Honeymoon: Day 2

11/04/12 - We got up at a reasonable time in the morning as we wanted to make the most of the day and get down to breakfast before it was cleared away. Breakfast in the hotel was nice, although not the best out of the hotels we stayed in - generally during the whole holiday we stuck to eating western food at breakfast (all the hotels had egg stations!), although there was always a selection of Chinese dishes that we could have tried.

Entrance to the Forbidden City

The day's plan was to go to the Forbidden City, which was only about 10 mins from our hotel. The rain of yesterday was pretty much a one off for the honeymoon and on this day the weather was hot and sunny (it stayed like this in Beijing). Walking to the entrance there were a lot of tour guides touting for business and saying that they could get passed the ticket queues quicker, but we just wanted to sort it by ourselves. At the entrance there were huge queues of Chinese tour groups in which each group had there own colour and style of hat. The ticket queue for non-tour groups folks was quite long, but actually took under 10 mins. We then got our audio guide and went into the City. It was interesting place and really big - we probably spent a couple of hours in there, but Jen was quite shocked by her first (and worst of the whole trip) experience of a Chinese public toilet. Near the exit people were being stopped going through by soldiers and there were official looking cars about, so we thought it might have been state officials going by. We went back the way we'd come and found another way through (we ended up at the same place, but after our detour the officials had passed and people were allowed through). Also, whilst in the Forbidden City it was the first time on the trip that Jen had someone request having their photo taken with her (due to her red hair we assume.)

Across the road from the exit was Jing Shan park, which has a happy story of an emperor hanging himself in it! The hill in the park was actually constructed from the soil excavated during the making of the moat around the City. While walking up to the top Jen attracted the attention of a large group of photographer with telephoto lenses trying to discretely take her photo. The tower at the top of the park contained a large Buddhist shrine and offered great views back over the Forbidden City. The park also offered a better second toilet experience than that in the City.

The Forbidden City from Jing Shan Park

From there we walked back down the side of lake in Beihai Park and the side of the Forbidden City to Tianamen Square. There were a lot of soldiers about including some rather obvious plane clothes soldiers/police. We saw the famous portrait of Chairman Mao and headed and through the gate at the north of the Square, which turned out to be the wrong way and just headed back to the Forbidden City entrance! Going back out to the Square we got accosted for the second time, so that a man and his son could get their photo taken with Jen. Initially I was in the photo, but they then asked me to move out the way, so it was just Jen and the man's son! Crossing under the road via the subway (which had X-ray machines) we were in the main part of the Square. We wandered past Mao's mausoleum (not going in to see his body) and saw the changing of the guard. At the south of the Square we went into the Qianmen Gate building - this offered a good view back over the Square, but didn't contain much of interest.

Mao's mausoleum in Tianamen Square

We walked down Qianmen street and went for a pot (well many refills of a pot) of tea at Haos Tea House. We'd not eaten since breakfast, so also had an ice cream from the Hagen Das across the street. After passing a shop for London Olympic merchandise (presumably a reassignment of a previous Beijing Olympic shop) we found a physics-themed footbridge at the bottom of the street. Around this area our guide book had said there were Hutongs (the narrow alleys and courtyards where people would traditionally live) that you could walk round, so we attempted to find them. But, they seemed to have all been flattened for new buildings (we did find some others over the next few days), so we just walked back to our hotel.

We booked dinner at the Pure Lotus vegetarian restaurant, which required us to take our first subway journey. We had to use two different lines, but it was very simple and cheap (20 yuan each). The map we'd brought with us didn't quite extend to the restaurant location (and we hadn't even noted down the address!), so we had to wander around slightly randomly for 30 mins before we found it. It was a rather fancy place with a huge wooden door at the entrance. The food was all served in very elaborate dishes and it looked rather impressive. There was a huge wooden menu that was very confusing. This confusion meant we ordered far too much including a chilli and fake "chicken" thing served in a huge banana-shaped dish (which we didn't really ask for, but just got told about and accidentally brought). But it was all very nice albeit very spicy (given the large amount of chilli). At the end we got complementary fruit served in dry ice!

Complementary fruit

After dinner we went to find bar we had found on the beijinger website, called Q bar, which was supposed to be good for ex-pats. After a 20 min walk we found the bar, which was above a slightly dodgy looking hotel - it was packed, but a bit odd and we couldn't get drink! We left with the feeling that we'd stumbled across a special singles, or swingers, night!?

It was now too late to get the underground home, so we tried hailing a taxi. Eventually one did stop for us. We had a card from our hotel with its address in Chinese script, but the driver had very thick glasses and didn't seem to be able to read it. The driver did seem to have understood the card though and got us back to the hotel for a fee of about £2.40.

Honeymoon: Day 1

It's been over a month since my wife and I got back from our honeymoon. While away we kept notes of what we did each day with the plan to write these up here as soon as we returned. Well it took a bit longer than planned to get round to it, but here is the first of our day-by-day instalments: travels to Beijing (we went to China in case you couldn't guess!) It may be a bit more detailed than absolutely necessary, but it's also there as a reminder to us.

---

Day 1 (and a bit)

09/04/12 - Just over a day after the wedding we boarded our flight to China. We flew with Emirates going from Glasgow to Dubai, with just a couple of hours in Dubai airport, and then on to Beijing. We arrived in Dubai airport late at night feeling pretty exhausted mainly due to finally starting to come down from the wedding high. Having realised I'd forgotten deodorant and Jen needed some make-up we did a bit of duty free shopping before trying to find somewhere for a snack. After much indecision we settled on a fish-based cafe where I had a beef sandwich, Jen had a croissant, and we drank some Sprite. This slightly revived us for the second leg of the flight. Originally the Beijing leg was supposed to be in an Airbus A380, but in the end it was downsized to a more standard Boeing 777.

10/04/12 - We arrived at Beijing airport in the early afternoon. We passed through a thermal imaging machine to check if you've got a fever and need to be quarantined, and then went into the impressive immigration hall. We passed through immigration without any problem and after a short monorail ride our luggage was waiting for us (this can often be an issue for me - in the past Jen has blamed my luggage woes on flying with a big back pack, so I'd been made to buy a proper suitcase for this trip). Our taxi driver from the airport was friendly and kept trying to point our things for us to look at, but as he spoke no English and us no Mandarin we just looked, smiled and nodded. Getting in to the centre of Beijing we were mainly struck by the size of the place and the buildings - everything was massive. We arrived at our hotel (the Hotel Kapok) in late afternoon just as rain broke.

Our first room in Hotel Kapok

The hotel had a quite funky facade and looked pretty swish when we got inside. They didn't have the style of room we'd booked available, so they upgraded us to a bigger room (it even had a small outdoor garden area) for a day (this turned into 3 days, but unfortunately not the whole stay). The room was massive, with a huge bathroom, and even came with its own gas masks in case of fire!

Night street food market

After having a brief rest we headed out to get some food and have a bit of an explore. Just about 100m from our hotel there was an outdoor food night market and one of the major Beijing shopping streets called Wangfujing. We perused the food market starting off with corn-on-the-cob-n-a-stick (rather than tucking straight in to the starfish/seahorse-on-a-stick) before heading down Wangfujing. Just off that street we found another small alley containing more colourful street food. With the rain having eased off we headed back to the main street market where we had crab dumplings, fried dumplings,spring rolls and banana fritters, which were all very tasty.

The band at a Qianhai lake bar

Despite the long day we'd got a proper second wind and decided that we'd try and find a pub. We briefly went back to the hotel to check our options before deciding to try and find a bar on Luogu Alley. We also decided that we'd try walking there as it didn't look too far on out map. It turns out that the city blocks in Beijing are larger than they look, but after about half an hour of walking (and seeing our first instance of the Chinese street dancing craze) we arrived at where the entrance to the alley should have been. Unfortunately it seemed to be a building site for a new subway station (a few days later we found out that there was a way through to the alley), so we decided to carry on walking to Qianhai lake where there were more bars. Another half an hour later we found it (after passing a bizarre Christmas display!) and walked round to look at the bars. All of the bars had live music going on in them and none were that appealing, but we wanted some alcohol after our long day and eventually just went into one after being accosted by a bar promoter type. The band in this place weren't that bad, but hadn't attracted much of a crowd. We both had a single drink and left to head home.

I made a slight wrong turn on the way back, but I realised my mistake quite soon and we headed in the right direction back to our hotel. After another long walk we made it back without any problems and quickly got to sleep.

---

I expect the following posts will get shorter than this!

Slalom in the sunshine

Today was one of the final canoe club trips of the academic year. But, unlike most club trips this one was happening on a gloriously hot and sunny day rather than the standard weather of cold, wet and windy.

Seven of us headed up to Grandtully to go on the section of the Tay there. We travelled quite a scenic route to get there at the behest of our SatNav (via Crief and Aberfeldy), but still got there with plenty of time to paddle. At this section of the Tay the Scottish Canoe Association has it's national slalom site, so there were easy parking facilities there. This river section has a short series of rapids (with slalom gates set up) followed by a long flat section, so we just stayed at the rapids and ran down them several times interspersed with a lunch break. There wasn't a huge amount of water, so the rapid weren't particularly big, but we were able to practice getting into eddies and play about a bit. We didn't attempt making the slalom gates though, although there were quite a lot of other paddlers on the river, so of who were slalom-ers. There was also a  group of rafts heading down the river.

It was nice to get off the river and be able to get changed in the sun and get kit mostly dried before packing it. We took a more direct route back home with a brief stop at a service station outside of Perth for an ice lolly.

First trip to Fort William

Today saw my first ever kayaking trip north of Glencoe - in fact it was my first ever trip north of Glencoe up the west coast of Scotland for any reason. The canoe club were having a full weekend of boating up around Fort William, but I decided just to head up for the day. With an early start I managed to meet the rest of the group at the village hall in Ballachulish at 08:10. We first headed to check out the Loy, which was a bit low, so carried on further along the road to the Arkaig. This river did have a fair amount of water in it.

The river is a fairly easy run except for a large Grade 4 rapid (the "Main Event") near the start, which is where we spent the majority of the time. We spent a while checking the rapid out and looking at possible lines. In general it was looking pretty hefty. I was at the back of the first trio to head down the rapid. There were a lot of huge holes along the way and I seemed to get stopped in all of them. I made it all the way down, but got stopped before the final drop, so had no speed to carry me off the rapid. Basically I got flipped at the bottom and after one failed roll attempt I became the day's first swimmer. The rapid claimed a few other swimmers after me, but quite a few people went back for seconds and thirds. I decided one swim was enough for the day for me, so didn't give it another go.

The rest of the river was pretty uneventful with just a few small rapids. We practice a bit of ferrying and breaking in and out of eddies. I did have some rather novice wobbles a couple of times on eddy lines (I don't think anyone else noticed), but other than that did manage without another swim. The rest of the group headed to another river to get a short run in, but I preferred the option of getting dry and heading back to Glasgow while it was still light.

Back in the water

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

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

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

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 Messenger¹, 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 instructions! So a bit more inference is required to make some so called "standard candles" for astronomical distance measurements.

For the Sun, we know its distance very well and we can also measure its 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 universe's 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 source's 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 if the gravitational wave signal is coincident with a gamma-ray burst then that helps localising the host with follow-up observations, but this will 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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.]