a grade 3/4 river depending on the level, although for us it was mainly grade 3 or less. It was an intermediate trip, but I think that the Nith was a new river for everyone on this trip, so we didn't really know what to expect.

When we got down there we first went for a look at one of the rivers that flows into the Nith, the Euchan - we didn't really plan to paddle it (fortunately!), but wanted to have a scout out for possible future trips. It did look fun, but there was a gorge section containing a very narrow channel that looked potentially rather nasty. After this diversion we headed back to the Nith to find a suitable get in. We decided not to start at one of the regular get ins at Sanquhar (which to me is a bizarre name for a village - it contains an inappropriate "q"), but head a bit further down stream to where the river looked a bit more interesting (and to cut down on the length of the shuttle run, seeing as we only had a bike for that). We found a good spot about two miles further along the road, although we didn't realise quite how long it would take for Mike to make it back on the bike after taking the bus down to the get out - at the time we thought he was just being slow, but we felt quite bad about that when we drove back along the road after paddling and saw just how far it was.

There were a couple of minor rapids soon after getting in which we all got over fine, although at the bottom of one I stupidly came a cropper on a eddy line and capsized. I tried a couple of rolls, but failed and some had a pretty lame swim - my general ability getting into and out of eddy's is still pretty poor and something I should really practice more often (and have practised more on this trip too, as the other were quite nifty at getting into small eddy's behind rocks). Unfortunately there were then large sections of pretty flat water between the rapids until we got to the gorge section. From then on the rapids were a more closely spaced and things got more fun, but the light was drawing in, so we couldn't hang about and there wasn't much time for people to play about in the waves (I was generally avoiding playing about anyway, as my early swim [and uncomfortable boat] had slightly dented my confidence). I had another swim during, or just before, the gorge section (we weren't too sure where the gorge started, but it was just before a point where there was a large tree stump in the middle of the river). Again this was quite a lame swim, as I just got through the rapid fine, but capsized at the bottom and again couldn't quite manage to roll up. The rapids near the end were a lot more fun, and we did most of them blind due to not having the time to hang about. There was only one more swim on the trip, although not from me this time (and at a point just off the last drop on one of the rapids, where a swim is much less lame).

I think the general consensus was that there was far too much flat water on this trip, but the end section was good. It'll probably be a while before the Nith is done again as a club trip, but it could be better in higher water, or if you just do the gorge.

For the journey home, at the insistence of Tom ;), we decided to try and get Reggie Yates (on his Radio 1 requests show) to play Meatloaf's I would do anything for love. We all texted in, and Ben even managed to get through on the phone and have his details taken, but unfortunately our request went unheard.

Scrolling drum tabs

2009-12-01T23:22:00.004Z

Since playing Rock Band and Guitar Hero I've thought that having a scrolling drum tab in the same style would be brilliant for learning to play new songs. Well fortunately I'm not the only person to think this and someone with some coding skills has actually mocked up a working code to do this. It seems that at the moment it basically takes in a text file with a tab that someone has already written (I don't know what format would be required), and then you sync that up with the music from the song. It would be nice if you could just pass it the music files and it works out the tab, but that's probably asking a bit too much ;) Anyway, I'm not sure if the guy who wrote this code is planning on actually making a production version and selling it, but I'd definitely be a customer if he does.

Brass monkeys

2009-11-29T18:04:00.001Z

Today four of us went on a non-official-club trip up to the Etive (by far my most kayaked river) where we were thinking of joining up with the Glasgow Caledonian University Kayak Club who had been wig-wamming up that way for the weekend. The day started off bloody freezing and didn't really improve temperature-wise. When we arrived at the Etive it seemed that half of the kayakers in Scotland were also there (however the Caly crew weren't actually there yet). It required quite a bit of will power to actually strip off and put on our kayaking gear, which wasn't helped by the very bracing wind racing through Glen Etive. By the time the Caly group arrived we were ready to go, and seeing as they had a big group and we wanted to do the river at a reasonable pace we decided to just go down as a four (the other reason we headed on was that we thought some other guys we knew who where also on the river [current and ex-GUCC members] would be giving us a shuttle back to our car from the get-out, but they were a bit too quick for us!).

This was the first time I'd done the river in such a small group, and as such we didn't set up safety (people with throw lines) on the banks at each fall, but just went down them. We didn't even get out to take a look at the drops before we did them, and put our trust in Chris that it would be fine. For me all the drops went pretty well, and I stayed upright and put in a couple of decent braces when needed, up until Right Angle. On the fall there I had a quite scary swim, as I capsized, got pushed against the wall on the side I was trying to roll up on, and then in the panic couldn't find the release handle on my spray deck - I found it in the end and was fine, but it shock me a little bit, and I was more timid with my paddling from then on (although it was reasonably near the get out anyway.) I was slightly wobbly going through a couple of the rock fields after that, but stayed upright until the very last rapid, when I hit a rock, got spun around and went over - I almost righted myself a couple of times using braces and the rocks near me, but in the end I succumbed and swam. In general though, despite the swims, I think I did some of my best paddling on this trip, and I was manoeuvring myself far more confidently than I have before.

Even with the swim before the get out I'd warmed up well during the paddle, but the weather didn't want to keep things that way, because as soon as we stopped it decided to start raining - and not just regular rain, but ice. There was a van to shelter behind when getting changed, which protected us from the elements a bit, but it would be nice for all rivers to be equipped with dry, warm changing rooms. Fortunately it wasn't as cold as this trip though - there was no ice forming on us. In the end it was probably for the best that we didn't wait for Caly, as they were only about half way along when we drove past on our way home.

The company I keep

2009-11-23T10:51:00.004Z

This afternoon I'm giving a talk in the Physics Department at Queen Mary, University of London (I used to know it as Queen Mary and Westfield College, but I don't know why they dropped the Westfield!) Looking at the other people giving departmental seminars this semester I seem to be in good company - three FRS's, a dame, an OBE, the Lucasian Professor, and mainly Professors (not lowly Post-docs!) I hope my talk on gravitational waves doesn't disappoint.

Low tummel

2009-11-23T10:48:00.000Z

I will follow in the grand tradition of very late posts about my kayaking trips by only just getting round to telling you about my trip from just over a week ago. A small group of six of us went to the River Tummel, which was a new river for me. It had been raining reasonably hard the week prior to the trip (nowhere near as hard as the past week though) and as we drove up most rivers seemed to have a good amount of water in them. But, the lower Tummel is a dam release river and when we got there it was very low due to there having been no recent release. This meant there were going to be large sections of the river that were quite scrapey. Once we were on the river it wasn't too bad, although for the first half of the river there wasn't much to do except dodging rocks. The second half of the river had the majority of the falls and rapids and things picked up well when we got to these. On one of the first drops (probably the easiest) I managed to get myself stuck against the rock at the top, and due to not leaning into the rock I capsized and went down the drop on my head, and eventually had to swim. However that was the only swim of the trip (we had been hoping to have none). Further down the river we stopped to play at the bottom of a rapid by dipping our kaykak's noses into the water and popping out - I only tried this once as I got flipped - I had a couple of attempts at rolling (the second of which almost worked), but had to be T-rescued this time. There were some good fun drops. We all negotiated S (or Z) falls without any problems. The final fall was the Linn of Tummel, which is a grade 4 or 5 depending on the water level - due to the low levels it was probably a 4 when we did it, but it did mean that to the left of the second drop there was a nasty rock shelf that was exposed. After quite a bit of scouting out the line to take and setting up safety, we all decided to go for it. Everyone made it down without any mishaps, and we all avoided the rocks (after this I heard a story of someone breaking their arm when the hit those same rocks). Despite the low water levels, and my one swim, it was a really fun trip - small trips seem to work quite well. I should be out again next Sunday.

Handling things

2009-11-19T11:56:00.000Z

The events in Paris last night (for those who've not seen the news this refers to the World Cup qualifying play-off game, involving France and Ireland, in which Thierry Henry performed one of the most blatant handballs ever seen, leading directly to a goal that in the end knocked Ireland out) have lead to the inevitable calls for a rethink over whether we have video referees in football, especially for decisions such as this. I have mixed views on video referees in football. On the one hand I like the fact that in real time during a game controversial refereeing decisions will get made and are allowed to stand, because I think it adds something to the game as a form of entertainment - basically it gives people something to discuss/rant/argue/complain about during and after the game, which a lot of people get enjoyment out of, even if it's a strange perverse masochistic enjoyment when bad decisions go against your team. It would be nice to just discuss a game with regards to the actual football that was played, but to be honest a lot of the time refereeing decisions have far more mileage, especially in often otherwise dull games.

But that said, when refereeing decisions do go against your team it can be really infuriating when you know that a quick replay of the event by the fourth official, and a word in the refs ear, would have easily set things right. You generally have to hope that such decisions even themselves out over the course of a game/season/tournament. Last night's event was slightly different in that it was a one off (over two legs of course) knockout play-off game, so one bad decision against you could be, and was, disastrous. When huge amounts of money are involved in the outcome of a game, or it involves missing out, or not progressing in, a major tournament, I can see that video refereeing may be very welcome.

But, I'm still not entirely swayed back to the arguments for video refereeing. I'd like to see something else first, although it may be far harder to implement than video reffing, and that's trying to make the players more honest! This again is something that's been bandied about in football discussions for quite a while, whether it's been trying to stop player diving, or trying to stop them abusing referees. Often the argument goes "Rugby [or insert your idea of the most honest and respectable sport here] players don't fake injuries (hehe), or abuse the ref, so why can't footballers be more honourable in their conduct?", and I still don't see why this idea of trying to make footballer's less inclined to cheat can't be encouraged more. This has started to some extent, via some disincentivisation, in that footballers who are caught diving after the event can face game bans and fines. But for things like blatant handballs that the referees/linesmen don't spot, how about having the players own up to these infringements straight away, and if they don't, and this is spotted afterwards, then they suffer similar consequence. To get more honesty it might just be a case that refs should start questioning players more when something untoward is noticed by opposition players. For example last night Shay Given was telling the ref that he'd seen a handball, so had the ref asked Henry what happened maybe be would have admitted it (as he did after the game!) - whether a player would admit it is why you'd have sanctions in place for dishonesty. It was interesting to read some of Trapattoni's comments after last night's game, when he said just that

"The referee had time to ask the linesman and then after to ask Henry... It would not have been the first time a player would have asked and it would not have been out of turn."

so maybe the onus should lie more with the referee than the player.

To be clichéd and just go back to the well trod "XXX players are more honest than footballers" argument that I mentioned, I'd just like to say that in some sports (e.g. snooker [some might argue it's not really a sport, and more a game, hobby or past-time, but in my eye's it has balls and they're being hit with something, so it counts as sport!]) players are expected to indicate whether they've committed a foul, and as long as you have mutual honesty from both sides things work out fine. I don't expect football players to now start confessing their every onfield indiscretion to the ref, but for certain things if the ref asks them what happened I'd hope they could be honest about it.

At the start of the post I said that one of my dislikes of video refereeing was that it might makes games less exciting to discuss by taking away the controversy. I think my idea could well make thing's even more dull, but at least it'll be honest! ;)

SciMon Diary: Day 14

2009-10-24T20:31:00.003Z

Unlike my last post this one's coming to you a bit earlier than normal. That's because when I leave the detector today I will be hitting the road and not coming back. It's my final shift! And afterwards I'm going to be driving up to Vancouver.

As shifts go this one has been very easy. It would have been nice to have an easy shift due to the detector being stable and locked in science mode, but unfortunately this has been easy due to the detector being out of science mode for the whole time! In fact we've been like that for nearly 24 hours (since just after the end of my shift yesterday). It seems that one of the operators (naming no names) yesterday changed some filters that have kind of screwed with our ability to get back into lock - until this morning they weren't even able to initiate the first stage of locking the detector (there are a few stages you go through before you have light locked down both arms at full power). The large earthquake in Indonesia then didn't help things. We^* have managed to come back into lock for a while, but with quite a poor range. Hopefully things will improve by the end of my shift, by which time I can hand over the reigns to someone else. [As I type this we've come back into lock!]

^*in all these posts when I've said "we" I've generally been talking about something that's been done by the detector operators, whilst I've sat back an watched.

SciMon Diary: Day 13

2009-10-24T15:45:00.004Z

I'm a day late in posting this, but for completeness feel I should write something. Yesterday's shift involved quite a lot of going in and out of lock. There were a few seismic spikes that may well have been caused by the wind, which had picked up considerably yesterday. This wind made the drive home a bit more fun as I had to battle against it a bit and avoid the tumbleweed flying across the road.

I've not really got anything more to say about the shift, so I'll just add that yesterday evening I watched an episode of Stargate Universe. I've not really watched any of the other Stargate franchise (well I've seen the original film, and caught the odd episode of the original series), but I thought this was very good. From what I've seen I think this is rather darker than the other Stargate spin-offs, and more in the mould of BSG. I don't think there will be many light and fun episodes, with rather more emphasis on lurching from one seemingly hopeless situation to another. Unfortunately I caught episode four (and most of episode five), so I think I'll be having to download the first three (which sort of form a three-part opening episode) when I get home. Robert Carlyle is very good in it too.

SciMon Diary: Day 12

2009-10-23T05:33:00.002Z

I've not been feeling too well today (I suspect a mild case of radiation poisoning), so I can't really be bothered writing anything. But to satisfy your LIGO cravings here's a LIGO dance:

Note how they form an L-shaped interferometer and the dancers act out the laser light (which is obviously what they intended). They try out a few different, and maybe slightly unconventional configurations though, but I think they throw in a Sagnac there too.

SciMon Diary: Day 11

2009-10-22T02:33:00.002Z

Today the student became the master when I got to impart all my SciMon knowledge to a new trainee. Firstly I described the importance of waxing cars, sanding floors, and painting fences, and how they should practice that over and above all else - this bemused the trainee, who thought such things couldn't be applied to looking after a gravitational wave detector. They'll be thanking me when they enter the local SciMon tournament and those SciMons from the other detectors (I'm looking at you Livingston - the evil ~~dojo~~detector) try dirty tricks to win.

SciMon Diary: Day 10

2009-10-20T22:54:00.003Z

Like last Tuesday (and in fact every Tuesday) today has been a maintenance day at the detector, which means that we've not taken any science mode data and have been out of look for pretty much my entire shift. There's therefore not been much for me to look at detector-wise, so I've been busying myself with me regular work - this has mainly consisted of getting increasingly frustrated with the Frame Library (a set of software that creates, and reads, data in the format that we use for gravitational wave data). I have also attempted to make some inroads into writing my lecture for the SUPA course on gravitational waves (I've not got very far, but if you want a sneak preview of what it'll be like then I'll mainly be talking about stuff from this review article.)

I currently feel like I'm now coming down with a cold, which should make the next few days extra fun!

SciMon Diary: Day 9

2009-10-20T03:48:00.003Z

Not really much to say today, but I don't want to leave a gap in the diary, so here's my summary of my shift: some science mode; some non-science mode; some seismic noise; no big earthquakes (at least none during my shift - a 6.2 magnitude one in Samoa hit us just after my shift ended.)

To add a bit of spice to this entry I'll let you know what I get up to afterwork! I get home, go the gym, make dinner, watch TV with a couple of beers, go to bed. Sounds exciting doesn't it! I sometimes mix it up with a trip to the supermarket, and today had the great fun of doing some washing. This has been my social life for the last two weeks. I don't know how I'll cope and interact with people when I get back to Glasgow - it'll be sensory overload.

SciMon Diary: Day 8 (week 2)

2009-10-19T03:05:00.002Z

When I arrived at the detector we'd been in science mode for about 5 hours and that continued for another 7 hours of my shift - a nice 12 hours at a range of ~17 Mpc. I'd been hopeful that we'd stay in lock for the whole of my shift, which would have made things nice and easy, but unfortunately something happened. It did allow me to actually do something in trying to track down the source of the lock loss - it wasn't an obvious seismic event, and various accelerometers on on a variety of optical benches were inconclusive (I had a lot of help to show me what channels I should be looking to perform the diagnostics). By the end of my shift we had some clues, but still didn't know what the ultimate cause was, or whether the same thing had caused loss lock on other occasions. I had learned a fair bit more about the diagnostics software though, and the locations of a variety of optical benches.

Day off

2009-10-18T04:15:00.004Z

I started my day with a nice 2 hour 45 minute drive from Richland to the White Salmon river (Google maps was quite accurate in it's allotted trip time). As I said previously I was off to raft the river with these guys. I arrived about an hour early (seeing as I wasn't completely sure how long the drive would take, so I left quite a bit of leeway), so went and had a look at the river and the Husum falls - there were a few kayakers paddling about. I was the first to arrive, but soon after a large group of guys who'd be rafting with us turned up, followed (a bit late) by another local couple. The group were a bunch of guys (mainly from Seattle) who were out on a bachelor weekend - they'd had a big night in Portland the night before, but seemed quite perky and up for it (well the groom-to-be was looking a bit pale, but he made it through ok). Our river guides for the day were Todd (one of the co-founders of the company) and Drew - they kitted us out and then drove us up to the get in.

At the get in (a private get in further up the river than the standard commercial get in, that allowed us to do a load more rapids) we had a introduction to whitewater rafting - how to sit in the boat; how to paddle; what to do if you fall in, etc. We then got split into two groups - it was the bachelor party in one boat with Todd, and the couple (Darrell and Amanda) and me in the other with Drew. Once in the river we did a bit of practicing paddling forward, paddling backwards, and turning, and then got going - the couple had both rafted the river before, so I was the only beginner in the boat. As we had fewer people in our boat we were a bit more nimble and manoeuvrable than the other guys. The top half of the river was a succession of class III rapids and we survived them all and I got the hang a paddling on a raft (which is unsurprisingly quite different that being in a kayak, it being a big open rubbery-ring thing rather than a plastic thing that you're enclosed in). About halfway down we reached a bit where there was a class V fall, which we walked around. After the fall there was the opportunity to rejoin the rafts either by jumping of a ~20 ft drop into the very cold (it being glacial melt water filtered through basalt) water, or walking down. Me and four others choose the jumping option.

After that there were a few more nice rapids, but the main event of the trip was the final Husum falls - about a 10 ft drop that's apparently one of the larger commercially rafted falls in the US. Before reaching it we practiced what to do when we went over the fall - drop onto the floor of the raft and grab onto the available lines. We ran the fall quite easily, but got quite a soaking at the bottom.

Rafting the White Salmon river

It was a fun trip. The guides were really good guys and the other rafters were very nice. But, I have to say, I'd have far preferred to kayak the river. In the raft you actually don't get to do much - you hardly need to paddle - and as it's so big you don't get the proper feeling going through waves and off drops (it kind of smoothes everything out). I do think it would be fantastic to run in a kayak though. I would recommend rafting, but probably you'll enjoy it more if you've not kayaked any class III or higher stuff before. I would also highly recommend doing a trip with Wet Planet Whitewater too.

My drive back was quite tiring and I actually now ache far more from sitting in a car for nearly six hours than from the paddling.

SciMon Diary: Day 7

2009-10-17T03:44:00.004Z

So I've reached the halfway point in my scheduled shifts - 7 down and 7 more to go. Today was generally seismically quieter than previous days (maybe the workmen just don't work as hard on a Friday!) and there were no major earthquakes, so we were able to maintain lock for longer and get a better range. We managed to keep in science mode for about half of the shift.

At the start of each shift I have to talk to the outgoing SciMon, look at the electronic logbook (elog) that's kept, and then write an entry detailing the detectors' performance during the shift. We have a variety of figures of merit (FOMs) that are displayed in the control room, examples of which include: a running plot of the range; the detectors state vector (i.e. whether we're in science mode or not); the average power in various frequency bands; the time to which, at the current sensitivity, we could reach the Crab pulsar's spin-down limit; different frequency bands from seismometers located at various parts of the detector (i.e. the central station, or the ends of the two arms of the interferometer); and the glitchiness of the detector. At the end of each shift plots of these FOMs are automatically posted on the elog, and the entry we write basically describes what's shown in the plots, but giving details of things like why we lost lock (which may not be directly obvious from the FOMs), glitches that occurred, and events in the seismic channels. These notes can then either inform the people who work on the detector about potential glitches in the detector system (that they can hopefully fix), or be used if an interesting event is seen in an astrophysical analysis to check that there's no other more mundane reason for the event. Anyway that was a long winded way of me getting round to saying that the automatically generated elog FOM plots were not actually generated before my shift (the script that runs them had accidentally not been restarted following a change), so I had to try and generate my own FOMs to describe what had gone on. I didn't do quite as professional a job with my amateur effort as in the standard plots, but I at least displayed the science segments and range for the previous eight hours.

We again had a school group in the control room today, and again their first questions seemed to be about the two clocks - what is it with school kids and clocks? Have they never seen them before?

My shift ended with us increasing the laser power from the 8W of normal weekday running to the 14W normally used at night and weekends. More power means more sensitivity (see this nice tutorial on laser shot noise for why), but it can also make the detector harder to control and easier to knock out of lock, so that's why the higher power is generally only used when it's seismically quieter. With this higher power we were managing ranges of over 16Mpc. Hopefully that'll continue over the weekend and when I go back in on Sunday we'll have lots of nice data.

Now I just have to prepare myself for tomorrow's rafting trip. Here's a preview of what I'll be doing:

SciMon Diary: Day 6

2009-10-16T04:17:00.000Z

There was a pleasant surprise this morning when I arrived at the detector. We were in lock, and the nasty noise I mentioned yesterday had gone (although there was still quite a lot of noise making the data below ~100Hz rather jumpy). This noise source caused there to be huge wings/sidebands on the 120Hz and 180Hz lines in the data (these lines are harmonics of the 60Hz line, which comes from the AC frequency of the US mains electricity). The noise seemed to have started when one of the optical benches (on which sits a variety of optics, like mirrors, beam splitters and such) was "landed" - it had previously been floated on a very thin layer of air. So, one of the things that was done yesterday was to re-float the bench. It looks like it was this that improved things, but it's not entirely conclusive (other things like slight realignments were performed). None of that happened during my shift, but it was nice to see the work payoff.

During the shift we were still troubled by the low frequency anthropogenic noise and we only stayed in lock for about half the shift, but that's better than yesterday (when there had been issues other than seismic noise keeping us from reacquiring lock).

We had some excitement in the control room when we were invaded by a large party of local school kids, but the seemed reasonably restrained and asked some questions about the various monitors in the control room (the group was split into two to visit the control room and both groups asked about the two big clocks we have, one of which shows the local time [PDT at the moment] and the other that shows UTC). While they were there I had some pieces of paper, with complicated looking maths on it, so hopefully I looked like a proper scientist to the students.

SciMon Diary: Day 5

2009-10-15T02:42:00.002Z

Another poor day for the detector. We weren't having maintenance day today, but we were out of lock for the whole of my shift. It's those pesky workmen again making a lot of noise in the 1-3Hz seismic band. This is the frequency range that relatively local anthropogenic activity generally manifests itself in, so we have a monitor which shows this to check how it correlates with our being in lock, or our inspiral range. Earthquakes generally show up in the 0.03-0.1Hz band and can also knock us out of lock, so we also monitor this (there was a magnitude 6 earthquake today off Samoa, which showed up as a large spike in this band, but as we were out of lock anyway it didn't hurt us).

Seeing as it wasn't looking like we'd get any science data it was decided that we'd let people go and play with the detector in the afternoon. One of the hopes was that we'd be able to track down a source of noise that kept our range down for the last couple of weeks (we should be able to regularly see out to over 16-17 Mpc at night, but we've been maxing out at around 14 Mpc). Hopefully when I go in tomorrow I'll be pleasantly surprised to see that we had an increased range overnight, but it may well be a complicated problem without a quick fix.

Today I also sorted out what I'm going to do on my day off this Saturday - I'll be going white water rafting on the White Salmon river with Wet Planet Whitewater. This should give me my paddling fix and also give me something more exciting to write about on Sunday.

SciMon Diary: Day 4

2009-10-14T01:50:00.003Z

Here's my next eagerly anticipated instalment of exciting tales from the LIGO Hanford Observatory. So what fascinating antics did the detector get up to during my shift today? Well... nothing actually. For all my shift we stayed out of science mode and out of lock due to today being a scheduled maintenance day. During this time there was a big magnitude 6.3 earthquake off Alaska, which most likely would have knocked us out of lock had we been up. Many important things were done to the detector, but it did mean that I wasn't required for much.

One strange thing did happen during the shift though - it rained, and has continued raining for most of the day. It's been completely dry for the previous week, and generally this is a dry place (it is the high desert after all), so it was a nice change to see the familiar weather of back home.

In lunch news it seems that my Philadelphia was as I left it yesterday, and I also discovered a sandwich toaster (which I'd previously though was a George Forman grill), so I was able to have nice toasted bagels.

SciMon Diary: Day 3

2009-10-13T04:11:00.000Z

Today was a rather poor day for the detector. It wasn't behaving very well and refused to stay in lock. To be fair to it it wasn't entirely it's fault - there were some noisy workmen playing nearby (doing something to an irrigation canal apparently) and they kept disturbing it (we think). We only had short segments of good science data and even during those our range was quite low at about 12 Mpc.

A more disturbing occurrence was that I found that some of my Philadelphia, which I have placed in the fridge at the detector, was stolen! I'll see if this flagrant theft continues tomorrow.

SciMon Diary: Day 2

2009-10-11T16:20:00.006Z

For my shifts I have to get up at the previously unknown time of 6:40am - it's quite a hardship I can tell you. I bet no-one else has ever had to get out of bed so early to start a job! I then have a 20 min drive along some of the most boringly straight roads you have ever seen (luckily my car has cruise control otherwise I think my legs would just cramp up from the monotony).

At the start of today's shift I was given the folder containing the visitor rules and regulations, which I've had to read. There's a computer use policy in there and I'm not sure if writing this blog constitutes allowed use of the computing infrastructure - it's probably fine.

I learned a bit about how LIGO compensates for the fact that tidal forces stretch the detector arms. We pre-calculate the expected change and perform some thermal adjustments to compensate. However in reality this only corrects for about half the total effect, so we also have to apply some actuation to the end test masses. Our first loss of lock today was caused by one of the controls for these actuators reaching the end of it's allowed range and getting stuck.

I've been trying to teach myself how to use the LIGO DataViewer, which is one of the software tools that allows us to quickly look at the data from all the different channels that the detector produces (it outputs data channels that contain any gravitational wave signal, but it also has hundreds of auxiliary channel monitoring various states of the detector systems). With this I can look at a snapshot of data, have a real time feed, or trend past data, from all the channels available.

I also submitted this paper to The Astrophysical Journal.

In other exciting news today I decided to make my own lunch rather than buy one of the very poor quality sandwiches from the 7-eleven on the way in. I have some bagels and a large tub of Philadelphia, and muffins.

Come back tomorrow to see I can keep up this scintillating, and enthralling, diary.

SciMon Diary: Day 1

2009-10-11T02:16:00.005Z

Today saw my first day as an expert SciMon - the first of thirteen more days. It being the weekend there weren't really many people at the site, in fact for the most part it was just me and the detector operator (someone who actually knows how to run the detector!). During the shift was based in the control room at the observatory, which looks like this, and has a variety of monitors projected onto the walls - some of the most useful monitors show the current estimated range (the distance, in Megaparsecs, out to which we could observe a binary neutron star coalescence), the sensitivity curve, and a variety of seismometer channels (useful for seeing if there's been an earthquake).

The main (but not only) duty of a SciMon is to document when and why the detector falls out of lock - being in lock means that the interference pattern that the detector uses to sense length changes is ~~held on~~ held just off a dark fringe [I've updated this as I just got reminded that we no longer lock on the dark fringe, but instead use a system where we lock just off the dark fringe (a so-called DC readout) - this is to help us better control the detector] i.e. where the light from the two arms of the interferometer are almost completely cancelling each other out - during this state, and if the detector's behaving itself, it can be said to be in science mode and we can use that data for astrophysical analyses.

For the first half of my shift the detector was behaving itself nicely, and I thought we might make it through the whole 8 hours staying in science mode. But this hope was dashed when a reasonably local earthquake in Nevada knocked us out of lock. The disturbance from this lasted a while, but we got back into science mode and the end of my shift saw us back behaving well. There was also an unexpected interruption in the control room near the end of the run when a tour group came through to observe the detector in operation.

At the end of the shift I handed over to the next SciMon on the 4pm-12am shift, but I'll be back tomorrow. (Posts probably won't get much more exciting than this)

Trainee

2009-10-10T01:26:00.005Z

On Monday I flew out to the US to start my time doing SciMon shifts (as I talked about here) at the LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO). My first full day here (Tuesday) was not spent at the detector, but was mainly spent in bed overcoming jetlag (and also an illness I seemed to come down with during my flight - not pleasant). But for the last three days I have been out at the detector learning the trade of the SciMon as a trainee. There's been little for me to actually do, but having a computer has meant that I could just get on with my regular work. I have learned what a variety of the monitors that we have in our control room mean (it's a bit like a space mission control room, with banks of screens and computers), and I've seen the effect of the last weeks multiple strong earthquakes on the detector.

Tomorrow I start my first seven days in duty as the "expert" SciMon. After that I then have a day off followed by another seven days of shifts. I'm going to try and write something every day about my experience, so be prepared for 14, probably, fairly dull posts about my experience. I may be going slightly mad towards the end!

Back to the Clyde

2009-10-09T21:59:00.000Z

In a late post that's just for the record (so I can keep track of what kayaking trips I've been on) I will briefly comment on the bit of paddling I did last Sunday. We had a beginners trip to the Clyde, where, according to this post, I apparently swam last time I did it. I not quite sure how, or where, I swam, because at the section we did it's a very tame river - useful for beginners trips to ease them in to things, but not too exciting for anyone else. I was still grateful to get on the trip as my last river paddling was a while ago and it's all good experience. In fact my general river skills, such as paddling out of eddys properly (eddying out) and paddling across a river (ferrying), aren't too good, so it was nice to practice these - even though I think some of the beginners showed me up a bit on both. The paddle was reasonably uneventful, although there were three swims from two of the new folk (but not me this time!). The beginners seemed to enjoy it and no-one got put off, so hopefully they'll all be back for more. I think I want to get back to rivers with bigger waves and more rapids, just because I don't look as stupid when trying to do simple river manoeuvres - going off weirs and waterfalls I can do!

Interrail

2009-09-24T09:32:00.003Z

In about two hours I board a train to take me from Budapest, where I've been attending our collaboration meeting, to Munich, where I'll be partaking in beer and sausage at Oktoberfest. Hopefully it'll be a nice journey with lots of pleasant scenery, but it does involve a 7 and a half hours on a train. If there's free wifi on the train (I have no idea whether this will be the case or not) I might give you a running commentary of the journey - or I might just catch up on sleep.

Limiting factors

2009-09-23T12:11:00.000Z

Yesterday the search that I've spent most of the last two years performing went on arXiv (following on from the search described in this post). I'll reproduce the abstract here and then try and explain a bit more about it:

Searches for gravitational waves from known pulsars with S5 LIGO data

We present a search for gravitational waves from 116 known millisecond and young pulsars using data from the fifth science run of the LIGO detectors. For this search ephemerides overlapping the run period were obtained for all pulsars using radio and X-ray observations. We demonstrate an updated search method that allows for small uncertainties in the pulsar phase parameters to be included in the search. We report no signal detection from any of the targets and therefore interpret our results as upper limits on the gravitational wave signal strength. Our best (lowest) upper limit on gravitational wave amplitude is 2.3x10^-26 for J1603-7202 and our best (lowest) limit on the inferred pulsar ellipticity is 7.0x10^-8 for J2124-3358. Of the recycled millisecond pulsars several of the measured upper limits are only about an order of magnitude above their spin-down limits. For the young pulsars J1913+1011 and J1952+3252 we are only a factor of a few above the spin-down limit, and for the X-ray pulsar J0537-6910 we reach the spin-down limit under the assumption that any gravitational wave signal from it stays phase locked to the X-ray pulses over timing glitches. We also present updated limits on gravitational radiation from the Crab pulsar, where the measured limit is now a factor of seven below the spin-down limit. This limits the power radiated via gravitational waves to be less than ~2% of the available spin-down power.

Firstly, if you follow the link to the paper, you might notice that there are actually 679 authors on this paper! That's quite a few more than you'll see on most astrophysics papers (by a couple of orders of magnitude!) and I'm somewhere in the middle of it. The reason for this is that the work has been done as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration, and everyone who has put work into designing, building, commissioning and running the detectors and analysis infrastructure (like code libraries, computing resources, theoretical understanding) that we use is included. We also have a few extra authors from outside these two collaborations. These are a selection of electromagnetic pulsar astronomers who have provided vital information about the sources we're looking for in gravitational waves. Here we've used data from the fifth science run (S5) of the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which took place from Novmeber 2005 to October 2007, and during which the detectors were at their design sensitivity.

The aim of this search is to use already known astronomical objects - pulsars (neutron stars) - as targets from which to look for gravitational wave emission - these are probably the most promising targets within our own galaxy, although there are many exciting extra-galatic sources. These objects are very dense (about the mass of the sun compressed into a sphere about 20km across) and rapidly rotating (they spin round 100 times or more every second - i.e. the surface of the star is rotating at about 20 million km/hr, or 2% of the speed of light) - both of which make these potentially good sources of gravitational waves. It requires a bit more than just being massive and fast for these objects to emit gravitational waves - they have to have some sort of deformation making them triaxial (like a rubgy ball, but with the difference between the axes being far smaller at less than around a millimetre). Are they actually deformed at this level (or a larger or smaller amount)? Well that's something we want to find out by looking for gravitational waves from them. And if we do see something we can make constraints on the exact make-up of the material in the pulsars.

The reason to go after known pulsars (rather than neutron stars that aren't currently observed [which we are also doing, and you can help with]) is that it's relatively computationally easy. If you don't know where to look to find a source (in, say, sky position and frequency) then you literally have to look everywhere, which requires huge computational resources. Whereas, if you have a known object you know precisely where to look. So that's what we do. We take our gravitational wave detector data and look at the frequency of a particular pulsar and see if there's a signal sticking up above the noise floor at that spot (it's not quite as simple as that because our data is produced by a detector sitting on the Earth, which is a moving platform, so any signal hitting the detector will be Doppler shifted [i.e. the frequency will change slightly as we're travelling towards and away from the source] and we have to take this into account - luckily we know the position of the source and the speed and position of the Earth and can calculate this shift - and also the pulsar spins-down, so it's frequency changes as it loses energy [and some young pulsars have messy frequency evolutions due to still unknown effects]). This signal is parameterised by four physical quantities of the source - the gravitational wave amplitude (directly related to the size of deformity on the star), the initial phase of the signal, the inclination of the pulsar, and the polarisation angle - so we try and estimate these parameters from our data. Unfortunately in this search we saw no signals from any of the pulsars we looked at, so rather than being able to estimate these parameters we instead set an upper limit for each - a limit at which we say that, at a 95% degree-of-belief, the gravitational wave amplitude from the pulsar must be less than.

For this search our best upper limit on amplitude (i.e. the smallest value) is 2.3x10^-26 (or 0.000000000000000000000000023) for a pulsar called J1603-7202 (the name gives the sky position of the pulsar in right ascension α, and declination δ, so this pulsar is at α = 16^h03^m and δ = -72^o02'). This value is obviously small, but it's a dimensionless quantity called strain, so what does it actually mean physically. Well given our detectors are 4km long (well two of them were 4km and one was 2km) it means that the signal from this pulsar cannot be changing the length of the detector by more that 2.3x10^-26 x 4000m = 9.2x10^-23 metres (or 0.000000000000000000000092 metres, or, in the favourite units of human hair widths, its about 1 billion billion^th of a hhw). If you look at the displacement sensitivity of the detectors then, at their best, between about 100-200 Hz, they would seem to show that they can reach 1x10^-19 m Hz^-1/2 - which is four orders of magnitude worse than our result! However, that value has the funny units of m Hz^-1/2, which is displacement spectral density - if we have a continuous signal that we can track over long time periods (like a known pulsars) we can get better sensitivity than this by integrating over time (basically just using long observations), which allows us to dig into the amplitude spectral density noise floor by the square root of the observation time (is seconds) - hence our better limits.

We can use our amplitude upper limit to set a limit on the ellipticity of the pulsar (basically the size of the deformation) - this requires us to assume that we know the star's moment of inertia (which in fact could be uncertain by up to a factor of three depending on the mass and make-up of the star i.e. it's equation of state), and that we accurately know the star's distance (which are generally uncertain by 10-20%, but could be uncertain by a factor of 2-3!). However, plugging in standard numbers for these values, our best upper limit on the ellipticity for any of the pulsars in our search was 7.0x10^-8 for J2124-3358. Given that the star has a diameter of about 20km this would mean that any deformations on it are less that about 1.5mm i.e. our direct observations rule out hills on this star, which is hundreds of light years away, being larger than 1.5mm!

Is an upper limit by itself interesting? Well that depends on your previous ideas about the source. If you think that the source could, or should, be emitting gravitational waves at a level above your upper limit then you can infer new information. In our case, for each pulsar, we have something called the "spin-down upper limit", which says that if we assume that all the kinetic energy that the pulsar loses as it spins-down is being radiated as gravitational waves then we can calculate a limit on the amplitude of those waves. We can compare our direct observational upper limits with these spin-down limits, and if we beat them we're entering a new regime of knowledge about the pulsar. The majority of our pulsars are actually spinning down rather slowly (the fast, millisecond, pulsars are generally slowly spinning down, thought to be due to them having weak magnetic fields) so their spin-down limits are small and therefore our results are still well above them (by about 10-100 times). But for a few pulsars (generally younger pulsars) we approach, and in the case of the Crab pulsar (and if you assume larger moments of inertia also for J0537-6910) beat, this spin-down limit. So, we're in a regime where we potentially could see gravitational waves from the Crab pulsar. However if we look at the ellipticity we can estimate for it, given our measured upper limit, we get a value of around 1x10^-4. Normal neutron star equations of state would suggest that the largest possible ellipticities that could be sustained by the star would likely be at least an order of magnitude (probably more) less than this, so you have to go to more exotic, and probably less likely, equations of state (things like quark stars) to get potential ellipticities at this level. Unfortunately these values are maximum possible deformations that the star might have, they could just be far smoother. For the Crab pulsar even though we've not seen a gravitational wave signal it's still nice to think about what this results means - in terms of the fraction of the star's energy it is losing when it spins-down, we can now say that less than 2% of it is being emitted via gravitational waves (magnetic dipole radiation and powering the accelerating expansion of the Crab nebula seem to dominate the energy loss).

These searches are not stopping because we've not seen anything yet. New data is currently being taken, which will soon hopefully surpass the S5 run in its sensitivity. We also have data from the Virgo detector, which will allow us to look for pulsars at lower frequencies than are accessible than LIGO - this is a frequency range where there are quite a few young rapidly spinning-down pulsars, which we hope to be able to surpass the spin-down limit for. New pulsars are also being discovered all the time (Fermi is has observed several new pulsars in γ-rays) and hopefully one of these could be a large gravitational wave emitter. We've only really just started these searches, so there's still a lot more to do and a detection could be just around the corner.

Jury duty

2009-09-07T21:45:00.000Z

Last week I was called upon to do my civic duty and go on jury service. I was in the Sheriff Court for the Sheriffdom of Glasgow and Strathkelvin, which deals with intermediate offences (and also some civil cases) - in fact prior to going into court (and in fact reading the wikipedia article I just linked to) I had no real idea of how the Scottish court system worked. One thing that the Sheriff court didn't have was a man with a star-shaped badge, a cowboy hat and leather chaps.

Having been cited to jury duty for Monday I didn't actually have to go into court until the Wednesday (I just had a number to call every evening to see if I was needed the next day). Glasgow Sheriff Court building was a big Orwellian block - quite cool architecturally, but very much like some kind of Ministry of Truth. On getting in there and going through security I discovered a quite ominous sign in the toilets stating that you needed to be careful when taking a paper towel as syringes have been found next to them before. After that I went up to my assigned courtroom where I discovered loads of people milling about - these turned out to all be jurors. There were some delays, so we all waited around outside the until we were lead into the courtroom, which was one of the smaller ones in the court. There were around sixty of us (which surprised me as I didn't expect anywhere near that number) and to fit into the courtroom some of the jurors had to sit in the dock and in the jury box (I got to sit in the jury box). We were then given a talk from the Clerk of Court about the court (apparently the largest and busiest court in Europe - not necessarily a claim to be proud of!), the role of the jury, and what would happen. Essentially what happens is the Sheriff, Prosecutor and Defence come in, followed by the defendant, the defendant give his plea (generally not guilty) and then the jury gets balloted from the group of people there. The balloting is very low-tech consisting of everyone's names getting put into a bowl, then 15 being picked out by the clerk and the jurors walking into the jury box. There was a case straight away once we'd been processed, so we got to see this in action. There was frisson of excitement as the names got read out - kind of like a weird bingo - but my number and name didn't appear (although the number before mine did).

After the jury was picked they had to be sworn in. When we'd been talked to by the clerk earlier he'd asked if we were picked whether we'd want to affirm rather than take the regular oath. Basically the standard thing is to take an oath swearing to God (I assume a Christian God, but maybe they're open to your own choice of divine being!) that you'll tell the truth, whereas the affirmation is a non-religious version. From those chosen jurors only two out of the fifteen chose to affirm. The oathers got to all take the oath together which required them standing, raising their right hands, and then saying "I do" after the oath had been read out by the clerk. The juror's affirming had to both do so individually and had to recite the whole thing, which was something of a tongue twister. I think it's about time that the oath is non-religious, i.e. doesn't require you to swear on any particular deity, by default.

After this all of us un-used jurors were asked to leave (although we could have stayed, as all the courts are open to the public [for nosey people I expect]), but return to another court after lunch in case we were needed as spares. Turning up at the court later on there were already about another sixty potential jurors waiting outside, so us extras were asked to leave and call back later. That was actually it for my time on jury duty as I never got called back again. I did get to sit in the jury box briefly, but never got to dole out justice to the criminal classes of Glasgow. At least this didn't happen.

Wallabies and wake

2009-08-31T17:20:00.004Z

Yesterday saw my first kayaking trip since the Etive weekend in May. We only had a few people out and had to make do with a flat water paddle on Loch Lomond. This was my second time out on the loch, although this time starting out from Luss on the west side, rather than near Balmaha on the east side. It was a fairly sedate paddle as the loch was calm and the only thing really disturbing it was the wake from the many boats and jet skis that were out there as well. Our main destination that we paddled out to was Wallaby Island where we went exploring to see the soon-to-be-culled Wallabies - we managed to see at least 3 individuals. It should be noted (unsurprisingly) that kayaking gear is not the best clothing to go scrambling round an island in - you get a bit too hot. On returning to our get in point we played around a bit practicing deep water rescues and rolling - being able to roll in a river boat (rather than the polo boats we use in the pool), with a buoyancy aid and helmet on, and in cold water is something that's useful when it comes to going down a river. It wasn't the most exciting of paddles, but it was good to get a bit of practice in again before things kick off properly with the new university term starting in two weeks.

Youtube sensation

2009-08-31T10:21:00.000Z

Every summer the LIGO Lab at Caltech takes on a load of undergraduate SURF students to do research. This year some of those students have put together (for outreach purposes I think) a medley of various California-based songs with a re-worked gravitational wave/LIGO theme.
.
It's a fun video, but also quite excruciatingly embarrassing to watch.

We urned it!

2009-08-23T22:25:00.002Z

I'm mainly writing this post so I could use that lovely pun as a title, but well done to the England Cricket team for taking back the Ashes. We just have to try and go over there and win it some time! As ever there ends my expert cricket analysis.

Edinburgh festival highlights

2009-08-23T22:23:00.002Z

Last Sunday (my birthday!) and Wednesday I had trips through to Edinburgh to take in some comedy. Last year I didn't get to see anything in Edinburgh as I was in Germany (my trip through two years ago is detailed here), and March's Glasgow Comedy Festival didn't have much that appealed (I think the only thing saw was Richard Herring's Headmasters Son), so it had been a while since I'd seen any stand-up.

On the Sunday we had one show booked, which was Stewart Lee's If you prefer a milder comedian, please ask for one playing at the Stand. But, we'd gone through earlier in the day to try and find something else to see. After a while of sitting around by the Udderbelly (in Bristo Square) and managing to come to no decision as to what to see, we decided we might have better luck at the Pleasance. As at every venue we were approached by many enthusiastic flierers, but nothing particularly tempted us until a very polite young English man (probably fresh from completing his A-levels) convinced us to go and see Two episodes of Mash (by this point we really just wanted to see anything). It was a decent sketch-based set that has some very funny moments, and in general kept up a good pace - the show, at just under an hour, went by pretty quickly and there weren't any times when it seemed to lag (I'd say the two stars that Chortle gave it in the last link was a tad unfair). After that it was pretty much time to get up to the Stand. The Stand in Edinburgh is a cosy venue (slightly smaller and a quite different layout to the one in Glasgow) a we were sat right up front - pretty much on Stewart Lee's lap. It was a very good show (I'm sure Stewart Lee would rate my ability to craft a review up there with the works of Dan Brown). I was actually a bit surprised at the pace of the jokes - Lee can often spend ages on a sentence or two, but it was a lot faster than I expected (there was still his standard repetition of key themes, but not so long seemed to be taken over them) - this was probably due to the fact that he had a lot to cram in in the one hour set. His stuff about a certain pear cider advert is particularly good, as is his surprising song at the end (the guitar on stage for the whole set was reasonably confusing up until the very end).

On Wednesday we decided to take a day off work and again head over to Edinburgh. We mainly, somewhat unintentionally, were stalking Richard Herring for the day. First off was a trip to the Underbelly (in an extremely hot cave-like venue) to see a live recording of the Collings and Herrin Podcast - they were doing five consecutive days of live podcasts and we went to the first day. They've done three live podcasts previously and I've generally not found them to be as good as the regular podcast, but I really enjoyed this one - maybe being in the audience helped! After that, at the behest of Herring, there was a lunch outing to the Tempting Tattie for one of their tasty, and good value, baked potatoes (there weren't as many of us as at yesterdays gathering).

After that we went down to the half price ticket hut to try and look for a random show before the two pre-booked shows we were seeing in the evening. We settled on going to see Jason Cook with his show Fear. For a mid-afternoon show on a Wednesday it was rather surprisingly sold out, but this could maybe be explained by the good reviews the show has been getting. And it was a nice show by a very likeable comedian. The premise of the show - peoples fears - kind of disappeared about halfway through, but that wasn't really to the detriment of the performance. Cook did leave the audience very intrigued though, by mentioning the three months he spent in a maximum security prison in Libya on charges of piracy (it would have been interesting to hear more, but apparently it would induce a panic attack in Cook if he thought about it too much).

The next show was back seeing Herring again for his show Hitler Moustache. This was again in another roasting venue in the Underbelly. As someone who follows Herring's work via his blog and the podcasts I'd read/heard the inception and growth of the vast majority of the stuff in the show, so there wasn't really anything that came as a surprise. It was still a good show, and well polished, but I think I'd slightly self-spoilered it (I did have the thrill of seeing my name in the program though).

The final show of the night was a midnight performance by Daniel Kitson (who I've seen several times before) at the Stand (which as it happened Andrew Collins and Richard Herring were also at). We were again down the front right by the stage. Kitson has been the comedian against who I gauge all others as he's been unswervingly excellent whenever I've seen him. He was again very good, but my enjoyment was slightly dampened by a couple of things. The heat of the venue (a recurring theme it seems) and the time and length of the gig meant I was rather too tired, and flagged a lot for the last half hour or so of the our hour forty minute performance. I think the show could do with cutting down a bit (that said I've seen Kitson do a three hours set that was really good for the whole thing!), but I may have found it better if it had been at an earlier time, or I'd not had such a long day.

That's probably my fill of stand-up for a bit, but expect I'll see some more come next March's Glasgow Comedy Festival.

Installing chrome

2009-08-10T17:22:00.005Z

[Update: there is now an easier, more hassle free, way to install Chrome, which can be found here.]

This post comes to you courtesy of the web browser Google Chrome. In fact so did the last post, but that was from my Mac laptop, whereas this is from my office desktop which runs Ubuntu. Installing this development version of Chrome has been a bit more trouble on my office machine than on my Mac, so I thought I'd document how I did it. The first thing to do is to download the .deb package from here (I've got the version for 32-bit systems) - this is a development version, so be warned that it could be buggy. This should then be relatively easy to install, i.e. I should just be able to type: dpkg -i google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb and away it goes, but unfortunately it defaults to trying to create, and then install stuff into, the /opt/google directory and for me, even with sudo, I can't write to that directory as it's not local to my machine - I get an error stating:

dpkg: error processing google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb (--install):
error creating directory `./opt/google': No such file or directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb

However, much searching has led me to find a solution to this (mainly from this page) that enabled me to install chrome in the directory of my choosing. Here's how it goes:-
Say you've downloaded the above .deb file to ~/Desktop, then create a directory to unpack it into:

mkdir ~/Desktop/chrome; cd ~/Desktop/chrome

then unpack the .deb file

ar -x ~/Desktop/google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb

Now uncompress the lzma file

lzma -d data.tar.lzma

Next you want to figure out where to install Chrome (i.e. somewhere that your permissions allow you to write to). I, for example, created a directory called /data/matthew/chrome. cd into that directory and then run

sudo tar xf ~/Desktop/chrome/data.tar

(If you're just writing to somewhere that your normal permissions allow you to write to then you don't even have to run sudo.) This will add opt, etc and usr directories to the directory you are in, with the main stuff for Chrome being in opt/google/chrome. I can therefore run Chrome with the command

/data/matthew/chrome/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.

You can then just remove all the files you downloaded in ~/Desktop.

You can now also use flash with the development version of Chrome (as shown here), so it's all working pretty nicely now! [But, hey, Flash "...who uses that"!]

Highlands and Islands

2009-08-09T22:36:00.000Z

Yesterday saw only my second trip to a Scottish island (the other being the now legendary trip to Gigha) - this is a rather paltry number of islands for having lived in Scotland for seven years. The new island I went to was Arran, which is one of the closest and most accesible from Glasgow.

To get there you can take the CalMac ferry from Ardrossan. We got the first train from Glasgow to Ardrossan that supposedly connected up with the 9.45am ferry. However, on arrival we found a massive queue that meant there was no chance of getting on the ferry we'd planned. There were at least 300 slightly annoyed people left with us at the ferry terminal, at which we weren't allowed to use the waiting room, and so had to brave the elements outside. Because there was a Highland Games in Brodick (one of the main villages on Arran) there were a few extra ferries on, so we waited for the 11.30am crossing. Again this was filled before we made it on (in fact it was mainly filled with pre-booked car passengers, so hardly anyone from the queue got on). After this we had to make the decision as to whether to bother waiting for the 12.30 crossing (it was to be the big 600 seater ferry) and thought that given we'd already waited 2 hours we may as well sit it out for another hour. We did however get given a boarding card for the ferry that we were told would guarantee us a place on it, and were allowed to actually wait inside in the waiting room (in which, for some reason, they'd decided to not open their cafe despite apparently being their busiest day of the year). When the ferry arrived everyone rushed to get on, but we thought we'd let the queue diminish a bit before we attempted boarding, safe in the knowledge that we had our "guaranteed" boarding card. However, on getting to the gang plank the CalMac employee who had guaranteed our place on the ship and told us we could go off and wait inside decided he'd refuse us boarding and told us we should have been there earlier (we'd been waiting for 3 hours by then, so I don't think we could really have been any earlier!). We started arguing our case and fortunately the guy from on the boat decided to let us on. Needless to say the first few hours of our trip did not give me a good impression of CalMac, especially as while we were queueing we were given no information about what was going on and just had to rely on hearsay and chinese whispers from other, equally irate, people in the queue.

Anyway, we did eventually make it out to Brodick by about 1.30pm. Our main plan was to climb Goat Fell and this is exactly what we did. We walked passed the Highland Games site, most of which had taken part in the morning and we'd therefore missed. The base of Goat Fell (and Brodick) was alternatively sunny and overcast, but the summit was completely hidden in a cloud, which we hoped would clear by the time we reached it. It didn't clear. Due to the cloud we had no idea of how far it would be to the top (our visibility was about 20-30m, which enabled us to see the path, but not much else), but had many false dawns when we thought we spotted the peak only to find it to be nothing of the sort. We passed one group who were on the way down and asked them how much further it would be and they looked quite dejected and said it just kept going on and on - I didn't believe them, but they proved to be right. Despite this it was still a fun climb though and we made the top in just over two hours - there was obviously no view! They way down was a less dispiriting experience, but was quite harsh on the legs and knees. It only took about an hour and a half to get down and it was glorious to get out of the cloud and see Brodick harbour again.

The other plan we had, being on Arran, was to have some Arran Blonde beer. We didn't want to miss our only chance of a ferry home (the last one being at 7.15pm), so instead of heading straight to the pub we dragged ourselves, on tired legs, to the ferry terminal to check on the length of the queue. It wasn't too large, so we risked a brief trip to the pub. Around this time there were a few pipe bands marching down the main street who'd been there for the games. After our pint we went back to the ferry terminal where all the pipe bands had gathered and were playing for the queueing crowds. Now I don't mind the odd lone piper, but I didn't find that the pipe bands sounded very pleasant. That's maybe just because I'm English, or it could be just that the pipe bands I heard weren't very good, or were drunk (I think a lot of the pipers had been drinking most of the day), but really it wasn't something that could be listened to for any great length of time - unfortunately we did have to listen to it for a considerable length of time as they all boarded the ferry and continued playing (there are also only so many times you can hear Scotland the Brave and Flower of Scotland!)

As we crossed the sea and made it back to Ardrossan the sun came out and everything looked lovely. It was good to get out for the day and was a fun walk, but I hope my next trip to an island goes slightly more smoothly.

Science monitor

2009-07-26T11:15:00.005Z

A few days ago (despite being on holiday) I had to join a three hour conference call. The reason for this was to train me up to be a SciMon (I think it stands for Science Monitor). Very soon the LIGO detectors will be starting their sixth science run (a period when we stop, to an extent, fiddling with the detectors to improve them, and take data for astrophysical analysis) and during these periods we need people to be monitoring them. The detectors have full time staff who are trained to operate them, but during science runs we also have a scientist there to monitor, and comment on, the state of the data that's coming out i.e. if the data gets noisier, or glitchy, can you see a reason for it (an earthquake for example). These things can be fed back to the operators to see if they can improve things in the detector, and they are also very useful when analysing the data to know the time of good, or bad, data quality.

In previous runs I've haven't taken the SciMon role, but this time I volunteered to go out for a couple of weeks. So in October I'm going to be spending time at the LIGO Hanford Observatory. During the conference call I actually learnt quite a lot about the detectors that I only vaguely knew before, so I think being at the detector will be a valuable learning experience. I also found out that SciMons have a lot to do during the 8 hours shifts that you take (the detectors require 24 hour monitoring, so there's a midnight-8am, 8am-4pm and 4pm-midnight set of shifts - I managed to get the most reasonable middle time slot). It should be interesting being out there and I expect I'll write a few posts about the experience (there's a few months to go yet though).

Small world

2009-07-26T10:45:00.000Z

For the last week I've been down south visiting friends and family. As is normal I've been into London a few times to meet up with various friends. In the past when wandering round London I've spotted the occasional celebrity, but this time has been a bit weirder. On walking through Trafalgar Square (to see the plinth-based art installation One and Other) I passed one of my neighbours from Glasgow! She didn't seem to notice me, but it was definitely her. Strangely this isn't actually the first time I've bumped into someone I know from Glasgow randomly in London, but the last time it happened was with someone who was originally from London anyway and it was around Christmas (so wasn't quite as odd for him to be there).

It's not just folks from Glasgow that I've been randomly bumping into though. Just heading down the Strand yesterday I noticed a couple of old university friends, so had a chat with them. Later, on the train back from London to St Albans, I got off and realised that the girl in front of me was another old university friend (she definitely wasn't from St Albans, so I'm not sure what she was doing there).

Football on Riverside

2009-06-26T09:24:00.003Z

Following an impromptu game of nighttime beach football at the GWDAW meeting earlier in the year, it was decided that there should be a more organised (and daylight) match at Amaldi. A group of 16 of us, made up from Europeans (a large chunk of whom were Italian, although unlike at GWDAW we didn't play Italians versus the Rest of the World), bar a couple of Antipodeans, went down to Riverside Park, in which we'd noted that google maps showed a football pitch-like shape. The shape we'd seen turned out to be a big astroturf pitch, which had a couple of baseball games going on in the corners and a football match in the middle. We tried squeezing in, but soon got informed by the coach (or some official-looking guy) of one the baseball games that we were supposed to have a permit to play there.

After some milling around and discussion of what to do we found a nearby patch of park ground that wasn't covered in trees (or fences designed to discourage ball games, which were quite liberally scattered around the most open of spaces) that would make a serviceable pitch. It had quite a slope on one side and was pretty uneven, but we made do. The game took a little while to get going and most people were showing signs of general lack of fitness, but towards the end (of our arbitrarily designated match time) we had a reasonable, and competitive, match going on. It was at 3-3, so we had a next goal wins situation, which through some brilliant touches of skill I scored.

I could definitely feel the effects of the match the next day as my left knee was suffering.

Intergalactic planetary

2009-06-26T08:58:00.004Z

As with all major meeting's this one had a conference dinner - it was, rather impressively, held in the American Museum of Natural History. The highlight of the night was getting to go into the planetarium there and being shown a fly through of their very nice software for visualising the universe (well, we didn't fly through their software in the sense of having code projected onto the Planetarium ceiling and scrolling through it - we saw pretty pictures). The software tries to make as much use as possible of real astronomical data sets, so it doesn't project up artists impressions, or simulations (other than it's representation of the Milky Way as observed from outside), but tries to be a close to reality as allowable from current knowledge. All the data went together pretty seamlessly (they said that there are a few bugs to iron out, but it worked surprisingly well for a beta version - we were in essence getting a sneak peak that the generally lay-public won't get to see quite yet), from the visualisation of the Earth and it's satellites (after having zoomed out from a view of Manhattan) all the way out to the 2dF and SDSS galaxy and quasar surveys. One thing we got to do in the planetarium that you don't normally get to do (in big museum-style planetariums at least), was to lie on the floor in the middle and look up - it's a cool way to view it and saves you from getting a crick in your neck. Being able to observe the 2dF and Tully (a big space cube) surveys in 3D was cool, and looking down the 2 degree field beams was a way I'd never seen it before.

Apparently all the software that they use will be freely available at some point, but I forget who's developing it and where it lives. I think it's partially based on this Digital Universe package.

Edoardo's get together

2009-06-26T08:30:00.007Z

I've just got back (well part of the way back) from a few days spent in New York for the Amaldi 8 meeting (the last one was in Sydney and I got to have a little holiday afterwards, but this time I've headed straight back). This meeting is entirely gravitational wave-based and embraces the whole GW community - involving experimentalists, data analysts and theorists using (or studying future aspects of/designs for) interferometric, bar and pulsar timing-based detectors, and covering ground and spaced-based instruments. It was an interesting meeting and I got a lot from it in terms of talking to new people, especially people from the pulsar timing community. All the talks are online here (including mine, which was given on the back of an unintentional hangover [this is not a recommended way to give a talk, but the majority of people I know have given a talk whilst hungover at some point in their career, and in some cases still slightly drunk from the previous night's excesses]), so you can give them a browse if that sort of thing tickles your fancy.

The meeting is actually still going on today (mainly talking about third generation detector designs e.g. for the Einstein Telescope), but I had to leave early as I'm heading to a friends wedding tomorrow - there will be astrophysicists at that to though, so I could pretend it's like a meeting... of course I won't do that Kirsty ;)

6 hours in Heathrow

2009-06-26T08:24:00.000Z

I am currently sitting in Terminal 1 of Heathrow Airport waiting for my connecting flight back to Glasgow after flying in from New York. Unfortunately I have a 6ish hour wait in Heathrow. I tried getting put in an earlier flight, but apparently if you have luggage in transit they can't move you! So, to ease the boredom I have signed up to one of the wireless networks - in this case Boingo. One of my boredom relieving activities was going to be to catch up on some TV via iPlayer, but this has proved a problem. Despite being in the UK at the moment it seems that Boingo don't use a UK-based IP address, so I'm being denied iPlayer goodness. One way round this would be to use my Glasgow University VPN account, but I don't seem to be able to log in to that. I think I may just have to resort to good old fashioned torrenting, or even just satiate myself with some stuff on youtube.

I suppose I could even try doing some work instead, but I don't think my sleep deprived brain is quite up to that!

Not leaving New York

2009-06-18T01:36:00.004Z

So, my travels to the US continue to provide fun times.

Today I have been traveling out to the Probing Neutron Stars with Gravitational Waves meeting at Penn State. To get there I've been traveling through New York, and unfortunately I'm still in New York, rather than being in the air nearing State College. I'm also lacking my luggage, which I expect is sitting somewhere in Heathrow airport, but is hopefully closer to me by now.

The latter issue seems to have come about due to my luggage not making my connection from Glasgow via Heathrow - despite there being a two and a half hour layover, so it's not as if the bag had to be rushed between planes. The transatlantic leg of the flight was with Continental, and so far they've been ok for helpfullness on my lost luggage situation (although a couple of the Newark baggage ground staff weren't so useful - if I'd followed their original advice I'd have been screwed), but we'll see how things pan out over the next few days i.e. whether I get my luggage or not. Can they echo BA levels of incompetence?

For my flight to State College I've had to go through La Guardia airport (I spent a few hours in Manhattan between flight connections) and I got there with plenty of time to spare. Unfortunately my plane wasn't quite so punctual. The journey consisted of two legs: first to Philadelphia and then on to State College; but due to a delayed first leg there was going to be no way of making the connection. So, I'm now in an airport hotel near La Guardia. At least they have free wifi.

Hopefully my travel will work out better tomorrow. I'll be slightly late for the meeting, but not too late.

[Update: For the leg of my trip described above it took my bag an extra couple of days to reach me out in State College - in fact it arrived just as I was about to leave to come back to New York (I had to pick it up at the airport). On my return from New York to Glasgow, surprise, surprise, my bag also went missing! It seems it didn't leave New York when I did and spent an extra night there. I'm either jinxed or have a poor choice of bag (a big rucksack), which is disliked by the baggage staff at airports.]

Astroparticles are the best particles

2009-06-09T00:22:00.000Z

As I've been fairly lax (and in reality a bit too busy) in the past month or two about writing blog posts I've decided to take the opportunity to write something while I'm on the train back from Edinburgh to Glasgow after a day at the IoP Astroparticle Physics meeting (there's still another day of meeting, and I am talking tomorrow, but now's the best chance I've got to write anything - at least until my laptop battery runs out). We've just had the meeting dinner (at the Caves), which was designed to appeal to the non-Scots, by consisting of a (decent) starter of haggis, and finishing with some Crannachan (spelling not-withstanding) [and also some of the worst tablet I've had!] followed by a Ceilidh. I had to commentate on the meal to my fellow table-mates due to my knowledge of all things Scottish (I have been here getting on 7 years now, so can interpret the native ways [although those East coasters's could do things slightly differently!]), and during the Ceilidh I was involved in all the dances (until I had to leave to catch the last train back to Glasgow) as I had a slight advantage in knowing what was going on. It was good fun, but dances generally should involve a higher female-to-male ratio! I don't mind dancing with other guys, but I think as a first go at Ceilidhing for some it may have been too much man-on-man action!

Prior to that we had a rather good speech by Sir Tam Daylell (former Labour MP and father of the house, who was slightly embroiled in the recent expenses stuff by claiming for some expensive book shelves prior to leaving office in 2005). What I didn't know about him was that he'd been very active during his time as an MP at promoting science and scientific outreach (he'd been told to do this by C. T. R. Wilson on meeting him during electioneering in 1958, when Wilson invited him in out of the rain for a cup of tea), and has met pretty much all the major physicists of his time (often by accident) - his parents hosted Born for a while.

In general the first day of the meeting has been good. It's a smallish meeting, which actually makes it easier to listen to the talks. One of the best talks was by Malcolm Fairbairn about the velocity distribution of dark matter (he amusingly illustrated the talk with images of Gordon Brown!) - he showed some interesting statistics and gave an interpretation of the DAMA results that I'd not heard before.

Like at NAM, one of the best session was actually about outreach. Astroparticle physics is a rich seam to tap for outreach. It's quite easy to set up detectors to show cosmic rays and is a very good way to enthuse school kids about the subject. I'd not really thought much about this before, but it's definitely worth more consideration.

Right, my laptop battery is about running out, so I'll have to actually upload this when I get home. There maybe more to write about tomorrow and hopefully I'll get back to blogging more soon!

[I uploaded this when I got home after a brief snooze on the train and having to be woken up by the conductor when we reached Queen Street. I should really be asleep now as I have to be up early.]

My second Etive weekend

2009-05-31T12:44:00.000Z

Last weekend was the GUCC annual Etive weekend trip (see here for last year's post, which it also appears took me about a week to post) - this involves a weekend camping in Glencoe and kayaking down the Etive. Last year the weather was gorgeous, which made the camping pleasant, but meant the river was very low. This year the weather was pretty awful, wind rain and wind for most of the weekend, but it did mean that the river was higher. I also didn't have to drive for the whole weekend this time, which was nice.

I've seen the Etive quite high before, but never when I've gone to run it myself, so it was quite daunting looking down the first section (in the middle part of the river) at Triple Falls. [In reality the water wasn't that high as many people said it could be a lot bigger.] On the first day it took a bit of convincing myself to take the plunge and take on Triple Falls, but once in the boat things were fine. I got down the first two drops fine, but then had a really stupid swim before the final fall. Last year, due to the low water, we spent quite a while redoing Triple and then jumping from the rocks into the pools (very nice in the sunny weather), but this year we where easily able to paddle between the main rapids and drops (without having to scrape our boats over rocks), so traveled on straight away. We took on Letterbox, Ski Jump, Crack of Doom (where I swam down the waterfall and got a few bruises to boot), Crack of Dawn (well none of us ran this except for Chris on the second day, due to a new boulder being in the way), Waterslide (can't remember if those are in the right order) before reaching Right Angle. With more water Right Angle looked at bit more daunting than last year, and again it required a bit of thinking about, but most of us decided to take it on. This year I managed to make it round the dog leg at the top of the main fall without swimming, and after going off the fall I came up upright and again didn't swim. It was great to do! After Right Angle (where we had to get out last year) there was more river we could do - in that section I managed to have a couple of really poor swims (giving me a total of either 6 or 7 swims for the day). After the days paddling most of us went straight to the pub back at the Kings House to get somewhere warm and dry.

For the second day we had quite a few more people join us (I think there must have been about 20 of us in the water at once, and there were other non-GUCC paddlers out to). I think that the water was slightly higher due to the night of rain, although other people maintained that it was lower, or at least the same as the day before. This time it was the third drop of Triple that got me and I swam at the bottom, but I made it the rest of the way to Right Angle without any more swims (there was a close thing on the small drop after Letterbox, but I managed to roll by pushing off the rocks on the river bed). This time most of us decided Right Angle looked a bit too dangerous to run, but the more experienced guys made it down fine. Most of us then just got out as the coldness and general knackeredness was getting a bit too much. I was quite, quite horrible having to get the buses and load up the boat in the rain and wind, but as ever it was so nice to get back into dry clothes afterwards. Luckily I didn't have to drive back to Glasgow as I was half asleep for most of the journey. Two days of kayaking and not much sleep can take its toll.

Despite the weather it was a great weekend. Two consecutive days of kayaking (despite being knackering) is a great way to gain experience and confidence. I might try and get out boating sometime over the summer, otherwise it'll be the new academic year before I see a river again.

Mid-table glory

2009-05-04T17:47:00.000Z

Yesterday saw the final day of the Championship season (bar the play-offs). For some the main excitement was near the top and bottom of the table where promotion and relegation battles were obviously taking place, but I was still mainly keeping an eye on the mid-table where Watford had an outside chance of clinching a mighty 12^th place (i.e. the top half of the table) should they win and other results go our way. We got our win against Derby, but with Sheffield Wednesday also securing a win we have had to settle for 13^th - maybe that's better though as it means we're top of the bottom half the table, which is more impressive than being bottom of the top half isn't it!?

In other games Birmingham City managed a win to give them second place and automatic promotion to the Premier League (but will Alex McLeish still be there?), which means that they'll be two West Midlands clubs to replace West Brom when they get relegated (whcih I'd say is a certainty now). And down at the bottom Barnsley managed to secure Championship survival at the expense of Norwich City - if only they'd had some drunken shouting by Delia to get them worked up they might have been safe.

Twittering NAM

2009-04-23T20:48:00.003Z

Just as a follow on from my last post...

There was a bit of twittering going on at the meeting to (although it took a while to get going and I didn't contribute much myself), so if you want to see what went on then search for the hashtags #jenam and/or #nam2009, and carolune had extensive coverage of the RAS community discussion at the end of the meeting.

Those of us from Glasgow were taking particular note of the meeting organisation as we're hosting it next year. There's already a basic webpage, a twitter feed to follow and a flickr photostream.

Astronomers in Hatfield

2009-04-23T20:47:00.001Z

This week I've been attending the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) - this year held jointly with the European Astronomy Society European Week of Astronomy and Space Science giving the new meeting title of JENAM. Last year the meeting was held in Belfast (see here for my exceptionally meagre coverage of that meeting!), but this year was held at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield, making it a perfect opportunity for me to combine a meeting with a trip back to my home town of St. Albans (which is right next to Hatfield, although I did spend the first eighteen months of my life living in Hatfield) - this also reduced my costs as I've been staying at my parents house and they've been giving me lifts to and from the meeting [obviously I got them to drop me off far enough away from the meeting venue, so as not to embarrass me in front of my cool astronomy friends ;-)].

Last year I noticed quite a few people were blogging the meeting, but a google blog search of this year's meeting doesn't throw up much (the usual astronomy blogging force of Chris Lintott wasn't here for one), so I'll summarise a few of the highlights I saw.

As with most major meeting's I got most out of the plenary talks. On Monday we had a great talk from Richard Harrison about the STEREO mission, which involves two spacecraft - one advancing in front of Earth's orbit and one trailing it - that monitor the Sun, and the space in between the Earth and Sun, to give a unique 3D view of solar activity and coronal mass ejections (CMEs). We got some really nice videos of data from the craft showing the two opposite views of a CME heading towards the Earth, although we didn't get to see any of the 3D images of the Sun itself. For the next two sessions of the day I went learn about Supernovae and γ-ray bursts (GRBs). Avishay Gal-Yam gave a nice overview of the different types of core-collapse supernova that happen to stars over the full range of masses. These include electron capture supernova at the lowest mass end (for which there have yet to be any completely convincing observations); accretion induced collapse (AIC) supernova from two white dwarfs ripping each other apart; supernova that don't produce an observable explosion (meaning event rates could actually be higher than observed); and really massive (of hundreds of solar masses) stellar explosions, which may not even lead to a core collapse.

On Tuesday morning there were a couple of really good plenary sessions. The first was from Tim de Zeeuw from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) talking about current and future ESO plans. There were some brilliant photos of the ESO Paranal site in Chile, home of the VLT (and the building that was blown up in Quantum of Solace), and impressive information about the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA). Most exciting was the part of the talk about the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), a planned telescope with a 42m diameter mirror(!), which I was surprised to find out has progressed very far in the planning and design and has a fantastic science case. After that we heard from Michel Mayor, one of the original discovers of the first exoplanets, who gave a very nice talk about a load of new planets discovered using radial velocity measurements, including the lowest mass (~2 Earth masses) exoplanet yet found. Later on I found out a bit about the LOFAR radio telescope and dark matter detection experiments, but the stand out talk of the afternoon, was my talk on searching for gravitational waves form pulsars! ;-)

The first plenary talk of Wednesday was given by David Southwood, director of science for ESA. I missed the first half of this talk as I'd decided to walk from my parents house rather than get a lift and I misjudged how long it would take, but arrived to hear about Mars missions. As ever David spoke his mind and didn't hold back his opinions (which is quite refreshing from someone who has to move in the political sphere, but at times verges on just being a bit too open with his views!) Later that day I mainly heard about gravitational lensing, including a talk by John McKean (a former Glasgow graduate) about detection of a water maser at a redshift of ~2.5 - the most distant water even seen - in the lensed image of a quasar. In the afternoon I went to a session on outreach done for the International Year of Astronomy (IYA09). Particularly interesting was the planned astronomy exhibit, and associated events, at the Science museum (they apparently have a massive collection of astronomical instrumentation from over the ages, but it's mainly in storage) and the events happening at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. There was also a talk about the making of the educational film The Starry Messenger that was made by people in the astronomy group at the University of Hertfordshire - it was premiered at the meeting, but I didn't see it, although if it gets released online I may well give it a watch.

Today's plenary session saw another couple of good talks. Firstly Joseph Lazio gave a nice overview of some of the science that will be possible with the Square Kilometre Array (a future radio telescope). He couldn't touch on all the things it will do, but did give a nice little introduction into it's potential for making a pulsar timing array to detect gravitational waves (something I'm particularly interested in). I then heard the status and results of a selection of ground-based γ-ray observatories. Later I saw an interesting talk by Prof. Sir Arnold Wolfendale (he's a very prominent old astronomer and one of the founders of cosmic ray astronomy, and as he's been around so long he's not afraid to be controversial and speak his mind, although for some reason he does seem to be a global warming denier) who was discussing whether certain cosmic rays sources seen by the Pierre Auger Observatory that had been tentatively identified as correlating with AGNs, are actually extragalactic or not - his opinion, backed up with some evidence, was the latter. The final talk of the week was an invited lecture by George Ellis who was discussing current topics in cosmology. His main talking point was to say that some current trends in cosmology to talk about multiverse theories as if they are a scientifically valid position to take, as opposed to being philosophical speculation - this is due to the fact that you can't think up any experiment, or make predictions, to test these theories, so they don't stand up to a standard scientific definition. He also discussed various cosmological theories that could be tested, for example that the universe could be small and have a closed topology. Finally the meeting ended with the RAS community forum, which had some interesting discussions, but wasn't particularly controversial.

Down the Doon

2009-04-15T23:35:00.000Z

[Reposted from here]

Yesterday a small group of us (Euan, Nick, Rupert and myself) took a departure from the normal north westerly or easterly river trips and went south of Glasgow into Ayrshire to paddle the River Doon (aka the Ness Glen). This river runs out of the Loch Doon dam through the Ness Glen gorge, straight over a small weir followed by a quick succession of rapid sections for about a mile.

The weather on that day was pretty overcast, but it was reasonably warm (although a bit breezy when standing by the Loch getting changed) and decent paddling weather. On heading down from the road to the river we were told by a nice old couple that the river looked "sporting", which we didn't really know what to make of, but hoped it boded well. After getting in above the weir we decided to give it a miss as there was some nasty looking metal underneath it (which from reading this has apparently taken the end off at least one boat), and started up proper just below it. It didn't take long to reach the first major rapid which we all navigated safely and were quickly onto the next. The next section saw my first swim of the day when I got pinned on a rock (which became a bit of a recurring theme for me) and the water coming over the back of my boat sent me under - I blame this on the low footbridge that I hit with my paddle just beforehand and made me lose control, but the other swims weren't so easy to pass the buck. The river was pretty shallow and narrow all the way down the gorge, so it was easy to make my way out, but my boat and paddle were a bit harder to reach and Euan bravely went in to fetch the paddle. At the next, slightly larger, rapid (I may be getting the ordering mixed up) we got out to have a look for the best route first. Then Rupert showed us the route not to take, before Nick showed a far nicer line and we followed over without any incident. Following that I had a couple more swims and pins (I had to be helped out of one pin by an old man walking by who gave me a shove with his walking stick), one of which was particularly gimpy when I just hit a log and went over, but everyone else made it down fine. This section of the river was great fun as there was always something to do and the rapids were challenging, but not too intimidating. There were a lot of low bridges, branches and obstacles to look out for, although that added a bit of character to the river.

The worst bit of the day was the next half hour (probably far longer than, but I kind of lost track of time) paddling almost flat water to the get out. I'd recommend for future trips to the Doon to get out at the bottom on the Ness Glen section and potentially just walk back to the top along the footpath, that is unless you really enjoy dull paddles, scraping your boat along shallow sections and weaving in and out of overhanging trees and bushes.

Overall it was a great trip and it's definitely a river I recommend again. Swim count: 3 (all me).

Getting shirty

2009-04-02T23:18:00.000Z

For some reason today I decided to buy the new England football shirt (if you can tolerate the stupid amounts of flash used on the webpage have a look). On seeing the last couple of England matches I've rather liked the new strip (it was debuted [is that how you spell the past tense of debut? - in fact is that even how you spell debut!] on Saturday's match against Slovakia) - it's nice and simple and looks good. However, the main issue on buying it is that it costs about £50! I knew it was going to be pricey, but that was about 15 quid more than I expected. I bought it anyway and will try and get as much wear out of it as possible despite living in Scotland.

I've nothing really to add about the actual football that took place other than I'm pretty please that we're still on winning form. Saturday's friendly was a good watch despite the opposition being poor and yesterday's qualifier was reasonably dull, occasionally frustrating, but got the job done.

The real G20

2009-03-31T13:11:00.004Z

This BBC article pointed out something I'd yet to notice (not that it's a particularly pertinent thing to notice) - my home postcode, G20, is the same as the name of the big meeting starting in London today between the Group of 20 top economic nations. Wow! That's such an amazing coincidence isn't it! The article throws into contrast the difference between the expected topics of discussion at the G20 meeting and the real life issues that the decent folk of Maryhill (i.e. me) are having to face on a daily basis. It's a depressing and gloomy place is Maryhill, with barely a shop left open; all of us living in boarded up, piss-stinking hi-rises; spending our lives shuffling between the bookies and the pub, with only a thin drawn-out roll-up (that has to be smoked outside in the dirty, rain sodden street) as meagre comfort; tripping over the homeless and destitute as we queue for any work we can get at the job centre; giving in to the syringe as the only release from our miserable existence; lying by the side of the road covered in vomit with a smashed bottle of Buckie and your last shred of self-worth seeping into the gutter. Compare that to the lives of these leaders of nations, with their fancy suits and cars and staff of thousands. They don't know what it's like! Damn them, damn them all.

Drumming solo

2009-03-31T12:55:00.003Z

Last night I went along to A-side studios for the first time since my last band attempt (that band attempt may not fail, it's just been on the back burner while I've been busy - and too lazy to get my arse in gear and sort it out). Anyway this time I went along on my own to just go into a room and bash some drums for an hour. They've essentially turned the smallest rehearsal room into just being a drum room, mainly I think due to it really being to small to get full band in to practice (we tried it a couple of times for band practices before, but you just got deafened in there), so I was in there for an hour at the small cost of £5. One of the main reasons that I went along is that I've not played my electric kit at home recently due to fear of waking up the baby that my downstairs neighbours have, but I also wanted to get behind a real kit again as it's much better to practice on. On playing about for an hour I realised that a) I'm not very good (well I'd realised this a while ago, but it struck home again), and b) I need some structure in my practices, so I can get good. This lead me to think about getting some actual lessons where hopefully I can lose any bad drumming habits I've taught myself, learn some drills to perfect the basics and pick up some new skills. I've yet to book a lesson, but am thinking I most likely will, and I chatted to the guy who offers lessons at A-side and he seemed very nice.

Altering my experience

2009-03-25T23:48:00.003Z

This morning I went to a proper tailors (well more an alteration place than tailors) for the first time ever. I wanted to get a suit jacket altered to have a more fitted look, as all the suits I've bought are off the peg things, which generally look excessively oversized and wide on me. The tailors I went to (Skint Alteration Tailors Ltd) was located in an unassuming doorway that I had to look hard to find and I had to be buzzed in and walk upstairs. Looking through their front door I could see another slightly ajar door marked staff only through which I glimpsed a couple of little old ladies at sewing machines. But I imagined this was only the tip of the iceberg and if I'd ventured into that room I would have seen a sea of blue rinses, hunched over their precious Singer's, with the deafening sound of thousands of needles punching through cloth. I didn't get to see behind that door however, so that world will remain a mystery to me. Instead I went into the reception area and was greeted by a man who was seeing to another little old lady's turn ups. The room was the only reception I've ever been in that came equipped with changing rooms, although these changing rooms weren't for the shy as the doors to them would only really have covered a standing persons midriff. Obviously my main fear, but also slight hope, was that the man who saw to my tailoring needs might be of the Suit's You Sir! variety. In fact he was almost the exact opposite, in that he got straight on the job with minimal of fuss or innuendo. I didn't even get measured and subtly felt up, which I mentally prepared myself for. He just pinned my jacket gave me a receipt and I was away. Maybe one day I'll have to venture into a more authentic tailors (one that makes entire bespoke suits, rather than just doing alterations) to get the experience I expected - on the other hand getting in and out with the minimum of fuss is not bad thing (had to get a last bit innuendo in there).

What I done

2009-03-25T00:20:00.001Z

Despite doing a fair few things in the last week I've been very lax in posting about them, so I'll try to rectify that by writing something now. Previously on Cosmic Zoo you saw me flying out to Los Angeles for a collaboration meeting and doing a bit of celeb spotting in Heathrow airport, but what happened next...

My first day in LA (a week last Saturday) was my only free time before the meeting started on Sunday morning, so I met up with my friends Ben and Erin who live there. They kindly offered to show me some sites for the afternoon and evening. We started with a trip to Santa Monica, which was busy with people out shopping and visiting the pier. We headed down to the pier (which has a fun fair on it), but decided to avoid the crowds and stuck to the beach end where we had a decent fish and chips [or fish and chip - singular - as it was called] (in fact some of the best fish and chips I've had in the last year or so have been bought in the US!) and a nice afternoon beer. That evening after relaxing back at my friends flat we headed to a new caf&ecute; that one of their friends had recently opened. It was called the Golden State Café and I'd recommend it if you're in the area. The burger was really good and there were a very nice selection of local beers. Later we went to another of their friend's brothers 21st birthday up in the Hollywood Hills, which was a nice and relaxing event in a really nice place. The jet lag eventually got the better of me and I had to get a lift back to the hotel. During the whole day we apparently travelled on all four main highways that cross LA.

The rest of the week was filled with the meeting schedule, but the hotel we were at was determined to try and screw with this by providing free drinks at every opportunity. Embassy Suites hotels have a policy of free drinks receptions every evening from 5.30pm to 7.30pm (supposedly limited to 6 drinks, but this rule seemed easily circumvented - not that you needed to circumvent it as the six drinks were ample). These drinks weren't meagre measures either. I assume the policy was meant to get to too drunk to move out of the hotel and keep you spending money in their bar, and in fact it seemed to work as I barely went to anywhere else.

On the final day the meeting finished at midday, so a few of us (mainly Cardiffians) decided to head to the beach for the afternoon before catching evening flights. We went via the airport, so people could check in their bags and not have to carry them to the beach, but the main thing of note was the mode of transport we took there. We were driven there in a limo, complete with mirrored ceiling, flashy lights, and free drinks. There were 10 of us in the limo, so in fact it worked out as a cheaper option to take than the normal Super Shuttle minibus service! After the airport the limo then took us on to Venice beach (we got a couple of strange looks from people as we got out). The previous weeks weather, in Arcadia at least, had been gloriously sunny, but down at the beach it was really hazy with no sight of the sun. However, we were at the beach, and we were British, so we were going to stay there, goddamnit. The main thing that Venice Beach seems to have, other than a huge stretch of golden sand, is a very long boardwalk (without the boards) lined with shops full of tat (mainly bongs and t-shirts) and street artists/vendors. This was interesting to see, but not necessarily the sort of place you'd want to spend too much time. However, it was really good to relax on the beach for an afternoon despite it getting chilly later on and the sea being to cold to swim in (well it was possible to swim and people were doing it, but I wasn't going to give it a try).

That was all for my latest US trip. At the end I was torn between wanting to come home, but also reminded of last years excellent road trip and wanting to see some more of California. I think next year, if we're back in California in the spring, we might well have another road trip. No more celebs spotted in Heathrow on the return journey.

Sorry I couldn't inject much excitement into that recap. There is a bit more I did, but that may just have to go undocumented for now.

Arcadia

2009-03-14T18:43:00.000Z

Yesterday I arrived in LA for yet another collaboration meeting. This year, unlike the same time last year, I've arrived with my luggage, which is a major improvement. The meeting isn't being held on the Caltech campus this time round and is instead in Arcadia at an Embassy Suites hotel. I'm not sure if there's actually anything to do in Arcadia, but will have to have a brief scout about this afternoon.

On an unrelated note I had a couple of celebrity spots when I was passing through Heathrow airport yesterday morning. Firstly I saw Julian Clary at the Bureau de Change, although there was little novelty to this spot as I used to see him quite a lot when I lived in a flat opposite his in Camden. The second person was former Man Utd/Denmark goalkeeping legend (and more recently BBC pundit and Strictly Come Dancing star) Peter Schmeichel. There may have been more famous people passng through, but two is a decent number to see.

Boarding in Glencoe

2009-03-08T15:37:00.000Z

Yesterday I went on my first snowboarding trip in Scotland (not including the indoor slope) to a real mountain ski resort (well calling it a resort's a bit much, more like ski set-of-huts). I tagged along with a few people from the Glasgow University Surf Club, who had been planning a weekend surf trip down to Wales, but had to cancel that and instead decided to hit the slopes for the day as they still had a minibus to use. We went up to Glencoe for the day.

When we got there it was apparently a borderline decision as to whether they'd open the skilifts or not due to quite high winds. They did open up and stayed open all day despite conditions actually getting worse throughout the day. When we first got up the main chairlift to the bottom of the ski runs the weather and wind wasn't actually that bad. The was some light sleet, but it was quite bareable. The hardest thing to start off with was getting the hang of the Poma tow that takes you to the top of the beginner slope. It didn't take me as many attempts as my first ever go on a tow, but it was probably four attempts before I made it all the way up to the top (the main problem was keeping your weight over the centre of the board when the pull initially kicked in and gave you a big jolt - many people, me included, were falling off as soon as it started). I stayed on the lower slopes all day (a few other went to the top, but I didn't really feel up for it after hearing what the conditions were like up there), but they provided a good enough challenge for me to practice improving my boarding.

As it got later the rain got heavier and there were more and more parts of the slopes that were turning slushy. By the time we went down for lunch we were all soaking wet. Lunch gave us a little time to dry off and warm up, but when we went back up the rain and wind had again picked up and the bottom of the beginner slope was now more slushy mud than snow. However we persisted. I had to regain my ability to use the tow, which I'd somehow lost over lunch (this got quite frustrating and almost led me to calling it quits straight away - luckily I managed to get up the slope a bit and as soon as I was boarding again I realised that I wanted to stay on the slopes longer). Once I was able to use the tow properly again I had quite a lot of good runs down the beginner slope. The main thing I tried to get myself to do was bend my knees more - I'm generally quite upright and use my body and back foot to turn, which isn't that good and made turning quite an effort. So I took more of a crouched position, which gave me a lot more control and felt more natural. During this time I got thoroughly soaked through and the slopes became more and more slushy and cut up. Everything on me was wet and my gloves where full of water (and bits of ice) - this was fine when I was doing stuff and my body was producing heat, but it wasn't so nice when getting the chairlift down. It was very nice to change into dry clothes in the end.

Despite the weather's best attempts to make it a miserable day I actually had a great time and it was good fun to be on a real mountain slope for the first time in just under two years. I need to get out somewhere else soon.

Zoo too

2009-02-25T23:34:00.003Z

Today I had my first look at Galaxy Zoo (it's been up for well over a year and I've known about it from the start, but I'm slow on the uptake sometimes) - an online project that uses the online masses (i.e. us web users) to classify galaxy images in the Sloan Digital Sky survey. Part of the reason behind the project (I think) is that people are actually rather good at image processing in a way that it's quite hard to get an automated computer program to do. So by getting people to do the classification (with multiple people classifying each galaxy for verification purposes) you get a pretty reliable and accurate catalogue - and sometimes get new things spotted. Basically what happens once you sign up is that you get shown a picture of a galaxy and then asked a couple of questions about it's morphology answerable by clicking simple icons, i.e. is it smooth and regular looking, or does it have spiral features, and that's about it - you can then move on to the next image, and the next, and the next... I only did two images on my first go and they were both fairly ordinary looking ellipticals. [ooh, I just got a spiral - there were lots more questions for that!]

One thing I have wondered about Galaxy Zoo before is whether I've inadvertantly got any hits from people who were really looking for it (with this post it'll probably become more likely). Well if you were looking for Galaxy Zoo you now have the correct link to it.