How high are pulsar "mountains"?

Just a quick post to highlight a paper that I (and others in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration, and a selection of radio, X-ray and gamma-ray pulsar astronomers) have been working on recently. The paper gives the most recent results from the search for gravitational waves from pulsars using data from the LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors. A summary of the results from this search can be found here, but I also reproduce it below (see the link for the result plots from the paper):

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity predicts that the motion of masses can lead to the emission of gravitational radiation, commonly called gravitational waves. These waves, which are distortions in the fabric of space-time, ripple out from their sources at the speed of light. Far away from the source their effect is tiny. The distortions from even the strongest sources (which are some of the most violent events in the Universe) stretch and squeeze the distance between any objects they pass by a fractional amount (called the strain) of order 10^-23. That is equivalent to a change in distance between the Earth and the Sun of just a few times an atomic radius! However, scientists have built detectors, based on laser interferometry, to perform very high precision distance measurements that are capable of measuring these extremely small distortions. In the US there are two such detectors called the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), in Italy there is the Virgo detector and in Germany there is the GEO600 detector. These are operated, and their data analyzed, by hundreds of scientists from across the world as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration.

An artist's impression of a pulsar. Image credit: Michael Kramer (JBCA, Unversity of Manchester).

One of the ways we are taking advantage of the fantastic sensitivity of these detectors is to search for continuous gravitational waves from pulsars. Pulsars were first observed in 1967 at the University of Cambridge by the radio astronomers Jocelyn Bell and Antony Hewish. They are neutron stars, which are the collapsed cores of massive stars that have run out of fuel and gone supernova (up until this discovery they had just been theoretical objects first proposed by Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky in 1934). They are very rapidly spinning, with rotation periods ranging from a few seconds to a few milliseconds, so their surfaces are rotating at up to ∼10% of the speed of light! With a mass of slightly more than the Sun (∼2.8×10³⁰ kg) packed into a sphere of radius ∼10 km, they are about 40 000 billion times denser than lead (this is equivalent to squashing the entire population of the Earth into a thimble). They also have magnetic fields a billion to a few thousand billion times that of the Earth. So, these are very extreme objects! The pulsed emission comes from beams of radiation emanating from the magnetic poles of the stars acting like a lighthouse. If the magnetic and rotation axes are not aligned then pulses are observed as the radiation beam sweeps across the Earth once per rotation.

To generate gravitational waves a pulsar must have some non-symmetric distortion that is not along its rotation axis, i.e. a "mountain". This distortion could have been: frozen into the crust or core of the star after it was born in the supernova; formed from material falling onto the star; or, be produced and maintained though extremely large internal magnetic fields (larger even than the external fields described above). However, due to the huge gravitational field at the star's surface the material forming the "mountain" needs to be really strong to not be flattened out (a mountain on Earth made of jello would not get very big before collapsing under its own weight, but one made of solid rock can become as large as, or larger than, Everest). For a pulsar with a crust made up of normal neutron star material the maximum deformation that could be sustained before collapsing is about 10 cm, so not very high for a "mountain" (scaling up in height only this would be equivalent to a ∼50 m hill on Earth). If the star was made up from more exotic materials, e.g. if it were a solid quark star, then it could possibly sustain a "mountain" up to ∼10 m in height. The "mountain" size can also be expressed in terms of the star's ellipticity (ε), which is a measure of its size as a fraction of the star's radius.

Making a few reasonable assumptions we can estimate the maximum amplitude of gravitational waves being emitted by most pulsars. To do this we use the law of conservation of energy. Pulsars are seen to slow down (spin-down) over time. This spin-down takes a very long time, and even the most rapidly spinning-down objects only decrease in frequency by less than a hundredth of a Hertz (or equivalently, increase their periods by less than ten microseconds) over a year. But, given the huge moment of inertia of the stars this still represents a very large loss in rotational energy, corresponding to a power of ∼10³¹ Watts, or well over ten thousand times the Sun's luminosity. If we assume that all of this energy is being lost by emission of gravitational waves we can calculate the amplitude with which we would observe them at Earth. This is called the "spin-down limit". If we can achieve detector sensitivities that allow searches to reach below this limit then we are probing interesting new territory, where gravitational wave signals could be detectable.

There are just over 350 pulsars (see the Australia Telescope National Facility catalog) spinning fast enough for their gravitational wave emission to be in the sensitive frequency band of the current detectors (∼20 to 2000 Hz). We have searched for a total of 195 of these pulsars using data from the LIGO, Virgo and GEO600 science runs, with the most up-to-date results for 179 of them coming from the most recent LIGO S6 and Virgo VSR2 and VSR4 runs. To help reach the best sensitivity we have used information about these pulsars obtained through radio, X-ray and gamma-ray observations; these have provided very precise knowledge of the pulsars' frequencies, positions and how their frequencies change over time. This information has allowed us to accurately track any potential signal in our data over the whole length of the science run (called coherent integration).

From these searches we were not able to detect evidence for gravitational radiation from any of the pulsars. But, we have produced the most sensitive upper limits yet, and for seven pulsars we are starting to probe an interesting regime within a factor of five of the spin-down limit. For the Crab pulsar and Vela pulsar we have surpassed the spin-down limit. From this we can say that, respectively, less than ∼1% and 10% of their spin-down energy loss is due to gravitational radiation. We can also say that there are no "mountains" on the Crab pulsar greater than ∼1 meter, and none on Vela greater than ∼10 meters. Among the other pulsars, we found eight more within a factor of ten of the spin-down limit. From the gravitational wave observations alone we can limit the "mountain" size for some of these to less than ∼1 mm, although the spin-down limit is more stringent for those pulsars.

When the current upgrades to the LIGO and Virgo detectors are complete we expect to be able to beat the spin-down limit for many more pulsars. This includes pulsars where we could limit the maximum mountain size to less than a few tenths of a millimeter! It also means we will be in a regime where we can make the first direct detections of gravitational waves from pulsars.

Astrophysicists of the Caribbean

What's a nice reassuring thing that can happen the day before you get a flight? Well it's certainly not this - the link is, unsurprisingly, to the plane crash in New York today. It's obviously great news to see that everyone survived with minimal injury, but I think it's amazingly lucky and I expect the pilot deserves a great deal of credit. The current best guess as to the cause of the accident is a flock of birds getting sucked into the engine, so I just hope that large groups of birds steer clear of Glasgow, Heathrow and Miami airports tomorrow.

I should just note that the reason I'm flying tomorrow is that I'm off to GWDAW 13 - a gravitational wave meeting being held, this year, in Puerto Rico. There's ligitimate reason for it to be held in Puerto Rico (honest!) It's the home to the Arecibo radio telescope, and radio pulsar observations are one of the ways to detect gravitational waves - see that's a good reason to be there isn't it! It just so happens that I'm taking a few days holiday in the Caribbean afterwards, but that is not, I repeat not, the reason for going.

[I think maybe I should have saved the title of this post until my next one, but there were sequels to the film, so I can do sequels to this title]

Back to the chalk board

Tomorrow see's me restarting my lecture course (same one as the last two years). This year I've LaTeXed up my lecture notes (well a chunk of them so far), so that they're readable to both me and the students. Hopefully it'll be worth it! Let's bring the joys of Observational Methods to the students...

Germary, Germany over all!

So long UK, guten tag Deutschland. In a work-motivated move I have come out to the Albert Einstein Institute in Hannover to experience how working life is out here and hopefully get lots of important stuff done (a paper here, an analysis there, etc.) This is going to be an extended visit lasting until late September (when a trip to Munich for a certain event know as Octoberfest might be happening.) I arrived today, after a being delayed a day due to a plane cancellation, and since then things have gone smoothly - that's your typical German efficiency in action. With the help of a couple of ex-Glasgow colleagues I was escorted from the train station, taken to lunch, shown were my apartment was, and given a tour of the institute. I've taken up residence in a office and been given a key and security entrance key-fob thing. Now all that remains for the day is to sample some beer and sausage.

Week in brief

Rather than an extensive post on any one thing that I've done this week this post will just be a brief review:

• I restarted lecturing a first year astronomy course on Observational Methods. This is a course I first lectured last year, but I've had a bit of a rearrange of the various parts to make it a bit more coherent. I think I'm more confident with the course this year and the lectures have flowed more easily (plus I bought myself a book on Observational Astronomy to help me through), but the students will be the ultimate judge of whether I'm any good.
  
• Other than lecturing I've mainly been revising this Living Reviews article on Gravitational Wave Detection by Interferometry (Ground and Space). One of my work colleagues and myself have been given the task of updating it as a fair bit has happened in the world of interferometric gravitational wave detectors since the article was published in 2000.
  
• I attended the annual Glasgow Uni Astronomy Society Burns Supper. On a couple of previous years I've had the privilege of giving a speech at this illustrious event (replying from the non-Scot's), but this year I was spared. As always it was a fun evening despite a couple of hitches, and their were a couple of very good speeches by Hazel and Ellie - almost on a par with my own efforts ;) By far the strangest part of the night was nearly bumping into Ann Widdecombe in the GUU where we were having the meal. She was attending some bizarre, and rather disturbing, pro-life meeting there - the presence of which had attracted a fair few protesters, and a police presence, outside the GUU.
  
• I had the densest and most meaty (but very tasty) sausages know to man at Blas, in what proved to be one of the most rushed dining out experiences I've ever had.
  
• I went to an Australia Day barbeque, proposed by our resident Aussie Siong and held in the outback (out back of Bob and Ellie's flat that is - sorry for the poor, poor joke). Being winter in Scotland, rather than summer in Australia, this was a slightly wet affair. However, we tried to catch the spirit of what it would have been like to be on a hot, sunny beach, drinking from some icey cold tinny's whlst another shrimp was tossed onto the barbie. Even though the wet weather proved our partial downfall, a lot of meat was cooked and eaten and some beers were drunk, and isn't that what being Australian is all about anyway.
  
• I partly killed one of the new astronomy grad students PhDs by noticing a paper on astro-ph on pretty much what he was planning on doing. It was a topic that myself and my boss were discussing last year (albeit in a slightly different vein to how it's been used in the above article) and even did the same basic calculations, but obviously we weren't the only ones thinking about it! You've got to be quick off the mark in this game.
  

That is all!

Burning the midnight oil

Should I still be working at 1.40am? The answer is quite clearly no, but the fact can't be denied that I am. [Ignore the 12.40am timestamp on this post as blogger doesn't believe in BST ;)]

Time for work

This week the University of Glasgow has given me the task of keeping track of what I do and how long I do it for. Fortunately this only relates to research and teaching, so I wont be having to give a detailed account of absolutely everything e.g. this week I spent xx.xx hours on the toilet, xx.xx hours brushing my teeth, xx.xx hours pissing around on the internet (in my own time of course), etc. This Time Allocation Survey is part of the fairly new idea (for this university at least) of Full Economic Costing, whereby the university calculates the budgetary footprint of each member of staff - in theory allowing them to more accurately manage their accounts. For example my footprint doesn't just cover my salary (which in fact is payed for by PPARC/[now]STFC), but includes office space, equipment, pension, etc, which the university has to cover. But I also do things for the university like teaching, outreach, and (hopefully) making the university look good by putting out good research. All this together is taken into account. This week I think I will mainly be doing research.

Anyway, I'm not sure is blogging comes under research or teaching...

From the sublime to the ridiculous

I'll regale you with the full story when I'm more compos mentis, but I'm currently sitting on the floor of the concourse of Newark Liberty International Airport feeling shagged as fucker after having spent a night queuing, attempting to sleep on the floor, being on hold on a telephone for over two hours, and then queuing some more this morning. It's not been a fun trip out to the US so far. I can only hope things improve and I reach my destination this evening. I don't hold out great hope, but things could take a turn for the better. The events that have left me semi-stranded have completely buggered scri_minus's travel plans though, although right now I'd far prefer to be at home. Thanks a bunch Continental! (oh, and the weather in the North-East of America.)

Hard at work

This conference lark is grueling stuff I can tell you! Here at the Moriond meeting we start at 8.30am in the morning and things don't finish until 8.00pm at night. So what have I been doing during this taxing schedule? Well snowboarding mostly, as there's a specific skiing related break in the conference for 4-5 hours every day. This has provided ample time for me to brush up on my snowboard skills and look pretty damn cool in my gear (I went shopping at the weekend to buy some salopettes, i.e. waterproof skiing trousers, and some ski gloves, and despite the salopettes being half price they still cost £50!) My fellow conference attendees, Christian and Alastair, have also been improving their skiing. My ability has improved quite a lot and I can, most of the time, go back and forth from either edge of the board at will. I've spent considerably less time on my arse, and am far less bruised and battered, than my first time. Here in La Thuile there are no green/beginners runs, although there are several pretty easy blue runs. These are all rather nice to go down, and they aren't too busy so there's plenty of space to move. However, I'm not limited to the blue runs and have attempted, along with Christian and Alastair, a couple of red runs. Let me tell you these can be steep and pretty scary at points. We may not have been the most graceful looking people descending down the slopes, but we survived which is the most important thing. I can't believe I originally didn't want to come to this conference.

On an actual work note I did have to give a presentation which seemed to go well. I also got quite an interesting comment, well worth following up, from a certain Jim Faller (who some people know quite well).

Oh, and did I mention that the weather has been amazing!

Meet me in the mountains

After a couple of weeks of rushing around and giving talks in Brighton and Nottingham I've gone slightly more exotic and am in La Thuile in Italy. I'm here for the Moriond meeting, which is a scientific meeting come ski trip - the skiing is a major part of the meeting I'm told. In fact they have a four hour break in the middle of the days schedule for hitting the slopes. For this reason this will be a short post as I've got to get lunch before grabbing my snowboard and getting on the piste.

Steal from the rich...

...and present to the poor.

Today I'm in Nottingham, home of Robin Hood and rampant gun crime, to give a talk to the Astronomy group at the University of Nottingham. It's been a fairly busy day of getting up early and then spending most of the time travelling and writing the talk I'm to give, but the event is now just minutes away. Bring on the seminar!

In the land of the one screened computer...

...the two screened computer is king.

I am now basking in the glow of two computer screens - ok, I'm only basking in the glow of one as the other ones not been set up properly yet, but I still have the extra screen on my office desk. I can now view two desktops at once, oh yes! I can code and check the web at the same time! It's going to open up virtually limitless prospects for looking at more than one thing at once! Does it mean I'll be twice as propductive though? Probably not.

Look up to the skies and see

The last weekend I was away in the north-east of Scotland at a country house, near Edzell, called the Burn. The reason for this trip is that every year we take a group of the second year undergraduate astronomy student to somewhere where we will hopefully have clear dark skies to do some actual astronomical observations - Glasgow's just not really the place to get a great view of the stars, what with all the light pollution. Another reason for the trip is as a socialising (i.e. drinking) experience for the students to get to know each other and to hopefully encourage them to stay on to do astronomy in their honours years.

This was my fifth consecutive year of accompanying the students on the trip. There are normally about 5 or 6 staff, post-docs and post-grads that go along to supervise the students, but also for the observing and social aspects. I enjoy it, so I keep volunteering to go, plus I'm now a dab hand at assembling the telescopes we take.

We travelled up on Friday afternoon, driven by the experienced and trusty coach driver from Ann's Coaches of Kirkintilloch. The drive, given clear roads and no unexpected break-downs, takes about 2 hours 45 mins, and this was the case this time round. The Burn experience always starts with the house Bursar, Andy, giving a short history of the house and it's rules and regulations, followed by another Andy giving the more important information of the bar opening hours. One thing you can always count on at the Burn is consistency in their menu at meal times. They haven't really altered this in all my years of going there, but I find this nice and comforting. The food is prepared by "the girls" as the housekeeping/kitchen staff are affectionately referred to. Friday night, as ever, was vegetable soup, followed by mince and potatoes, with green beans. It never fails to remind me of my Grandma's cooking, as the way they do the mince mean it tastes and smells exactly the same as when she does it - I don't know what they do differently to when I make mince! Anyway, on the actual observing front Friday night wasn't particular good for us. There was pretty continuous cloud cover. Nevertheless, Ross and I did a short demonstration of how to assemble the Meade Celestron 5" telescopes we took with us, and we then got the students to follow our lead. Due to the fact that no observing could be done, we eagerly embraced the drinking option. However the Burn bar shuts at the early hour of 10pm so you have to make sure that last order is a big one and will last long enough in the night. With everyone stocked up on booze most people just sat around playing card games or chatting, but there was no extreme drunkeness as has occasionally in the past made it into the realms of infamy.

Saturday was an altogether nicer day and started off with bright sunshine. I made it down to breakfast at 9am in the morning (I've never missed breakfast at the Burn and wasn't about to start on this trip), but promptly proceeded back to bed after I've eaten as I'd only had about 4 hours sleep. After lunch of (who'd have guessed!) baked potato, some of us went on a walk along the River Esk. The river cuts a gorge close by to the house and has a really nice walk along its edge. The path along has many routes, some pretty precarious, down to the river's edge and it's always fun to scramble down these - in the past there's been some fairly risky bit's of rock climbing taken on, given that the river has some really fast rapid in it. This year a couple of the students decided to take a dip in the river despite it being bloody freezing - this is a first for a Burn trip.

That evening (after dinner of properly good fish and chips) the sky was still really clear, giving us the opportunity for some proper observing. There were only two planets up that evening (Venus and Jupiter). Unfortunately Venus wasn't showing any phase (at least that we could make out), but Saturn, as ever, was great to look at - and Titan was visible to. It's always fascinating actually looking at Saturn or Jupiter with you own eyes and seeing the rings or stripes in the atmosphere, and I can just stare at them for ages and not really get bored. The other objects that were observed quite a lot were the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda galaxy. The Orion nebula was really good when viewed through one of the larger Dobsonian telescopes we had brought. You could easily make out the trapezium of bright young stars in the centre, and a really extended amount of structured nebulosity. The Andromeda galaxy only really looks like a large fuzzy blob when viewed with the eye through a smallish telescope - if only we could adjust the exposure time of our eyes! Of the other objects we looked at the Crab nebula is closest to my heart, however it's distinctly disappointing when viewed with your eyes - I couldn't see the pulsar blinking! It was a good night observing in general, and everyone was just excited to get a good clear view of the dark night sky and appreciate what's actually up there. People got to see the band of the Milky Way properly, they got to learn a bit about how to navigate around the sky, and most people saw a few shooting stars.

After a bit of observing we had the Burn quiz. This is generally made up by the staff on the trip, and in previous years the post-grads have normally taken part in it - and won by large margins I might add. This year we put together the quiz, in part cobbled together from earlier quizzes, and partly new written by (mainly) Ross, Jen and I. This seemed to go down ok with the students. The night, of course involved more drinking, with the odd trip outside to stare at the sky for a bit longer.

I think I've written enough for now... oh, and lunch on Sunday was, of course, Chicken Kiev.

Finally

After a long and gruelling process I've finally submitted the paper which provided the bulk of my thesis to the e-print arXiv - it's called Upper limits on gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars. It's been over a year since the main results in this paper was presented in my thesis, but since then there have been a series of modifications, checks, re-calibrations, reviews, and then re-checks to make sure everything wasok . I can't take all the credit for the paper. As with all our results papers it's gone out under the authorship of the entire LIGO Scientific Collaboration (along with Michael Kramer and Andrew Lyne of Jodrell Bank Observatory who helped us with our pulsar data). During the review process there were very many useful additions to the paper in areas in which I'm no expert, along with the general selection of typos, re-wordings and grammatical corrections. And as it's a results paper we also acknowledge the great many people who got our detectors working to the stage where we can start getting results, and who maintain and look after the instruments for us data analysist's benefit.

The final process in the submission to arXiv didn't entirely go without a hitch as on first attempt it didn't like some of my LaTeX, but on second attempt it all went through fine. Now we sit back and wait for two weeks whilst the paper is perused by the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC) before submitting it to Physical Review D.

Second home

In an effort to write-up my research/ideas/to-do-lists on a regular basis I've created a research blog. I did have a very basic version previously, but it was just a simple html webpage and had no features whatsoever. For this blog I've made use of wordpress as it has very easily installable software - I only had to get out local sys admin to do one thing which was set up a mySQL database for me. Hopefully this will encourage me to keep regular research notes, which will now be handily archived and tagged depending on the subject.

Oh, what a night!

So last night I stayed in the Van der Valk hotel (named, I assume, after the Dutch detective of the same name) in Hildesheim. Now Hildesheim is supposed to be a nice, fairly picturesque, town, but I didn't really get to see much of it as I was only there for an evening. My hotel room overlooked a very pretty, very German looking, square, but my main experience of it was the load bells that peeled every quarter of an hour. The hotel itself was very pleasant and had a good, homely, feel to it. My room was large although my huge double bed was covered by two small single bed duvets! One of the main reasons for going to this hotel was so that we could all get together for a meal with the PPARC delegates. The main restaurant was closed for refurbishment, so we were squeezed into a room next to the bar. The bar was filled with rowdy Germans watching Germany versus France in the Handball World Championships (currently being held in Germany). As I hardly ever order fish at the restaurant I decided to go for the Red Snapper (with rice and mango chutney). I was sorely disappointed though as my fish was bloody tough and chewy, although everyone else's meals looked delicious.

Tonight I'm in the Maritim hotel at Hannover Airport. It's huge, with a giant atrium with hangliders hanging from the ceiling. It seems to be set up to cater for business conferences, but I'm yet to check out the dining and drinking facilities. Hopefully they'll be decent, but it's not the ideal place to be spending a Friday evening.

[Update: I went out to dinner at one of the hotel restaurants (well the only one that was open) and had a great meal - far better than last nights rubbish (and that's not too harsh a way of describing it). As you expect from a restaurant I got the complementary bread, but this came in three different varieties and with butter and pesto - pesto goes very well on a nice piece of buttered bread, although I'd never put them together before. I then got a small complementary starter of some lamb wrapped in pastry and a lemon grass soup - as I said it was completely complementary and not something I ordered, but it was bloody nice. Next came my starter which was some rabbit with salady vegetables, but which also included some chicken wrapped in spinach! Again it was lovely. My main course was a venison dish which was sort of like beef wellington, but with the cow substituted for deer. This came with some fried red onion, some potato, carrot and turnip cakes, something bready that I couldn't identify, and (this being Germany and all) some sourkraut. It was great, and meant that I'd had a total of 4 different animals like a true carnivore. Finally I got a complementary chocolate mousse, which although tiny was very nice, and was made all the better by the fact that the waitress who brought it over was attractive. The whole meal was washed down with a couple of glasses of Weissbier. The meal was great, but the sad fact is that I was eating on my own. It does make me feel rather awkward sitting at a table on my own between courses just twiddling my fingers. After the meal I decided to have a drink in the hotel bar (called Bar Night Flight). After one pint I couldn't take it anymore. I can drink in bars on my own if there's some sport to watch, but just sitting at the bar nursing a pint whilst a lounge style piano player/singer warbles at you was too depressing for me (I also wanted to punch the pianist/singer as at the end of each song he'd repeat the last line in a whisper e.g."I wanna make love to you, baaabbyyyyy".)

Travelling salesman

At the moment I'm away on a whirlwind tour of Hannover's many hotels. I'm in Hannover to take part in a visit by our funding agency PPARC to our very own gravitational wave detector GEO600. Tonight we'll be schmoozing with the visiting dignitaries. Tomorrow we visit the detector site and then head back into Hannover to the Albert Einstein Institute where we will give a selection of talks. The upshot of this trip is that I'm staying in three different hotels over the three nights I'm here. Last night was the Holiday Inn and Hannover Airport. It's a pleasant hotel, clean and modern, and with spacious, well designed rooms. They do a good selection of beers and a nice cheese burger and the staff are polite. As with many of the large chain hotels they have extortionately priced wireless internet though! Tonight I stay at the Van der Valk Hotel in Hildesheim. Then Friday night will be in the Maritim Hotel again at Hannover Airport. We'll see how they compares.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let me begin...

Today I gave my first undergraduate astronomy lecture on Observational Methods - or telescopes and detectors as the majority of the course will be. The lecture style I have decided upon isn't quite the fully old school chalk and talk method (my writing-on-the-blackboard skills aren't well developed enough for that), but is fairly routed in non-digital technology by using overhead projector slides. These are supplemented with the standard array of handouts and a few nice pictures displayed, in a nod towards digital technology, via the medium of my laptop and a digital projector. The first lecture seemed to go fairly smoothly with no full on technological breakdowns, or student riots or walkouts. I was also there on time and didn't overrun - what more could you ask for? I'm not sure, however, if the students are too enamoured with the amount of writing they were expected to do. In the classic tone of "You don't know how lucky you are! In my day..." I should tell them that my, in my opinion, fairly sparse slides are nothing compared to the amount writing I did in some of my undergraduate courses - and I was bloody well grateful for it to! To be fair to the students I've not actually received this complaint, but it was more of a feeling I got. Given time their hands will get used to writing notes and they'll appreciate what good training I'm giving them when it comes to having to write lots in their exams ;) Also, as I'm kind at heart, I've posted the lectures on the web for the students to download, despite rather sternly telling them that I wouldn't do it until the course was finished as I didn't trust them to not just stop turning up at the lectures. Anyway giving the lecture was actually quite fun and hopefully the students might actually enjoy them! I'll have to think of some good off-topic anecdotes to tell them - "... and I saw this telescope and it was THIS big!"

Is it new?

One of the main things I've managed to do so far at GWDAW11, whilst supposedly listening to other peoples talks, is to start drafting a new paper! It's on something I, and some other Glasgow people, thought about a while back - I finally decided it might be worth following up. I did a bit of a literature search for similar things (thank you NASA ADS), and it's a close run thing, but the idea for the paper doesn't seem to have been done before. It should be quite easy to do the work for it in a short time. Get in!

Questions

A couple of days ago I did my first real academic style job - I set an exam question. I can't tell you what the question is just in case an actual student has a look at this here blog. It's a question for a general physics paper (something I never had to go through during my undergraduate days) which meant that there was a fairly large scope when thinking of it. I'm quite proud of my question and hope it makes it onto the exam paper. If it does make it onto the exam it could mean more marking for me though!