In my face

The other day I joined the internet social networking revolution and got myself a Facebook account. I was invited to join by a friend from my undergraduate days back at UCL. From what I'd previously read Facebook was set up as a way for people at universities (initially the likes of the Ivy League US universities) to keep in contact, organise events, date, etc, and for those reasons I felt it should be hated. I even had a rather long rant about it once (not recorded anywhere). I've mellowed in my view of it now and it seems a lot more open to anyone now which makes it a bit nicer. I'm am on there as a UCL alumni, which was one of the first batch of UK universities to be on it (because UCL types can be rather arrogant and like to think of themselves as rather brilliant Ivy League types). I'm not sure how much I'll actually use it and have no real desire to go about trying to create a large social network on it, but I've set up an RSS feed from here so it may open up a wider readership to my blog. At the moment I only have a network of two people. If you would like to be in my facebook group/network/social circle then send me a message.

Beta blogger

I've just switched to the new β version of blogger. It seems to be linked to having a google account in some way - I may be terribly out of date but do google own blogger now? It has funky new features, so you may see some changes to this site in the new future. For a start I can add labels for my posts like those people on livejournal have. I don't know whether this new version supports TraceBack yet though, but we shall see. Update: it would appear that it doesn't have TraceBack, so I may have to use the workaround suggested here.

The Swedish prize - part 2

(As I was saying yesterday...) this morning saw the announcement of the Nobel prize for Physics. It went to two guys (Smoot and Mather who were the PIs - Principal Investigators - on the COBE satellite) and is for an astrophysics based discovery (hooray!) - measuring the blackbody temperature and finding anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background (CMBR) using said COBE satellite. I'll leave it to Sean at Cosmic Variance to explain this in more detail in his post here. Quite a few other people have written about this to in a far more informed way than I can manage if you search about a bit. This is the second Nobel prize to go the the CMBR, the first being it's discovery by Penzias and Wilson in 1965. I predict that if there's another Nobel going to CMBR based discoveries in the not too distant future (and I'm sure it'll be trying for the hat-trick) it'll be for the discovery of a stochastic background of gravitational waves in the polarisation of the microwave background. That may just be my gravitational wave bias talking though.

The ecstacy and the agony

So today I watched my first Watford game of the season, playing Fulham at home. We were on 3 points after the first six games, with three draws and three loses. From what I'd heard we'd actually been playing quite well, with a fair amount of spirit, but had yet to be able to pull off a win. I was hoping today would be a different affair. With the added support of me watching the game we could hardly lose. The first half saw us pushing forward with lots of verve and passion, monopolising the possession and creating the best chances. All this forward play lead to one goal, involving a lovely chip from Ashley Young onto Marlon King, who after looking like he'd lost his balance managed to recover and put the ball in the net.

The Fulham manager Chris Coleman surely had some harsh words for his players at half time as they were out on the pitch a full five minutes before kick off. This didn't seem to have helped sure up the Fulham defense as after a mistake by Volz Watford got a great break on. This lead to a second Watford goal scored by Young from a fantastic cross by Bouazza. So 2-0 up only a minute into the second half. I am the lucky charm that I was hoping I'd be. This is surely going to be our first win of the season. Well how wrong could I be. Fulham decide to start to play, actually holding onto the ball for a bit, and our defense suddenly decide to go to pot. Fulham get a goal back and Watford become far too nervous and look quite shakey. Then Fulham get the equaliser - disaster! What are we doing. What happens next is even worse, we fail to clear the ball from our box about 4 times during a goal mouth scramble and then score an own goal. Nooooooooo! Going from 2-0 up and looking quite commanding, to losing three stupid, stupid goals.

That wasn't quite it though. In the last few minutes it got rather exciting with Young managing to pull back an equaliser for us. To be fair, Young did have a great game. I'm liking the look of the lad. So it ended 3-3. We had squandered our lead, but managed to salvage a point at least. Next up are we're away to Arsenal, maybe our first win there then!

The Swedish prize

Tomorrow see's the announcement of the Nobel prize for physics. I have no idea of who's in the running, but no doubt it'll be for something done about 20 years ago - something pretty damn good mind you. Today was the turn of medicine to get it's prize and it went to two guys (Fire and Mello) who did pioneering work on RNA interference, which has revolutionised a lot of modern genetics - allowing people to understand the role of gene expression far more widely and easily than before. The work was only done 8 years ago, which is a very short turn around for getting a Nobel. We then have prizes for Chemistry on Wednesday, Peace on Friday, Economic next Monday, and an undecided date for Literature.

Giant Ruddy Bangs

Last week I was down in the big smoke of London attending the grand surroundings of the Royal Society. There was a discussion meeting on γ-Ray bursts - GRBs - (intense flashes of γ-rays seen from space), which I was going to. The discussion there was very topical with a lot of talks being about recent results from the Swift satellite, which was specifically designed to spot these GRBs and then quickly slew onto their location and look at the afterglows from the original burst. Observing these afterglows is the key to working out the underlying process which causes the burst. Now I'd heard that bursts where catagorised into two types, short and long duration, depending on how long the initial flash lasted, with short ones lasting ~< a few seconds, and long ones lasting up to a few hundred seconds. I also thought that current knowledge suggested that the short bursts where from the inspirals/merger of a pair of compact objects e.g. neutron star binaries or black hole - neutron star binaries, and long bursts where collapsars e.g. a supernova in which the ejected material can't escape and falls back onto collapsed core in an accretion disk. Turns out that things are far more complicated than this two category system! There are all sorts of differences seen in and between bursts currently catagorised within one or other of the systems - with differences in the energies of the initial bursts, short bursts looking like long bursts, afterglows being mysteriously absent etc. Obviously there's still a lot more to find out about these events, but at the moment there's just a lot of stamp collecting and building up enough events to start making better catagorisations and working out what's really going on. Are these bursts all from the same kind of underlying event but just seen differently (i.e. a viewing angle effect) or are they completely different kinds of things, like white-dwarf mergers rather than collapsars?! There's enough going on in the field to keep the theorists and observationalists happy (or at least scratching their heads) for a while yet. Hopefully us gravitational wave types can detect something to help those guys out.

Carbon, carbon everywhere

Right, it's time to take action! Now normally I'm a bit apathetic or just plain cynical (or maybe just too lazy) when it comes to petition type things, but I decided I'm going to change my ways for one issue at least. That issue is going to be climate change and the capping of Carbon Dioxide emissions. In the past I have actually been quite dismissive of the whole climate change thing, or at least mankinds contribution to it - I didn't have any doubt that the world has been heating up over the past century. I mean the Earth's climate has fluctuated wildly over its lifetime and the reasons for it were probably solar, or volcanic in origin. But I've come round to the view that mankind is certainly contributing a majority of the current temperature increase, and this could cause us some rather large problems in the not too distant future. There've been many recent climate reports from all sorts of governments and NGOs, all of which give very stark warnings about what will happen, but still governments (which as I just said have commissioned some of these reports) have not put any substantial policy into action - and I don't care about the Kyoto agreement, because it was fairly wishy washy and insubtantial in the first place. After seeing yet another report on these issues on Newsnight tonight I thought I'd write to my MP on these issues i.e. getting a yearly commitment to specific, and tough, CO_2 reduction targets, having a dedicated minister responsible for dealing with these issues and getting all other departments to legislate with these targets as a top priority, and also the need for these issues to be a top priority on a world stage. Now it was mentioned on Newsnight that Friends of the Earth, unsuprisingly, are campaining on these very things, and actually have a letter draft already set up - saving me the bother of writing one myself. This letter will be emailed to your local MP to encourage them to sign a proposed bill addressing the first of my points above. I encourage you to follow the link and send the letter in, or write your own letter and send it to everyone you can think of i.e. Tony Blair, the Queen, etc. Also encourage all your friend to send it in, email and pester them about it, also get your non-British friends to send a similar letter to there government representatives. This is only a first start obviously, but if everyone does this for as a first thing and then keeps sending more emails/letters and the like then thing may get done!!

Now I just have to find a way to justify my flight from Glasgow to London today, rather than walking down and planting trees on my way.

A good day for the Brits

This evening many European national teams were playing the second of their qualification matches for the 2008 European Championship. The British teams playing today (Scotland, Northern Ireland and England) all won, which is very good. The England game, which is the only won I saw all of, was however a rather disappointing affair. This was the first England game I've watched in a Scottish pub since seeing us go out of the World Cup (and we all know my last experience), but admittedly there've only been two England games since then and for one of them I was in America. We just didn't play well at all, couldn't pass for anything and just kept losing the ball. Some of the players just didn't be seeming to bother trying to even look where they were passing. We won, which is the main thing, but I'd like the players to at least try a bit harder, as having a 1-0 lead makes it a bit more nervy than it really should be. Scotland did well beating Lithuania away from home (I only saw brief bits of the game, so can't really comment on the performance), so they're now on top of their table on goal difference ahead of France. This should hopefully give them confidence to go on and perform well when they have to play France and Italy. The best, and most shocking result, was Northern Ireland's 3-2 win against Spain. I saw the last 15 mins of this game, and it was far more exciting than the whole of the England game. A brilliant result for them after their disappointing result against Iceland at the weekend. So all in all a nice evening for the home coutries, lets hope it continues.

And the winner is...

...Jodrell Bank. The lovely Lovell radio telescope sitting in the Cheshire countryside has won the BBC unsung landmarks competition. I think it is a very deserved winner and more people should appreciate the beauty of astronomical instrumentation. There are some great telescopes around the world that look fantastic and are truely epic pieces of engineering. You've got things like the Gemini and Keck telescopes, with huge 8-10 m mirrors that had to be transported to altitudes of a few km at the top of mountains - in fact at the Gemini South site in the Chilean Andes they had to blow the top of a mountain to flatten it out! You've got the Arecibo radio telescope which is 305 m across and built in a huge sinkhole in Puerto Rica. These are amazing instruments doing cutting edge science. I suggest visiting their respective websites to check how good these thing look to. Older smaller telescopes also look pretty damn cool and beautiful too and are incredible demonstrations of precision engineering from 100s of years ago - check out the pictures of the Radcliffe and Joynson telescopes which I got to use as an undergraduate at the University of London Observatory.

Update: It's been pointed out to me that I missed our our own beloved GEO600 in my speil about wondorous astronomical instrumentation. This was an oversite on my part. I should also give a nod to our maybe slightly more impressive and larger (well it eats a bit too much ;) ) American cousin LIGO.

Roll with it

On Sunday I dusted off (and they really were quite dusty) my roller skates. I've had these since I was 14, so getting on 11-12ish years, when our school (well whole city really) went through a roller skating stage. Now back in the day (aka the mid-90s) many places got in with the new-fangled inline/roller blades style action, but St Albans wasn't like that - oh no, we were old school! We shunned the inline wheels and went for the two wheels side-by-side at the front and back, as nature intended. Everyone had them, from the old women with blue rinses, to the smallest newborn baby. Obviously I had to get with the program and buy a pair. At the time me and my friends would whizz around on our bewheeled feet, oblivious to the many dangers that we faced, i.e. cars on roads and general steep slopes, and we lived to tell the tail. We even went to the occasional roller disco, which aren't proper roller discos unless at least one person break and appendage, in my opinion. A lot of fun was had rolling around in general.

So basically after all these years (well with some uses and wheel/bearing upgrades) I decided to give skating another go. I went down to Kelvingrove Park, which has some flatish surfaces, but also rather too many hilly bits. The last time I'd put the skates on was about 3 years ago (also in Kelvingrove Park), so I was a bit nervous to start with. I can skate okay, but still when I pick up a bit of speed I rather worry about whether I can stop again. After I bit I gained more confidence, but refrained from trying to speed about too much. It has also been raining a bit, so the surfaces were quite slick, which means that you have to be a bit more careful - especially when encountering wet leaves on the ground. I didn't skate for that long as it started to piss it down, but I enjoyed it and will try to go out more regularly from now on. Maybe I'll get back to the stage where I can skate backwards (properly) and do jumps and stuff.

The day of no internet

Today was a long, hard and tedious day. I had to read things off flattened, dried wood pulp and write things using ink rolled from the tip of a thin tube onto said wood pulp. Why was I forced into such backwards, primitive, stoneage style, actions? Because, I'm afraid, my computer at work was slightly buggered. Well, my computer itself was fine, but the server which held our home directories had been upgraded, and unfortunately was having some teething problems, which in general meant I couldn't log into my account and use the thing. This meant I spent a day with no access to the lovely, lovely joys of the internet. Do you know how that feels!? If I'd chosen to take a day offline it wouldn't have been so bad. It would have been a self appointed abstination, which would have left me feeling good about myself. This unwanted internet break, however, left me feeling angry and out of touch with the ebb and flow of the world around me. How does one know what's going on without access to the BBC news I ask you!? Do you know what I was reduced to during this enforced web disconnect? I actually had to try and do some non-computery work! I read some papers which had been sitting on my desk for weeks. I went through some notes I'd been meaning to go over in detail. I tried to finally fathom out the whole covariance matrix/derivatives of the log likelihood thing! It was horrifying I tell you.

Anyway, things are back to normal now. Our sys admin has sorted things and I now have a home directory to call my own. Hoorah! Tomorrow I be able to do it, but today I even missed looking through the arxiv preprints this morning - how sad!

Where are all the Watford blogs?

I just cast a google net out for people who are blogging about Watford FC and found just the one site - good on this guy for trying though (he also is into trees). I know we're not that big a club, but I'd thought more people might want to write about us. I'll try and keep up some comments on them here, but I don't want to turn into an exclusively football fan based blog. I'm hoping the other guy will have some good posts now we're into the new season, which I can just link to.

I should say something about the other nights game (Watford 1 - West Ham 1) that I gleaned from the brief highlights on Match of the Day last night - we again played some good football and showed a lot of commitment, we had a lot of chances and a fair few goal scoring opportunities which could have clinched a win for us if only we'd had some better finishing. We're showing promise for the rest of the season and don't think we'll be heading back down again without putting up a good fight. These comments have been put together from the Big Book of Generic Footballing Phrases by Mr A. Pundit.

Point on the board

Yesterday the mighty Hornets (aka Watford FC) got their first point on the board in the new Premiership season - we drew 1-1 with West Ham at home. Let's hope there are many more of these precious points to come. Not sure how the game went, but hopefully they'll be some hightlights on Match of the Day in a few minutes time. I assume we played excellently of course, and where somehow robbed by an injustice of epic proportions ;)

Today I (and my three co-authors) had an abstract accepted for a poster at the Royal Society GRB discussion meeting in London next month. I'm hoping that there's a conference proceedings for this just because we'd get published in the Philisophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, which sounds cool!

Beg your pudding

Why oh why have Richard Ayoade and Matthew Holness forsaken us!? The DVD of Darkplace has been delayed yet again until January next year, arrghh! And we'd planned some sort of Darkplace viewing evening and everything.

On actual astrophysics news more compelling evidence (or even dare I say proof) for the existence of dark matter has been found (see the BBC article here, the actual paper here, or Sean Carroll's - he held the press conference for the news release - very good cosmicvariance post here). Also an interesting paper I read this morning is this, in which John Middleditch tries to overturn pretty much all of current supernova theory! He seems to be on a bit of a mission and have some bones with either certain people or just the general atitude of recent cosmological thinking. His paper is a bit of a rant, but raises some interesting, although maybe wildly inaccurate, questions - many of which could probably be answered sensibly by people more in the know than me (I'm glad I'm not going to have to be peer reviewing it for whichever journal it's been submitted to). However his ideas are intriguing if not only for that fact that from what I can make out they might provide a bounty of sources for gravitational wave types like me!

Britain, Britain, Britain...

I'm back in good ol' Blighty. It's so nice when you look out the plane window and see the green fields of the UK. They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence (or ocean), but I say that we have the best green grass around.

The were no hold ups or delays on our flights back and we were allowed hand baggage on board which relieved some of the boredom. The security checks (or lack of) were still rather farsical though. I mean the ban on liquids (new film - Lakes on a plane - terrorists hijack a plane using a terrifying combination of water from Windemere, Superior and Titikaka, anyone!), gels and lotions amounted to people being told not to bring them on board. Actual checks that this was being followed were rather random and pretty incomplete that they may as well have not bothered. I mean there were people carrying large suitcases on board, which surely would have contained toothpaste at least, an probably some hair product, or make-up, and security didn't seem to mind one bit.

Red stick

A brief description of where I've been in Baton Rouge (i.e. the place I've been at a meeting for the last week):-
It's rather hot and humid during August - luckily most places inside are air conditioned. It's a proper college town, in that everything relates to LSU (Louisiana State University). Their mascot is a Tiger, so there are many tigers in all the merchandise! We're staying near the main campus so are surrounded by frat and sorority houses - some of them look pretty damn nice, but by virtue of them being frat/sorority houses are most likely filled with twats (it being out of term time most of them are empty - hurray!). We've been staying in a hotel which is named after a guy called Lod (yes that's right Lod, short for Lodwrick) Cook, who was an LSU alumni and rich oil magnate - he's met pretty much every recent US president, many movie stars, has an honourary knighthood, and is basically properly in the know - he may however be dead, we're not sure! There are many turtles and herons on the lake near our conference hall. Nowhere has the Fox Soccer Network (even the supposedly "English" pub and grill called the Fox and Hound), so we couldn't watch the Englang versus Greece game - which we won 4-0 by the way. The pub/restaurant called The Chimes has a very good selection of beers on draught, and some nice Cajun style food. The bar called Slinky's has a very well decorated mens toilet! and is very nice for the general dive that it is. There are other things to, but I wont mention them now.

I've been to Baton Rouge a couple of times before and this description is based on my current trip only - plus I'm rather tired at the moment. My next post will probably come from back in the UK.

Emo-a-no-no

I sent the comic link from my last post to some of my friends and got the general response that a lot of the cartoons were a load of emo wank. It's true, a lot of them are emo wank (love hearts and all!), but their are a few cartoons which are hilarious (which was also acknowledged).

Monkey see, monkey put on blog

So blatantly taking stuff from another blog here (found on the very good cosmicvariance which I keep plugging - read it for it is good), but I enjoyed it so I though I'd spread the joy. From this post there are some great cartoons/comic strips taken from this website - take a look at it and laugh. Here's a couple that were posted on cosmicvariance:


And here's a few I saw just looking at xkcd that I liked - there are some far more funny ones on the website though - I'm sitting at the back of my conference pissing myself whilst looking at them:


And for the truely geeky:

Definitely have a look.

New York Cares

...so we were in Newark airport with our vocuhers for free things. We take the free shuttle bus from the hotel to the airport. The driver of the bus decides that we don't really want to be staying at the hotel that the airline had planned for us, but instead we want to stay at a different hotel. He tells us that his hotel has alcohol (nod, wink) whereas the one we'd supposed to be going to didn't. We liked his thinking and went along with it. At the hotel we made use of the free dinner vouchers to get some ice cold bottles of Corona sent up to our room - they we're concerned that we didn't want any actual food, but we reassured them that that was just fine. It was now time to fight off the tiredness we were feeling and explore the Big Apple.

We got the shuttle bus back to the hotel, then the airport airtrain to the station. It was then a 25 minutes train ride into Penn Station in New York. Out of Chris, James and I, Chris was the only one who'd been to NY before, so he becames official guide. Apparentlty street numbers get larger from south to north, and avenue numbers get larger from west to east - all laid out in a big grid. We set out to go to 42nd Street - we went the wrong way, luckily we caught this error very quickly and turned around. It's a fairly busy city, well at least it is at about 6.30pm on a Friday. For a while we just wander about a bit along a couple of streets staring up at buildings and dodging all the people. All the buildings are rather high and you're constantly staring up at them. After a while we thought we should actually decide on a destination, so started to head towards Central Park. We walked up a road containing many exclusive looking shops like Luis Vuitton, De Beers and Tiffany's and also the most 80's sky scraper ever, Trump Tower, until we got to Central Park. Central Park contained many people roller blading and jogging as you might expect. It also had lots of horse and carriages, but we weren't tempted to take a ride.

Hunger started to strike, so food was in order. We happened across a restaurant called something like the Brooklyn Diner - we were sold. It definitely looked the part. On their menu they had (ringed by a large red box) the famous cheese burger - recommended by the New York Times (or some such newspaper) as being the best burger in New York. We saw some other people with it and it was large. Again, we were sold. The waitress almost didn't have to ask what we wanted, I said "Three..." and she finished with "...cheese burgers." The burgers were very good, although I can't vouch for them being the best in New York, as I only have the one sample. It seems that we weren't the only people who enjoyed this diner as the walls were covered in small plaques containing the names of famous people who'd eaten there (this is what we assumed anyway). We were in a booth containing Kevin Spacey and Vanessa Redgrave, to name but two - well the two names we actually recognised as being famous people!

Next we decided to go to the Empire State Building - well you've got to really haven't you. This required us to go on the Subway, or at least the fact that we were knackered and our feet hurt required us to be able to not have to walk. We made it to the Empire States Building after eventually finding the right Subway stop and passing the many examples of the classic image of steam coming out of drain covers. We looked up at it and it was tall. By this time it was gone 10pm and we were all feeling very tired. Did we want to go up the Empire State or just go back to the hotel. We were at a large risk of actually falling asleep there and then so we went for the return to the hotel option - sounds boring I know, but we really were incredibly knackered. I go up it next time I'm in New York and I think I'll definitely make an effort to go back. It's seems like it could be a really good city to get to know.

We got back to the hotel about 2 hours later after a series of delays, but finally got to bed for about 5 hours sleep before our journey recommenced. I may right about this later.

P.S. Anyone who gets the reference for this posts title gets bonus point.

Ping-pong with a difference

Chris and I have just invented a great new game. In the Louisiana State University Physics and Astronomy Department they have a common room containing a table tennis table. The room is also furnished with ping-pong balls - two orange and two classic ping-pong ball white. This is almost all you need to play table tennis, but unfortunately not quite enough. Yep, we were missing not just one bat, but two, thus making the game impossible, Well that's what you might think, but we are wiley, ingenious physics types. Improvising with our most bat-like appendage, our hands, we were able to play a reasonable game. This did have the problem of slightly hurting our knuckles, when playing a particularly vigorous shot. Casting our eyes around the room we hit upon some other bat-like implements - a fish slice and a tray. These served well and enabled and enjoyable game. We did get some strange looks from people walking passed the room though. Send me your ideas for other racket substitutes.

Coming to America

On Friday I had the lucky opportunity to try out the new heightened red-alert-critical-awwooooga-awooooga-level security at UK airports. People may have noticed that on Thursday our plucky security services, with the help of those good men (and women) in the Scotland Yard anti-terror unit, thwarted an evil attempt to blow up US bound planes from Britain. And how were these evil doers going to achieve this - well they were going to use that most innocent of phases of matter, something we all know and love in it's many incarnations - liquid (and/or its slightly more sinister cousins, the lotion or gel). This frightful plot led to clamp downs on pretty much any kind of hand baggage on flights out of the UK, especially those heading to the US.

So I (and some colleagues) was going to be heading out to my scientific collaboration meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the day after all this happened. After an hour and a half sleep on Thursday night (I was packing and trying to write the talk I was going to be giving at the meeting until late into the night) I got prepared to head to the airport early. Upon arriving at Glasgow airport we were given a leaflet showing the allowed items we could take on the plane, and were issued with our approved clear plastic bag (this weekends must have item!) into which we could place our allowed items. We complied and put our travel documents, wallets and keys into said bags and proceeded to check in our laptops, ipods, phones, books i.e. anything that might provide us with the slightest bit or entertainment on the flight. I didn't have to check any liquids as the only liquid I had were my own vital bodily fluids and I assumed there weren't going to require me to dessicate myself before boarding. Other than these extra restrictions on hand baggage the other security measures didn't seem any different from normal flights to the US - no extra questions, no extra-extra-friendly body searches. So fair enough we had to check all this stuff we'd normally take on the plane, but it's for our own safety and the rules apply to everyone right, we're all going to be equally bored on the plane. We'll actually this didn't quite seem to be the case. People still managed to get books (restricted), magazines (restricted), pens (restricted), packs of cards (restricted) onto the plane. At the extra security check we had before boarding they didn't seem at all bothered! So those of us who stuck by the rules weren't too happy.

The plane trip was as boring as you'd expect, with three rather shit films being shown. I can never sleep on a plane and this flight was no different. I ended up playing songs in my head, but there are only a few that I know all the lyrics to, so my playlist was quite restricted. Due to having had a band practice the night before we left, and one of the songs we're trying being White Wedding, I had the bass line to this on continuous loop in my brain.

By the time we landed (in Newark airport) it was quite obvious that we'd missed our connecting flight. As ever I breezed through immigration and customs - I never really had any problems getting into the US despite many peoples horror stories - the guy who cleared me through even seemed quite friendly and didn't have the usual angry, suspicious look on his face that I've come to expect. We then had to stand around for longer than usual waiting for our baggage as it was receiving some extra checks. We spent some of this time scowling at people who had restricted items blatantly showing in their clear plastic bags - the sheer cheek of it. When the luggage finally showed up on the conveyor belt there was a smattering of applause - well we were in America and they get quite excitable over there (some must have been itching to whoop or call out on some way). Surprisingly my laptop, phone and ipod were in their one respective pieces, without any dents or scratches, and having not actually been stolen by baggage handlers - hurrah! We proceeded to the flight connections desk to sort out some new flights onto our final destination. It was only 3pm in the afternoon, so we thought the possibility of getting connecting flights would be quite high, but apparently not. We were told that the next morning would be the only possibility. However, our airline (Continental) were going to put us up in a hotel for free. They also gave us vouchers to pay for dinner and breakfast. We resigned ourselves to having to spend an evening in Newark - it's just luck that Newark is only a short train ride from New York City! To be continued...

Apocalypse now (well in a couple of weeks!)

We are going to soon be ringing in the apocalypse, so some end of the worldish songs are needed. Here's my start (following on from Bob's):

• S.A.L.T. - The Orb - Orblivion
  
• Paranoid Android - Radiohead - OK Computer
  
• East Hastings - God Speed You Black Emperor - F#A# (Infinity)
  
• Eclipse - Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
  
• Higher than the Sun - Primal Scream - Screamadelica
  
• Jericho - The Prodigy - Experience
  
• Tears in the Rain - Vangelis - Blade Runner Soundtrack
  
• Satan - Orbital - Electronica
  
• Take California - Properllerheads - Electronica
  
• No God only religion - Spiritulized - Spiritulzied (live at the Royal Albert Hall)
  
• I am the Resurrection - The Stone Roses - The Stone Roses
  
• The Man Who Told Everything - Doves - Lost Souls
  
• Killing in the Name - Rage Against the Machine - Rage Against the Machine
  
• Champagne Supernova - Oasis - (What's the Story) Morning Glory
  
• Salva Mea - Faithless - Reverence
  
• The End is the Beginning is the End - Smashing Pumpkins
  
• The Show must go on - Queen - Queen's Greatest Hits II
  
• Building Steam With a Grain of Salt - DJ Shadow - Entroducing...
  
• How Soon is Now - The Smiths
  
• Invasion - U.N.K.L.E. - Never Neverland
  
• Darkness - Saian Supa Crew - Saian Supa Crew
  
• Ready or Not - The Fugees - The Score
  
• Melt - Leftfield - Leftism
  
• Phat Planet - Leftfield - Rhythm and Stealth
  

Expect more to be added soon.

Mad fer it

This weekend I broke out of my normal standard practices (i.e. going to the research club on Friday night followed by sleeping on Bob and Fiona's living room floor, followed by breakie at the Tea Garden) and went down to Manchester to meet up with some old friends from home. Manchester is kind of equidistant between me in Glasgow and the Londony area, where most of my mates are based. It also happens that my friend Justin and his girlfriend Kirsty have a house right near Manchester, which meant we had somewhere to stay for free.

I'd never visited Manchester before, so I didn't really know what to expect. As cities go it seems rather nice, with a centre not too disimilar from many other largish British cities. It's modern and clean, but still with a lot of nice old buildings and classic architecture. The general cross section of people seemed to come in your normal ratios of chavy/townie/neddy, trendy young professional, overweight, greasy looking middle aged couples, football shirt wearing types that you see across the nation. So it was fairly familiar territory as far as generalities go, but I didn't have my bearings at all - except for the up/down directions. I like having at least some idea of the layout of a place, to find my way around, but this normally only comes by doing a bit of vague wandering around, picking out landmarks and familiar sites. I've now got some idea of the set up of the city, so next time I'm down there I'll be able to stride about the place with an air of confidence - I'll probably still get horrendously lost though.

In our short time their, from my view at least, we managed to cover a fairly large chunk of the major night spots, and saw our prerequisite number of hen nights - bunny ears (or some other deely bopper type head gear) seemed to be the winning mode of dress. We went to a fair few bars and managed to consume a large variety of beers, shooters and other drinks and danced away like idiots to a selection of Madchester favourites (I couldn't help but sing along and wave my arms around in an Ian Brown style) and classic dance anthems. A great time was had by all and I definitely think I'll be heading back to Manchester at some point.

My humanity to others (ubuntu) remains

So I tried getting rid of my Linux (Ubuntu for those who are interested in my favoured distribution) partition, but failed. This is mainly due to my ineptitude at reconfiguring my partitions. Basically I tried to just delete the Linux partition and then expand my existing Windows (NTFS) partition into the free space - QTparted (which I was running from a Knoppix CD) didn't want to do this. Also because my GRUB loader now couldn't find the Linux partition (which I had managed to delete) it just decided to throw up an error and stop, so I couldn't even access Windows. Now I'm sure there are ways to get to your Master Boot Record and change things around there to make everything work again, but I don't know how to do this, so what I had to do was reinstall Linux (this time on a much smaller partition) so that I could reinstall GRUB. I did however manage to leave another 20Gb partition which I formatted as FAT32 so it can be accessed with read and write in both Windows and Linux - this should give me enough space to play with. So I still have Linux, which is good, and I now have more disk space to access from Windows - things didn't turn out too bad and I've not had to reformat the entire drive or anything.

Let the wall come down

Right, the time has come to remove the aparthied from my hard disk between NTFS and ext3. I currently have a Windows partition and a Linux partition, although unfortunately with my current level of disk space one of them has to go. After much soul searching and internal wrangling I've had to opt for the keeping of Windows - I know, I know, it shouldn't be that way, but for my purposes it's just how it's got to be. I just don't use Linux enough on my home computer, and still haven't been able to get the my wireless to work under it (admittedly I've not tried as hard as I could have), so the 20Gb it currently has is going to have to be given over to store more music and stuff. When in the future I get another harddisk then rest assured I'll get with the pengiuns again, but for now I'll just have to cope with only using Linux at work. I will post again soon if this process goes without hitches, otherwise it may be longer as I'll have to reformat the entire disk. Finger's crossed that qtparted can do it's stuff - yes, yes, I'm using a Linux tool to get rid of Linux, it's not quite right I know.

They're floaty light

Floating confectionary. Helium filled flying saucers. Hot air balloonesque meringue. Clouds of whipped cream - whipped with Hydrogen that is. It's the future people!

Semi-naked

The past few days have been noticably warmer than usual, in fact we (that is we as in the British summer) seem to be setting records in the old heat stakes. This heat provides me with ample opportunity to force the site of my bare torso on the unassuming public - and it seems that I'm not the only one. I'd obviously prefer to be doing this on a lovely tropical beach, but being as there's no such tropical beach a short strole away from Glasgow Uni, I've been having to strip down in the University grounds at lunchtime. It's a very nice place to sit and have lunch, but in the heat it does lack a bit of nice clear blue sea to dive into and cool off. They university needs to employ some roaming ice-cream/cold beverage/fan sellers to tend to our heat reduction needs during hot days like this. Or they could at least install some sort of paddling pool/lido on the grounds.

One thing that I've discovered is a rather sweaty activity to do in the sweltering heat is drumming - even when you are just wearing your shorts. I was having a bit of practice this evening and was dripping by the end of it - this is especially sweaty when trying to keep up with some high tempo beat. It's no wonder that drummers are famed for wearing cut-off t-shirts, or just discarding with the t-shirt altogether. I'll have to consult my bandmates to agree on a level of attire that they consider acceptable for me to wear.

Some things are like other things

Now don't you ever get caught out when trying to explain a bit of out there theoretical physics to the lay man, and think "what I really need is a useful analogy to a real world situation that they can relate to". Well if you don't then you should, because I'm forever in those sorts of situations. Why only today I was trying to explain the about Gravitational Radiation from Standing Accretion Shock Instability in Core-Collapse Supernovae to a passing ned (for non-Glasgow folk see here for the definitive ned guide) and instead of thanks for enlightening them on the subject I got a harsh chibbing. If only I'd had a Buckfast or Kappa based analogy to hand I might have only received a light bottling - I made this story up, but it illustrates the point.

So on this note (and having talked a bit about it with Bob the other day) I would like to set up some sort of repository of physics/astronomy analogies. I've heard some good ones in the past and promptly forgotten them, so it would be nice to have them written down and collated somewhere. For the moment this repository will just be this post and its comments section, but this may move somewhere else if I get a large number of analogies. And this is where you come in, my loyal reader(s), if you can think of or have heard any good (well even bad) physicsy analogies then send them to me. Also spread the word to others.

I would like to kick this off with a good analogy myself, but my mind is drawing a blank. I'll try better for tomorrow.

Zi Zi Top

So the World Cup is over. We've had a month of intense football to light up our days and nights, and now there's only void. There've been some good times and some bad times, but it's been an exciting part of my life for the duration (maybe that makes me sound a bit sad and football obsessed, but what the hey). No more sights of the pie man himself Ronaldo, attempting to waddle ineffectually towards the ball. No more amazement at Klinsmann somehow pulling it out of the bag and turning the German's into a major force. No more confusion at how the Spanish and Dutch managed to, once again, have really great teams, but still not making it very far. No more concern over how some of the match officials were allowed to officiate on such a high level stage. No more cameramen focusing on the most attractive girl in the crowd. No more bewilderment at the lack of a star striker shining through in the tournament - it was all midfielders! No more tension between Martin O'Neill and Marcel Desailly in the BBC punditry team - O'Neill was as brilliantly blunt as ever. No more theatrics and pouting from Cristiano Ronaldo. No more 25 pass wonderfully worked goals from the Argentinian's. No more jeans wearing, chain smoking managers like the Mexican manager Ricardo "the Wolf" la Volpe, or histrionics from Guus Hiddink. No more super volley's from the likes of Cole and Maxi Rodrigez. No more Rooney petulance. No more of Zidane's breath-taking excellence and show stopping madness. No more dream destroying red cards. No more heart breaking penalty shoot outs. No more superlatives. No more... football... and all the brilliantly bizarre side show that goes along with it.

Well I suppose there's only just over a month until the new Premiership season starts and I get the joys of watching the mighty Watford taking their rightful place amongst the big boys. First match is against the Toffeemen - bring 'em on.

Space: Above and Beyond

I was going to post this yesterday, but hadn't finished writing it - so now in all its glory is my controversial space rant (also the post I reference was actually written a week ago, so I'm being rather slow on the uptake in the fast moving world of the blogosphere - can't believe I just used that word!):

This post has nothing to do with the little known space war type sci-fi effort from the producers of the X-files - much under-rated and cancelled criminally early though it was. Instead I'm going to talk about a much debated subject amoung astronomers - whether we should be spending money on (NASA) sending people back to the Moon and on to Mars. I'm just writing this now, because I saw a post about it on cosmicvariance the other day. Many professional astronomers/astrophysicists it seems are the harshest critics of more manned spaceflight, with a proposed return to Mars being subject to lots of ire. There are good reasons for this, and generally the biggest reason is that money spent on manned spaceflight could see them potentially out of a job! This is due to NASA having a limited amount of funding, a large chuck of which has been earmarked by the current US administration for R&D into Moon/Mars missions, meaning other projects for which money had been promised are either scrapped or greatly delayed. These scrapped/delayed missions are ones that many astrophysicists need to continue there research and to get grants for post-graduate students/post-docs. So you can see they wouldn't be pleased about this diversion of monies away from their projects. Indeed one of the missions being held up (at the NASA end rather than the ESA side) by this funding issue is a the space-based gravitational wave mission LISA, so I should myself declare a vested interest.

Having said all that I'm all for manned spaceflight of the going out to Mars variety even though it costs an extraordinary amount of money. A quandary that many astrophysicists who are so opposed to spending money on this rather than their own particular pet project must have is that a lot were probably inspired into their line of work by the thought of space travel. You'll ask many what they wanted to be when they were kids and they'll have said "Astronaut". Also by our very nature, we astrophysisicts are of quite a geeky bent (ok so a bit of a grand generalisation there) and grew up reading/watching far too much sci-fi of a flying through space/visiting other planets/meeting aliens style. This is why we got into the job in the first place people! But, hey, I suppose you have to leave those grand dreams of childhood behind especially when you're job could be on the line. It just annoys me that the very thing that inspired so many, is something that they now turn their backs on.

There are some astrophysicists who think the whole idea of sending people into space is just a big old naive pie in the sky dream (I don't like that type I don't). "We don't need to send people to other planets to do good science, look at what robotic mission's are already doing - it's great stuff" they say. And yes you can do loads of great science with robotic missions, and yes they're cheaper and less risk, but, god, they can be boring! I mean they still quite excite me - I like pictures of Sojourner trundling along the Martian landscape - but to the general public it must seem fairly pish really. I mean you could put a picture of a cute kid's face on a Mars rover and call it little Timmy, but it's not going to evoke an emotional response. What you need is people. People can empathise with people, they can see the endeavour that they've undertaken, the risks, the hardships, all for the sake of exploring something new. And they could do some very good science whilst also being all "Look at me, I'm the first person on Mars. Aren't I great!" - it's not quite Armstrongesque, but you get the picture. And this is the point - people in space inspires others - it creates an interest in space that other things can't achieve. There are some who say that the amazing science achieved (and I agree there's been some pretty ground breaking and Nobel prize winning, down right awesome results) by the HST/Chandra/WMAP/XMM/Spitzer/etc should be enough to inspire interest in astronomy/physics/sciecne in the general public, but is it really? At the moment we have astronauts on the ISS, but it doesn't do it for people as they're not seen as doing anything up there. But if they were striking out across the solar system, that'd be another thing. The public would lap it up, and all things space would see the benefit.

So there are those who don't want to see money wasted on space travel at all and then there are those who still like the thought of people in space, but say "if you could only just wait until after I've got funding for my project, please". It's a case of just put it off for a bit, because obviously in the future there won't be other people equally desperate to get funding for their vital-to-the-understanding-of-the-universe satellite. You can't just keep saying let's put it off for a bit, or it'll never happen.

An even more annoying group of people in the anti-going back to the Moon/Mars group are those who are opposed to it just because it's been proposed by the Bush administration. As Bush is somehow the most evil thing ever - sort of a combination of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Wile. E. Coyote, Blofeld and Darth Vader rolled into one - nothing that comes out from his adminitration can be a good idea. I don't know if putting funding into space travel is some vaste right-wing neocon conspiricy, but to automatically say it's a bad thing cos it's done by Bush just seems rather narrow minded. Well maybe I'll be proved wrong when I find out that the money's actually not for sending people to Mars, but instead for setting up a solar system wide chain of Starbucks, or stealing oil from the Europans, or maybe even just commiting some sort of genocide the way evil types tend to do.

But basically I want a Neil Armstrong-type moment in my lifetime. I'm sick of seeing the footage of him stepping of the lander at Tranquility base and saying his immortal line, but knowing that I was 21 years too late to see it live. Everyone who saw it remembers it and it regularly tops polls of best thing ever done, ever! So I think we deserve another moment like that for ourselves.

Also, I want to go into space goddamnit. Imagine standing on one of Saturn's moons and looking up at Saturn's rings filling half the sky - I'm there!

Feeling hot, hot, hot

It's bloody roasting here. I have many windows open, but I still need dipping in something cool.

I did have an actually proper post to put up earlier today, but I got distracted from writing it by actual work - i'll finish it tomorrow, so prepare to be underwhelmed.

So as not to make this post completely pointless I got sent a couple of links today (by Iain) that people might want to look at. The first is not for those of a nervous disposition, and when I just said "might want to look at" really read "should steer well clear of", but it is a music video by the Hoff. It actually gets exponetially worse throughout, with no plateau or break in the attrociuosness. It also contains a mocked up version of KIT, as I assume the real KIT would have had no truck with such garbage.

The other link is to a trailer for the Tranformers movie. I don't want to spoil it, but Colin Pillinger was holding out on us!

Milk Man

I'm currently (well make that was) listening to a very strange tune called Milk Man by Aphex Twin (well it's by Aphex Twin so it's not that strange comparatively) - it goes along the lines of "I wish the milkman would deliver my milk in the morning, I wish the milkman would deliver my milk when I'm yawning... I would like some milk from the Milkman's wifes tits, I would like some milk from the Milkman's wife tits" etc, etc. It's actually a rather good tune, but I'm not sure about the dubious nature of Richard James' (aka Aphex Twin) prefered milk delivery mechanism. I think I was going to write about something else but I've gone a bit off topic there!

So what else have I been listening to whilst writing this - well there's been a fully instrumental version of Metallica's "The Unforgiven" by Apocalyptica, "My Red Hot Car (Girl)" by Squarepusher, which is very good and is probably the most bassy tune I have, "Mr Wendal" by Arrested Development, "Soul to Squeeze" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, which I didn't actually know I had, and now I'm listening to "Sloop John B" by the Beach Boys (in both mono and stereo). Fairly eclectic I'd say.

Becoming England

Ok calm... calm... yep, just about calm enough.

I've been living in Scotland for almost four years now and really I should know what to expect when watching England football matches in public. Despite this I still put myself through the torture of watching the games in pubs. This is all the worst if it happens to be a game which could send England out of a major tournament, the World Cup for example.

So yesterday for the England versus Portugal game, in the quarter finals of the World Cup, I found myself watching in the fairly anti-England environment of a Scottish pub. I had my parents and grandparents in tow, as I'd just had my PhD graduation that morning (yes I can properly be called a Doctor now, with the piece of paper to prove it). My friends had saved me and my family some seats in the corner of the pub, which was fairly rammed full of people. There were the odd couple of other England supporters in the pub braving it out in actual England tops, but we were by far the minority. I wont dwell on the details of the game, what with Rooney's sending off, the blatant underuse of Lennon down the right, the use of Beckham in the first place, the crimal misses of goal scoring opportunities, and Carrager's retaken penalty, but will go through my emotional journey. With almost all competitive England games I get a slight feeling of nerves and anticipation before hand which will either settle down or increase to hair pulling heights during the match. For this match my nerves where actually fairly settled at the start, the sense of dread had yet to kick in. Also duing such matches a foul mouthed beast takes over the use of my mouth and the most common thing I can be heard saying is "OH, FOR FUCKS SAKE!" with increasing levels of volume and vehemence. I had warned my parents of this before inviting them along to the pub to watch the game, but I don't know if they knew that I'd be swearing at top volume almost continuously. By half time in the match I'd gone through a fair old battery of expletives, but was still suprisingly calm despite some outside appearences - well I say calm, and I mean it in a worked up and tense kind of way, but calm compared to how things would get. To gauge my levels of tension some of my friends had worked out a system based on the angle of my body, with sitting bolt upright being the least worked up, to curled up in a foetal ball weeping on the floor being the highest level.

So on came the second half and Rooney's sending off for accidentally crushing a Portugese players nads beneath his studs and then pushing Cristiano Ronaldo (well we've all wanted to punch him in the face at some point haven't we). This was head in hands time, we were down to 10 men with half an hour of normal time to go, and we still hadn't scored a goal, and we have no strikers! Most of the pub obviously go ecstatically wild (but we'll get to that later). I resign myself to defeat - or do I, no I still have some hope. Occasionally losing a man forges a team together, more than making up for the numerical disadvantge. And with 10 men we still did well, we sat fairly deep, but Portugal didn't look like scoring - unfortunately neither did we, which could only mean one thing: extra time. By this time I've managed to use of another bucket load of expletives, with my dad looking quite bemused by it. I'd also decided, I expect like pretty much every other England supporter, that I should be instantly transported out to Gelsenkirchen to take Sven's place as manager, because he didn't know what the fuck he was doing. This didn't happen, so I just had to shout as loudly as I could at the TV screen. So it's extra time and we've already played 90 minutes in the sweltering heat - I'm talking about us in the pub as well as the players cos it was roasting in there - and we've got to go on for another half hour, and my nerves are fairly shot through. Again during extra time there were few chances on goal from either side, and despite my dearest wish of an England goal on the 29th minute we don't get it. Horror! Pain! Death! Torture! Big scary monstery things! It's a penalty shoot out! A penalty shoot out for England in a major championship! A penalty shoot out! For England! In and major championship! There's only one way it can go... ...but still some tiny, tiny shread of hope remains. I cling to it and go foetal.

It really is the cruelest thing to do to an England supporter - you could peel his (or her) skin off with a rusty potato peeler, whilst sprinkling salt and vinegar on his exposed raw flesh and forcing him to watch you molest his beloved puppy (or kitten), and he'd still take it over a penalty shoot out in a major championship. We don't like them, get it! I watched! I couldn't actually look at the Scots around me supporting "not England" (not a Portugal supporter amoung them from what I could see), as with each Portugal goal and England miss my despair was converting to anger. Emotions are funny things and can easily transform from one thing to another, and strong emotions of one form will quickly jump to another strong emotion. I'd invested a lot of emotion in this match and this team. They represented the country of England, but they also in some way represented me. Stating the obvious here but I'll never play football for my country in a World Cup, so these players we're my proxy, and their pain at losing was my pain, and frustration, and despair, and anger. For someone who doesn't really follow a team in such a way it seems so completely irrational to feel so strongly about a game, but there are few things in life that you can get so attached to and passionate about and will give you such an emotional roller coaster of lows, but could sometime, maybe, in your wildest dreams, give you such heights of joy. So I wasn't particularly happy when we lost.

If I'd been in England (or even Portugal say) my despair would have kept in that emotional state and I would have sat quietly with my head in my hands reliving moments of the game in my head, until eventually it after 20 minutues to half an hour I'd have rejoined the rest of the world. But I wasn't in England, I was in the worse place for an emotional England fan to be - Scotland. And this made all the difference in converting my hurt into anger, because (and as I've said at the start of this post I've known it to be the case all along) a large proportion of Scot's revel in England's demise - and when they cheer and whoop at Portugal winning the game, I know that they don't actually give a shit about it being the Portugal team - they just care that England have lost. They haven't spent the rest of the World Cup anxious and tense at every other Portuguese game, and most of them won't care if Portugal lose to France on Wednesday, whereas I'd given my soul over to the England team and didn't appreciate having my nose rubbed in it. So I got angry and wanted to hit things - people, inanimate objects, anything. As I'm not actually a violent person I didn't do that, but I did have to leave the pub pretty sharpish just in case. I know there are many reasons given about why the Scots hate the English football team in particular and I'm not going to write about it now, but it doesn't mean I'm going to like it. I love living in Glasgow, I think the city's great and have a really good group of friends, but for future crucial England games I might have to make the trip south of the border, because for those 90 plus minutes a large proportion of Scots (in my eyes at least) become complete fuckwits. And I know you think the same of us too.

Can't get enough of that wonderful physics

This afternoon I have been spending time scanning some of the posts on cosmicvariance.com - and as such have been sidetracked by the attached comments and links to other blogs/websites (this interconnectivity thing can lead you off in some interesting tangents e.g. Naked Under My Lab Coat - well with a blog title like that I'm going to have a look aren't I). This (cosmicvariance that is) is a joint blog between 5 (astro)physicists and I've mentioned it before. It is also linked from my sidebar, although after reading several posts I've decided that the name of my link, currently "Physicists who blog about actual physics! And other stuff" is fairly wide of the mark, and should actually be "Physicists who blog about stuff, oh and some physics". The majority of it is talking about, unsurprisingly at the moment, the World Cup, along with other random topics that you or I might write about. Admittedly there is some physics (well actually having a second look at the blog there's a fair bit of physics, but being an astrophysicist myself I think I filter it out), even in a post about the World Cup. In another of World Cup posts Fiddling with the World Cup there was one of the most vitriolic anti-American rants, via the medium of footballing analogies, I've heard in a while by a guy called Alfredo Louro saying things like:

"Americans don’t know how to improvise. This is why their armies, the most technologically sophisticated armies in the entire Local Group, are helpless against some barefoot guerrillas. If Americans stopped thinking about how to change the rules of football, and actually tried to understand the game, they might actually begin to understand guerrilla warfare, and save their lives."

If you read his whole comment I think most people would agree that he was being a tad harsh (especially on the post's author Sean) - unless, say, his father was killed by an American misinterpreting the back pass rule (not quite sure how that could happen, but I'm just saying).

Comets

This morning I learnt from Prof. David Hughes that the more we learn about comets the less we actually know! He was in Glasgow giving a seminar to the astronomy group and very interesting it was to - he's a very good public speaker, so if you get the chance go to one of his talks. He did also show us some nice pictures of comets, although I didn't spot any alien spacecraft hiding behind any of them.

Drum piccies

Some pictures of my drums can be found here. I even took a couple using the timer on my camera to show me astride the kit, bashing away with all my might. I've had a quick go and tested out some of the preset kits. It all seems very nice so far, but there's a lot more to check out.

I've had a bit of a read of the manual and there are a couple of gems in the warning section. I like this piece of advice "Do not put burning items, such as candles, on the unit. A burning item may fall over a cause a fire", and am glad I read it as I was going to attach some pyrotechnical display to the drums - a couple of roman candles and a catherine wheel maybe. I also like this caution "Do not place the instrument in an unstable position where it might accidentally fall over" - it's a fairly boring caution but now I know not to place my kit in any precarious places. None of the warning labels quite match some of the ones found here though. A particularly good one is "Do not attempt to stop chain with hands or genitals" found on the directions for a Swedish chainsaw.

Practice makes perfect...

... well if not perfect then at least slighty better. Yesterday evening we had our second band practice, and all is going rather well. We've been going to a rehearsal studio called Lofi down a dark alley in the centre of Glasgow - last week we had to feel our way out in the pitch black, scary! It's a decent place with good equipment other than that, but we may try out some other places in the future. We have to hire the cymbols to use on the drum kit, which also requires knowledge of how to attach them to said kit. Last week we struggled through figuring out to attach them ourselves - it's all fairly simple except the hi-hat, and we did fine. This week I asked the guy who worked there to show me how it's done properly, but for some reason the way he did it didn't seem to be as good as our bodged effort from the previous week! Anyway we got the drum kit set up and started practicing. We managed to make it pretty much entirely through one of our songs - I forget which one, ooops. This was fairly impressive we felt. There was even an attempted jam session at the end - not as good. My own performance was a mixed bag and I need to tighten up a lot. I often kept falling out of the beat with my foot on the bass peddle and struggled to regain it again afterwards. I loosened up after a couple of beers though, which seemed to me to improve my drumming. You should have heard our Radar love - oh yeah!

The practice was followed by going to watch the second half of the France versus Spain match at a nearby booze merchant - who'd have thought that France would get through after how they played in the group stage! After the football finished though we didn't just all go home to our beds satified and excited about what we'd just achieved - oh no, we continued boozing until the early hours in a proper wild band stylee (not so good on a work night see Advice). We did throw a few band name about in our inebriated state, but still have yet to settle on something. In summary band - good, some booze - also good, lots of booze on Tuesday evening - bad.

The wait is over

Today my drum kit arrived. I've yet to see it, but my flatmate phoned saying it was delivered at 9.10 this morning. It'll be fun getting home and putting ti together, although hopefully this wont be as fun as actualy playing it. As it's electric I've got all sorts of preset styles to fiddle around with, so I'm sure it'll provide hours of technogadegtry enjoyment as well as being a good practice aid.

Pick a card, any card

It must be a hard job refereeing a football match. I mean you've got to have eye's on the back of your head to to spot each and every offence commited. You're not at all helped by the players, they'll cheat and dive, and swear and shout at you. They don't trust you enough to do your job that they think you need telling when somebody should get booked, or someones commited a foul, or handled the ball. And as for the managers... they've not got a kind word for you. You may have given a dubious penelty decision for their team, but that isn't enough for these guys. Barracking you from the side lines, arguing with the fourth official, kicking up a stink in the tunnel at half time. It must be a nightmare job. Well in the Holland versus Portugal game today the ref got his own back. How's about this for card happy - 16 bookings, 4 red cards! We can only assume he was trying to get his name in the record books - the previous highest number of bookings was also 16, so he didn't quite top it, but boy did he try. All the bookings and the general bad feelings between the players made for one hell of an exciting match though. Also all the bookings for Portugese players should hopefully make it a bit easier for England in the quarter finals.

Speaking of the England game... well actually there's not much to say. We've managed to get through, which is all well and good (honest I'm all very happy about it and that), but we still haven't managed to play at all well. Now I'll concede that it was rather hot out there and the players looked truely knackered (on both teams), but it wasn't the most enthralling game. I pity the poor neutral who was watching, cos at least I got some excitment out of it due to caring who won. Beckham did hit a rather sweet free kick to get our goal, but Lampard had a few chances that should have at least troubled the Ecuador keeper in some way. Well we've got the game against Portugal to prove ourselves and let's hope we make a good game of it.

Drums

I will find out what happened to my drum kit tomorrow. I'm hoping I'll be bashing away at the fake electronic style skins by tomorrow evening.

Where oh where can my drum kit be

So to allow me to practice my drumming for the band I've gone and bought myself an electric drum kit. This is not a cheap item, but it will allow me to bash away in silence (ooh err missus) without annoying my neighbours - I think a real drum kit might have been a problem for the guys in the flat beneath ours, especially as we've got laminate flooring. This kit was supposed to have been delivered yesterday and when I arrived home today (after my general dirty stopout behaviour of not going home on a Friday night - as ever thanks go to Bob and Fiona for their hospitality and living room floor) I was full of anticipation about putting together my kit. Unfortunately it was not hear. I'm not happy - think I'll be having to phone the delivery company on Monday. When the kit finally does arrive I'll let you all know what it's like. I'll need to be practicing "Radar Love" by the Dutch legends Golden Earring, which is one of the songs we decided on at our first practice.

Unsurprisingly I've still been watching lots of football. One of the most exciting games so far was the Australia versus Croatia the other day. I'd not liked to have been an actual Aussie or Croatian fan, because if I were I might have suffered a heart attack - it was tense enough as a neutral. And what the fuck was Graham Poll up to at the end there! Today's match between Argentina and Mexico was also rather good. In extra time the two substitutes Teves and Messi look particularly lively and were making some lovely runs - also it was a fucking sweet goal that Maxi Rodriguez hit. I was quite annoyed by a few things though, these related to the fact that three of the players in my fanstasy football team (Schweinsteiger, Cambiasso and Saviola) all got substituted and didn't get any goals, grrrrr!

So we're through

I thought I should comment on the result today. England are through to the next round - well we new that already, but now we know that we will be playing against Ecuador. We played quite well in the first half. Joe Cole has been by far our best player and again was showing some good form. His goal was a blinder, struck very, very sweetly. Rooney did ok for the first half and was showing some good touches - he can control the ball far better the Owen ever can. It was quite funny to see his reaction when subbed in the second half, throwing his shoes off and everything - hopefully he was just annoyed at his own performance. I should just give a Rooney style shout out "rOOOOOOOOnEEEEEEy, rOOOOOOOOnEEEEEEEY", it's all in the vowels you see.

I just wanted us to beat Sweden. It's been soooooooo many years since we managed it and it's just getting annoying now. They have some sort of hoodoo over the England team which says "You can't beat us, we have something unexplicable over you which means you will forever suffer defeats and/or draws against us". But, hey, we'll live with the result. But we have to play better... a lot better!

I'll comment on our band practice from the other night soon.

Really! Simple syndication?

After completely missing the little orangey icon in the corner of my web browser I finally discovered that I'm available as an RSS feed. This was mainly down to my LiveJournal using friend queennell syndicating me via her blog. This involved some sort of fancy wizardry, using her high level powers, which I would probably fail to understand.

For anyone (!?) who may have come across this blog hoping for some astronomy/physics content (don't laugh jakeybob and gingerfi, there might be other people than you that read this - no, no wait... feel free to laugh long and loud, there's no-one else) I have found the site that might be for you. It's a blog called cosmicvariance and is maintained by 5 actual (astro)physicists and has far more physics related topics than I've covered - not a hard task I know. It seems quite fun as well - I've even added a link to my links bit to your right.

Band

This evening we have three hours in a studio to create noise. Will we all make it out alive - who knows. We could have split before the day is out.

Right so how do I play these drums then - you put your left arm in, your put left arm out, in out, int out and shake it all about - oops, no that's the Hokey Cokey. Lets starts again...

Beard

Nearing three weeks and things are well on track with the growth (patchiness and all), however Peter has managed to become unfeasibly hairy, presumably via some sort of yeti heritage - this is deeply unfair.

That was the week that wasn't

The week that has just gone by has been rather vague and fuzzy - well it could have felt that it was a very coherent and lurid week, but when interpreted through my brain any such coherence would surely have disappeared. After way too much booze on Sunday I managed to pretty much forget who I was, where I was, what I did and which plane of existence I was supposed to exist in on the following Monday (hence this). Once I'd decided that I should settle into the usual three spatial and one time dimension which makes up our so called reality things started to improve. I then hit my brain with a very high concentration of saturated football, although I had already been building up dangerously high levels of football in my brain over the previous weekend. This excessively large dose built up to a maniacical fevour which culminated on Thursday with the England versus Trinidad and Tobago game. Whilst watching this game I managed to get wound up like one of those spirally bits of metal - ah yes a spring. There was much ooohhing and aaahhhing, and effing and blinding, and sitting on the edge of the seat - and consumption of lager tops (which as I will tell everybody is a refreshing yet manly drink and as such I should not be mocked for drinking it - see this article which backs up my argument). Then there was the release (no, not that kind of release) of the spring, when England, despite every effort not to win, won. Unfortunatley this didn't get rid of the football building up in my skull compressing my vital brain functions, as it made me then drag (well they were fairly willing, but it was my idea) people along to a fairly awful night at a club called the Viper. This led me to send out the following apolgetic email when I arrived home:

"To those who I convinced to go to the Viper tonight (aka last night) I can only profusely apologise. Yes, it was shit. And, yes, it was full of medics. I had thought that there would only be a few of said medics and otherwise it would be good for a dance and a drink. Well on all fronts I was very wrong - it was packed with medics and was neither good for dancing or drinking. Sorry and sorry again. Please ignore my suggestions in the future and give me a slap in the face if I try and do the same thing again.

Yours grovelingly,

Matt"

The following morning (aka yesterday) we had a bunch of school kids coming round the physics department, who I had the joy of telling about the wonders of gravitational waves. I managed to do this fairly well in my opinion although their enthusiasm wasn't all that evident. We then showed them round our research group labs, which mainly consisted of many vacuum tanks, which aren't the most exciting pieces of kit you can show kids. I tried to stay bubbly and lively throughout the tour though, and hope this rubbed off on the young people (again, no, I didn't rub any part of myself against the kids - stop it with your wrong thoughts). Later my own enthusiam for my subject was put to a fair old test by the dreaded event that is the code review. This involves me talking through my code line-by-line over the phone to a few others, who then point out what I've done wrong. It is a hideuos event which no one can enjoy, but our collaboration insists we do. During this is when my brain finally imploded as I tried to splutter through an explanation one of the functions in my code. I started mainly saying random words hoping in vain that they would provide a decent explaination of what the function did, but this didn't work gnnnarrgh.

This brain fug continued long into the evening with no word that I said, or sentence I tried to construct, coming out of my mouth correctly. I then started giggling to myself at random words. "Half Sugar" should not be a phraise to provoke that much hilarity, yet that it did. I also had a cash machine giving me strange looks - it wanted to fight me it did - or at least that's what I thought last night, but now I reckon it wasn't trying to start a fight at all.

I think sleep last night has had some calming effects and some of the football has oozed out my ears and nose to releive some of the pressure. However, I've already watch one match today with two more to go, so I think the levels may build up again.

Beard news - it's still there and growing. I will make it to the end of the month, I will.

Band news - we have our first proper practice on Monday. Need to get learning my drum parts.

ps in a lot of the above post I have talked about build up of football, in reality read that as football, booze and lack of sleep (but no pyschotropic drugs).

Itchy chin

My beard attempt has reached a rather itchy stage. If I think about it too much then the itching gets worse, and the temptation to shave stronger. I'll need to stop stroking my chin when in deep contemplation as this reminds me of it's irritatng hairy bits.

I've just finished watching the Brazil versus Croatia game. Are Brazil the most over hyped team other than England? Well on this performance yes is the answer. They didn't show much at all, although Ronaldinho still did alway look rather scarily good when he was on the ball. Kaka's goal at the end of the first half was a very good strike, actually similar to a few others we've seen in the World Cup so far, but that was about it from them attack-wise. During the second half Croatia seemed to be doing all the going forward and had several rather good moves, but kept striking the ball at the keeper when they had opportunities on goal. The prize for fattest, laziest person on the pitch went hands down to Ronaldo. He couldn't be arsed moving at all, even coming onto the pitch for the second half seemed to take hours for him. His fastest movement was going off the pitch when substituted. Brazil may have been holding back, but unless Ronaldihno does something really special I don't know where the extra things will come from - that said they've got the 3 points they needed and that's what counts in the group stage. Anyway, you maybe can't read too much into the first game as I hope is the case for England.

In a rather boring game (maybe the most dull I've seen of the tournament so far) the French showed absolutely nothing when playing the Swiss. They're not a patch on the team from say 6-8 years ago. I'm just hearing Henry give an interview and he's giving the whole "it was rather hot" excuse. Henry didn't really seem to get let into the game with passes not being played into him well, and the Swiss always kept a lot of men back. There's nothing else really to say about the match as bugger all happened. Boff, *shrugs*

After some rather negative comments there I'd just like to say my favourite team of the tournament so far. It's been the Czech Republic in their game against the USA. The play of Rosicky and Nedved was excellent, and I'm really looking forward to their next game. Also showing very good form was Robben for Holland. Everyone has also been saying that the Argentinians looked very good on the game against the Ivory Coast - I was watching the game but wasn't paying it as much attention as I should have from the subsequent reports.

Still it's been a good tournament so far and I'm looking forwards to a lot more from it. I have to say it - Come on England!

Advice

Don't drink too much on a Sunday!

Boring, boring England

It's been a few hours now and I've had some time to reflect on the game, but still the England versus Paraguay game was one of the most boring affairs I've seen in a long while. There's something to be said against the whole scoring early thing, which is that if a team does it then a lot of the time they'll just go into sitting back, dull-as-a-rather-dimly-lit-grey-thing, mode. Which seemed to be what England did. The pundits seemed to give England quite a lot of praise for the first half performance, but I'm not sure why as we didn't do anything. And then for the second half we proceeded to do even less. Not that Paraguay looked at all threatening, but I'd have liked to see something that provided a modicum of entertainment. Despite all that I'm still glad and releaved that we've got a win (and the associated 3 points) under our belt, and can hopefully go on to better things in the next game. Trinidad and Tobago look like they could be quite fiesty though and will be very much up for the game, but the Swedes were looking fairly poor and maybe England can break their tradition of shit performances against them. As any good manager does in a post match interview (with the possible exception of all the interviews that Mick McCarthy gave after Sunderland games last season) I'll try and take some positives from the game - Joe Cole was looking pretty good with some of his runs at the defenders down the left side, and Crouch keeps improving with some nifty bits of ball control.

Other than the England game I've managed to see 3 of the 4 other World Cup matches so far. I am liking the festival of football that it is.

After watching the opening Germany versus Costa Rica game yesterday I went to a pirate themed flatwarming party hosted by Ellie, who went to great lengths to bedeck her flat (aka the good ship the Three headed monkey) in a piratical theme. We all got dressed up approriately and had a swashbuckling time drinking much rum and grog. I recommend that everyone walk down a busy main road with about 10 other people dressed as pirates sometime - it provides amusement for all, especially when you go on a booze-based raiding party into Sainsburys.

Beard news - I have now entered uncharted territory with my growth in that I don't think I've gone 10 days without shaving before (well obviously that's not right as I didn't shave as a child, but you know what I mean!). There's the odd grey hair in the mix, but I fortunately don't have the classic signs of the ginger anywhere to be seen. I am still rather sparse and patchy though.

Band news - I'm on my way to being a proper drummer as today I purchased some drum sticks - I now just need something to hit.

The excitement rises

Can you feel it, can you feel it, can you feel it! You know, the anticipation, the heightened expectation, the fervour (had to look at a thesaurus to get that one). It's all about to kick off, it's the World Cup. There're going to be highs and lows on this roller coaster ride, but most importantly there's going to be lots of drinking and slacking off work early.

In beard competition related news (see here for an explanation (!?)) - my face continues to sprout hair in a patchy fashion, but I'm determined to make it to at least the two week mark before I wuss out from shame at my beard's shitness.

Also I send a call out to people to visit my friend Michelle's (and three other's) energy saving blog. They are currently camped out in the centre of Cheltenham trying to show that physicist can live energy efficient carbon neutral lives, via means of heating things up in a cardboard box covered in tin foil it would seem ;)

He bangs the drum

Today I will talk about the band. A few months (well now nearly a year) ago a new post-doc Chris arrived in the department brandishing the crazy idea that we start a band. At his previous institution (the University of Birmingham) he had apparently taken a rag tag bunch of non-musically talented physicists and they'd become a some sort of supergroup with record contracts coming out their ears - well not quite, but I think they might have played a gig in the back room of a pub or two. Determined to repeat his former sucess he has gathered together John, Neil (aka the Mole, aka the Total Ride), Ellie and myself to be his new rock triumph. I will be playing the drums in the band - this is due to the fact that I have no ability on any other instrument (well I'm a mean player of the maracas) and played the drums for a few months at school when I was eleven. Despite the band being nearly a year in the making we've so far not had a proper practice session, although this will soon change as we're gearing up for something next week. We have several songs lined up and have taken the appropriate instrumental tabs off the internet. I've been practicing for my role by playing the air drums, these are kind of like normal drums except they exist only in your head, and can turn you into a drumming legend (like Phil Collins say) with only the slightest leap of the imagination. Unfortunately I doubt my air drumming skills will match up with reality when I have to sit behind a real drum kit.

The main challenge now for the band, other than me aquiring some drumming skills (the other are all actually quite good), is for us to find a name. There have been several suggestions floated around, although I wont give away too much yet (and the people who read this are likely to be the ones who know anyway), but we haven't settled on anything quite yet. I'll keep you updated on our status when we've had our first full practice - should be interesting!

World Cup starts tomorrow by the way.

Mutants amoung us

After watching the X-men last night, I see today that mutants are indeed amoung us (in this case a three armed baby boy in China) - and we are indeed trying to restrain their mutant powers (by cutting off the third arm). Sure, they say medically it's the right thing to do, but who knows that three arms isn't the way that the human race is supposed to be evolving. We could start to compete with other post-quadlimbed creatures, like all insects, arachnids, and the most evil of them all the dreaded Octopus.

Mamma mia! It's the X-men!

My post title today is a cryptic crossword style clue to what I did this evening. No, it's not "albumen", I don't know where you got that idea from - egg white was not involved, but, wait, I can see where you were coming from - the guys from Abba (almost 'albu'!) wrote the hit west end musical Mamma mia! (along with the Abba song of the same name) and then the men bit obviously comes from X-men. And no, it's not "Paulo Di Canio" the facist footballer. He wasn't involved in my evening at all, but again I can see your line of thinking - he's Italian and a bit fiery, hence the Mamma mia!, and he was often known for getting red cards therefore leaving his team with 10 (X in Roman numerals - there's the Italian link again) men.

My title is in fact derived from having been to an Italian restaurant for dinner and then going to see X-men 3.

At the restaurant - Mimmo's on Ashton Lane in the heart of Glasgow's trendy west end - I had a lovely chicken risoto with peppers, roasted tomatoes and a lovely pesto suace. Highly recommeded. I would give a link to Mimmo's but I can't find one at the moment. I've been there a few times before and have generally found it to be rather good. It's a very small, but cosy little place, and has a nice atmosphere because of this. It's size can however leave you disappointed if you've not booked and find it full - which takes aproximately 5 and a quarter people.

After filling ourselves we went to the UGC to watch X-men: The Last Stand. I can't be arsed giving a proper film review, but I'd say it was a decent enough film, although not on a par with the previous ones. See it if you can spare the time and want a bit of fun, but I wouldn't go out my way if you're not that bothered.

Anyway, back to growing that beard. Hnnnnnnnnnnh, hhnnnnnnnnnnnh - those are the straining noises you have to make to get hair to grow. I've also been told by queennell that massaging the hair folicles works.

In the summertime...

Due to the lack of a summer so far in Glasgow we made the most of a fairly fair weather day to have a barbecue. There are quite a few green areas in and around the west end of Glasgow where you'd think a BBQ could be hosted, but we had the fear that we would incur the wrath of a park warden, so didn't make use of one of the major parks like the Botanic gardens or the Kelvingrove park. We did however find a nice area down by the River Kelvin, on the site of an old water mill. We seemed to spark off a bit of a trend as very soon after setting up the rather poorly performing disposable BBQ we had, at least three other groups of burnt sausage enthusiasts were copying us. After several rounds of sausages and burgers, and fending off the odd hungry dog or two, we were satiated and retired to mine for a bit of light reading (the Sunday Times) and TV (Top Gear). An overall satisfying day.

On a footballing note, well done to England in the game yesterday. Not the most exciting game despite the good score line. Just a note to Crouch, despite my previous post, stop with the robot now, you've overdone it. Keep up the scoring though, if not the celebrations. Bring on Friday.

I said I might say something about a beard growing competition, but have still neglected to write about it, so here is the email I sent giving the gist of things:

"Tomorrow is the start of the inaugural beard growing competition. As some of you may know it was decided in the RC last Friday that we would test our skills at facial hair growth by sparing our faces from the blade for the month of June. The outcome of this will be judged by Fiona and Morag who will arbitrarily decide on who has the best chin warmer. Unfortunately there is no prize for the winner except maybe some smug satisfaction at being good at sprouting hair, but I expect in reality we shall all be losers. People who pull out of the contest shall be branded weak and pitiful and shall be mocked unceasingly - although I expect I may fall into that category. Bob may well be at hand to take some time lapse photography so we can watch the hair appear in mere seconds when all is done.

Matt - I included you on this incase you felt like joining in the comp from Germany. If you do then send photos - we'll know if you've doctored them in any way though, so no finding pictures of beardy blokes and photoshopping their magnificent manes onto you own face. I also thought Ellie might want to have some say in this, particularly "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!".

Anyone how cares to take up this challenge, wield your razor to your skin for the last time tomorrow morning. Let the battle commence.

Your champion of the chinstrap,

Matt

ps you can't just grow a tash, it will not count."

I can just say that my own facial growth is progressing at it's rather poor rate - patchy at best. Bob has taken some initial photos, and Matt has taken up the challenge, as noted by a rather amusing picture sent earlier today. We'll just see how long I can last before shame sets in and I decide to shave. Updates may be given over the course of the month - whether the photo's get posted is another story.

Working late = psychotic episode

Arghhhh, I'm still in work and all is not well. I've been juggling trying to get code to work, writing a few slides for a talk, chatting to people via instant messenger and listening to early 90s dance music - on top of having had a couple of pint of Stella with my dinner. All this has made my brain a rather mushy consistency - rather like their mushy brethren, the mushy pea, only more pinky-grey than green. I think the time has come for me to get some sleep, preferably in my bed at home rather than at my desk in work. That requires some kind of walking motion, which I can hopefully remember how to do - it's right foot forward, left foot forward, then repeat, right? Or is that left foot and then right foot!? I just don't know anymore, it's too goddamn confusing. I need some sort of wheel type mechaism so I can just roll, that would make things all so much easier. Now if only I can figure out how to attach them. To the workshop...

Tomorrow I may say something about our beard growing competition. I bet that's got you intrigued.