Driving nowhere

The last couple of times I was in the US I saw quite a lot of adverts on Fox TV for a new show called Drive. It looked as though it could be decent, so when I got back here to the UK I started downloading and watching the show. It stars Nathan Fillion of Firefly fame, as the character Alex Tully, and is also produced by one of Firefly's producers, Tim Minear. The premise of the show is that various people have been asked to become involved in an illegal cross country roadrace, that's been run for many years by a shady, unknown, organisation. There is a prize of $32 million for the winner, but the various characters have their own, generally more personal reasons for competing (e.g. to rescue their kidnapped wife in Alex's case,) and the races' organisers seem to have their own agenda's for the people they've picked to take part. I've fairly enjoyed the first four episodes of the show, and was starting to get into it, but little did I realise, until I tried to download the latest episode, that the show's been cancelled by Fox! Apparently they might air the remaining two episode at some unknown time in the future, or they might just release them online. Nathan Fillion and Tim Minear must be wondering why Fox (or at least the American public who apparently weren't watching the show) hate them so much as to cancel two of their shows!

In other TV related opinion:- I've been enjoying the latest series of Lost again. It's come good after a while where I was just getting a bit tired of the whole situation. The end of season 6 of 24 can't come soon enough in my opinion, as it's just got completely stupid - and I mean stupid even by the usual standards of 24! And what can I say about last weeks episode of Heroes (ep. 20 - Five Years Gone) other than it was fucking ace!

You decide

After a last minute conversion to Scottish Nationalism and evangelical Christainity this morning I went to the polling station to place my votes firmly behind the SNP and SCP. I long for the days when I can live in an independent, fundamentally Christian, Scotland, without being bothered by those English bastards or any pesky gays...

...only joking ;)

I did go and do my democratic duty this morning, but my votes were cast slightly differently than above. I was expecting a last bit of electioneering by the local council candidates outside the polling station, but there was only one Labour leafleter and no-one trying to take any sort of exit poll. One thing I'll say about the voting is that a lot of the parties didn't half go out of their way to make the regional list ballot paper [this is the proportional representation part - courtesy of the Lib Dems - where you don't vote for a particular constituency candidate, but rather a party, and a certain number of parlimentary seats are made up proportionally from this vote] as confusing as possible. Rather than making things nice and clear by just having their party's name in the box many decided to spice things up a bit by adding their party leaders name, or their slogan. It just made the ballot look cluttered and annoying. The local council ballot was quite fun in that this time round you get to rank the candidates in your favoured order. I spent a short while considering who I thought was better out of the three Labour party candidates - mainly going by their pictures from the election material I'd had through my door. Oh, the excitement!

Time for work

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

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

Naming conventions

If I were Finnish what would I be called? Well now I think I've found out.

Equality for all, except...

Tonight I caught the end of a party political broadcast by the Scottish Christian Party (next week across the UK there are local elections and in Scotland there are also elections for the Scottish Parliament.) Now the SCP seem to be an angry bunch, but I wasn't quite prepared for the comment that their leader, the Rev. George Hargreaves, said at the very end of the broadcast. Now one of the SCPs main bugbears seems to be the Equality Law that is soon to be introduced across the UK, with their particular attention being on the fact that it means you can't discriminate against someone due to their sexual orientation. Being Christian's you might think "how can they be against something that says everyone is equal?", because isn't that how God views people. Well they don't quite see it that way. The law is in fact an affront to all Christians and is in fact discriminatory against them! Yeah, right! Now I come to what the Rev. George said. He compared the introduction of the anti-discrimination law to the Nazi's introducing a law banning the preparation of Kosher food. And then went on to make the statement that pretty much suggested that, as the Nazi's followed up this law with the Holocaust, the UK Equality law would lead to a similar fate for Scottish Christians! Comparing a piece of anti-discrimination policy to events that led to the Holocaust is really fucked up. Not that I was ever considering "placing my cross by their cross" (their slogan for how you should vote), but these guys will most definitely not be getting my vote!

Down and out in Vicarage Road

It's finally happened. The inevitable has come to pass. With three games of the season to go Watford have become the first team to be relegated from the Premiership.

It's been fairly obvious through the season that we've not been of the same calibre as the majority of the teams in the top flight, but there've been a fair few games where we've shown plenty of spirit and fight (unfortunately goals are what they use as the arbiter of things in football matches - when will they learn!). In many games we just couldn't hold onto our lead, or clean sheet when the games were in the closing minutes. Ultimately our players weren't good enough despite our manager, Aidy Boothroyd's, always upbeat assessments of things.

What do we come away with from this season. Well the players will have gained some experience for when we go up again, but experience isn't always the best substitute for skill. Mainly we'll have come out of this season with lots of money. Aidy's been very frugal in his spending, and we made a job load of cash from selling Young to Aston Villa, so we're sitting on a whole wad of cash which should be of a lot of benefit in the Championship.

Hopefully next season, in our more natural surroundings of the Championship, they'll be a few more wins I can cheers on. Unfortunately I wont be able to watch any of them on TV. (It looks like Luton are going to League one, so they'll be no M1 derby next year.)

The last post (from the APS)

This will be my last post from the APS meeting. I'll just take a moment comment on a few more of the talks I've seen.

One of the most entertaining talks of the meeting was on Selling Physics to Unwilling Buyers given by Lawrence Krauss (of The Physics of Star Trek fame). Krauss is well known for his public understanding of science work and is very good at it due to his enthusiasm and understanding of the problems that the general public have with science. He doesn't shy away from saying that the vast majority of people think that science is dull, difficult and that scientists are untrustworthy. But he thinks that the apprehensions are things that you can get past by showing science in its true light. We need to show that science isn't some abstract thing that has no impact on people's lives, but is in fact integral to pretty much every area of life, and basic science is in fact easy to demonstrate and understand. Also people need to be shown that by applying the basics of scientific, or experimental principles, they are able apply a better filtering of ideas or views that are obvious crap from those which have a weight of evidence. I can't do justice to all the things he said here, but the main new thing I came away with was that I should use more video clips in public talks.

At the moment I'm sitting in the morning plenary talks session and have heard a couple of very good talks. The first talk was by Jacqueline Hewitt from MIT and was about looking from a 21 cm background from neutral Hydrogen in the dark ages. The 21 cm line (the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave) is a radio frequency emission line from neutral Hydrogen (i.e. an electron bound to a proton), and the dark ages represent a period in the universe between the production of the CMBR (i.e. the time at which protons and electrons first are able to stay bound within Hydrogen atoms, without being disassociated by the radiation field) and the reionisation of that Hydrogen by radiation from the first stars after they form. I'd not really heard much on this subject before and was very interested to here about the methods for going about trying to detect this emission. I'll keep an eye on this stuff in the future as they should be able to learn a lot about structure formation in the early universe from such observations.

The next talk in the plenary session was about global warming by James Hansen - I think it's probably more useful to hear this stuff from a scientist who works on the subject than from Al Gore. I've never really been confronted (or looked out myself) the evidence for human induced global warming, so this talk was very enlightening. He showed how the Earth's climate (temperature, sea levels, greenhouse gas levels) has fluctuated by large amount over periods of hundred of thousands of years and the reasons for this. The main point being that these changes are very gradual and the feedback mechanisms of the Earth take a long time to respond to them, whereas now the man-made release of greenhouse gases is well over and above natural level and the planet can't deal with these as part of the natural long term trends. The idea that short term variations in the solar flux have lead to the current warming don't seem to hold up much weight after you've seen the long term trends. He proposed many of the main ideas to deal with energy consumption and emission problems, but obviously these need governments to introduce proactive policies or nothing will get done.

Anyway I need to make a move and head to the airport soon. Next post will be back from blighty.

Hair brained

In some physics related hair news, top Caltech GR theorist Kip Thorne has decided to emulate a black hole and have 'no hair' (really sorry about the black-hole physics based joke.) I saw him wandering about at the APS meeting the other day and he'd completely removed his famous ponytail!

More science news

Other interesting talks I saw yesterday involved dark matter and GR.

In this dark matter session I saw a talk on Noble liquid dark matter detectors and axion detection. The talk on Noble liquid dark matter detectors was by Richard Gaitskell of Brown University. This man is the most English man ever! He puts Hugh Grant to shame. The talk was littered with many utterances of "Damn!" and general foppish bumbling, in the endearingly charming way that only a true Englishman can pull off. It was an entertaining talk describing the how you can look for neutron recoils caused by WIMPs (a term for a variety of dark matter candidates) within various Noble gas detectors. The other talk in this session that I saw was about axion detection by Dave Tanner of the University of Florida (who some of us at Glasgow, and within the gravitational wave community will know). The axion is another dark matter candidate. It was proposed as a solution to the CP problem in various weak interactions (you expect interactions to be symmetric i.e. if you take a reaction and mirror it [swap the charges, parities and directions of the particles involved] then you expect things to look the same, but there are certain interaction involving the weak force where charge conjugation and parity are not symmetric [imagine walking towards a mirror, but your reflection moves away from the mirror - that would be a strongly broken symmetry]). You can't detect the axion itself, but it will decay into two photons although with a decay time much greater than the age of the universe. If you want to try and detect this decay you have to induce the decay. The talk was about the axion detector ADMX, which aims to detect axions forming a cold dark matter halo around the Milky Way. It does this by using a microwave cavity to try and induce the axions to decay. One of the most interesting ideas talked about was a future plan to generate and detect axions using optical cavities within large magnetic fields. You create axions from the photon field on one side of a wall, this axions flow through the wall and are then converted back to photons on the other side - you essentially are "shining light through a wall"! It was very interesting.

The final talk I saw yesterday was a nice historical perspective on the development and use of General Relativity. It was a very entertaining talk, with lots of anecdotes, which showed that even the great minds who worked on the foundations of GR could make mistakes.

Later today I give my own talk, so I should give it a run through at some time to make sure I can stay on time (I've only got 10 minutes).

Science report

In a shock to all my loyal reader's I'm going to talk about science and comment on some of the talks I've seen here at the APS meeting. Yesterday afternoon I went to a talk given by Geoff Burbidge of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler and Hoyle (or B²FH as it is commonly referred to in the astronomy community) fame - this was one of the seminal works on stellar nucleosynthesis i.e. the creation of heavy elements within stars. The paper was published in 1957 so Burbidge was giving a lecture in a session dedicated to the anniversary of it. As you'll probably gather from the paper being 50 years old Burbidge himself is getting on a bit. He's originally English, but has lived in the US for many years and has an accent that fluctuates between the two as he talks. The start of his talk was a good historical perspective of his field, which is always interesting to here from one of the people who was around at it's very start. However, for the majority of the talk he moved onto discussing his many problems with current cosmology. You see he is one is the dwindling minority (a fact he indeed joked about) who, like his more famous co-author Fred Hoyle, still hold onto some form of a steady state universe. Part of his theory relies on the CMB being explained by the synthesis of Helium from Hydrogen, rather than from the hot fireball Big Bang model. Although he makes his points well, some of his conclusions do seem to be rather clutching at straws to hold onto a model that pretty much all evidence points against. It was a very entertaining talk in all.

Today I have seen some very nice talks on the proposed Dark energy missions SNAP, Destiny and ADEPT. The first talk was by Saul Perlmutter, the lead author on the original Supernova cosmological acceleration results (supernova observations seemed to show that the universe is currently undergoing an accelerating expansion caused by an as yet unknown dark energy). He gave a very nice, and understandable, overview of the scientific objectives of SNAP (Supernova Acceleration Probe). Another of the talks was by Daniel Eisenstein of the University of Arizona describing the science objectives of ADEPT, which goes about the dark energy problem in a rather difference way that the supernova observations. This is instead looking for Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO). This requires looking at the large scale distribution in space of galaxies at different redshifts. Now my knowledge of BAOs was very limited before this talk, but it was all very well explained and I came out feeling quite well informed on the subject. It basically says that there should be a naturally preferred distance scale between galaxies set down by the speed of sound propagation, and therefore matter density propagation, in the early universe. You look for these preferred scales by looking at the distribution of galaxies, and indeed they are seen. I shouldn't be too enthusiastic about these missions though as they're in direct competition against the gravitational wave mission LISA for being the first Beyond Einstein mission to be funded - of course it would be nice if they could all be done.

I also saw a talk this morning by a promising young physicist by the name of Jennifer Watson, of the University of Edinburgh, but currently working at SLAC. I learned all about the B → k^*ll decay process and how you can distinguish it from the charmonium decay. Fascinating stuff ;)

More news tomorrow maybe.

Jacksonville landing

Last night I decided to have a look around the area outside my hotel in Jacksonville. I ended up in the Jacksonville Landing - a selection of bars, clubs and restaurants surrounding a circular open area with a fountain and stage. The Landing overlooks the St. John river and has a nice friendly feel to it. The weather was perfect for sitting around outside enjoying the surroundings and doing a bit of people watching. The stage had a couple of bands playing and I sat down for a few beers to listen to them. The music was generally a selection of cover band standards like Brown Eyed Girl, but the second band (called the Mystery Band) did throw up one rather random song when they played Groove is in the Heart by Dee-lite (with a slide whistle used for certain musical effects) - it was interesting.

Radio free football

My first post from the APS meeting is being made whilst listening to the Watford - Man Utd FA Cup game (we're 1-0 down at the moment, boooo) on my laptop. I've spent much of this morning looking into ways of listening to UK radio stations while I'm using a US proxy address. I found this handy list of web proxy's through which I've been able to listen to certain BBC radio stations (I could here Trevor Nelson on Radio 1 fine) - although, very annoyingly, BBC Radio 5 live and BBC Three Counties, which are broadcasting the match, aren't connecting properly (maybe due to overload of listeners!). Instead I'm listening via the Man Utd website, which is broadcasting the Century FM commentary, and doesn't actually care where in the world my IP address is. I was going to try the Watford website, but it required payment. (GOAAALLLLLLLLLLL! - Bouazza just equalised, get in!) I did try and find somewhere (fuck, fuck, fuck - Man U just went back in front with a Ronaldo goal) to watch the game by going to the local Hooters (I've never been into a Hooters before - honest - but the outfits the girls wear are actually hideous). I asked the manager if they were able to show the game and he consulted a list of all sports being played, which did contain the match (result, I thought), but because it was Pay-per-view they weren't going to be showing it (damn).

Soon I should actually work out what sessions of this meeting I'm going to attend this afternoon.

[The dream is over, we've lost 4-1 :( So long Wembley!]

Leaving on a jet plane... back next Wednesday

I'm now just under 7 and a half hours from leaving for my latest work related trip to Florida. I'm again flying Continental via Newark airport, but hopefully things will be a bit less stressful than last time! I've packed, gathered all my shit together (passport - check, tickets - not needed, cos it's all e-tickets these days!, US power adapter - check) and booked the taxi for early in the morning, so all's good.

I'll probably post from the APS meeting (which is what I'm going to be attending - this is no holiday ;-)) and will maybe even have some physics news from there! I might also be spending a large part of tomorrow night scouting out potential FA Cup football watching venues (apparently it's being shown on Setanta 2, so I just need to find a bar with a subscription - should be easy!) Anyway, I might attempt some sleep before my flight, so goodnight UK.

T-minus one month and counting

So it's now exactly one month before people will get to hear the reality of what our band(s) sound(s) like! Echoing what I wrote in a previous post - just to drill the date and venue home to everyone - we're playing on Friday 11^th May at the Research Club. The tension for my bandmates and I is surely going to rise considerably over the coming weeks and we're going to be practicing like demons to get everything sounding tight, but it should be worth it. No pressure!

Right, I must get home to do some of that practicing I mentioned.

Sunshine on an overcast day

Posted from Phys. Rev. X:

Sunshine is a new sci-fi film directed by Danny "Trainspotting" Boyle and written by Alex "The Beach" Garland and last night some of us went to see it. The flim follows crew of a second attempted mission to reignite the Sun, which has (for a probably best unexplained reason) stopped working properly. As a bunch of (astro)physicists (including one solar physicist) going to see a film about the Sun dying, naturally we're going to find a few holes to pick in the science, but mainly we were just hoping to see a good film. I could write a very long post with all the factual problems with the science in the film, but being factually correct isn't the main point of most popular sci-fi as the setting is just frame on which you hang the film. The main point of the film was to focus on the psychological effects on the crew as they passed into the zone where the intense solar radiation meant that communication home was no longer possible - wait a minute this zone appeared to start outside the orbit of Mercury, but we can easily recieve signals from there! No, I mustn't start on the nitpicking - and also how they dealt with being humanity's "Last, best hope" (Babylon 5 anyone) for salvation.

As far as eye candy went the special effects were great. We were treated to many majestic views of the spaceship, the Icarus 2, backdropped by the tremendous, yet terrifying and mighty, Sun. The film ramped up the level of crazy throughout, and this was generally well acted. There was a fair bit of distorted camera effects and angles, and mildly subliminal images towards the end of the film, which didn't, for me, enhance the film or serve any purpose. You were left more with a feeling of "What!?" than "oooooohh...aaaaaaahh..." at the end.

Overall I enjoyed the film as an entertaining spectacle, but was left rather flat by it. I wasn't really moved by any of the characters to care about any of them. I wasn't even particularly bothered about the success or failure of their mission considering its grand goal was trying to save all of mankind. Sunshine didn't give you the all out action and fun of something like Armageddon, which serves it's purpose as a bit of fluff sci-fi very well, but it also didn't give you the darkness, or real psycho craziness of something like Event Horizon. It sat somewhere inbetween and didn't quite satisfy. A modern film that does the etherial, going a bit mad, aspects of space quite well is Solaris, which just lulls you and kind of washes over you (that said I watched it on a plane, so was fairly spaced out myself) as it doesn't try to give you a big heroic saving mankind theme. But if you want proper sci-fi of the kind that this was trying to be then you can't beat a bit of 2001.

(Almost) gone, but not forgotten

I'd completely forgotten about the Premiership football fixtures today until I had a look at the BBC website just now. It seems that, after their dismal performance on Saturday, Watford have pulled off a win, beating Portsmouth 4-2. And we scored four goals in one match! It's pretty amazing considering up until today we'd only managed a grand total of 20 goals in 32 matches.

We've five matches to go before the end of the season and I think the only possible chance of top flight survival is if we win all of them - and even then it would probably be a very close run thing! However, this is probably about as likely as me winning the lottery jackpot 44 times in a row, being inundated with marriage proposals from the world's top supermodels, and finding that my next door neighbour is Elvis. A man can dream though! Which would I want more though,Watford to stay up or the rest... ;)

Our next focus is Saturday's match against Man Utd in the FA Cup semi-final. Winning this is just slightly more probable than us staying up. Unfortunately I'm going to be in Jacksonville, Florida at the time of the game. I'm not holding out much hope of finding somewhere to watch the game, but I'm definitely going to try.

Get your skates on

Last year I wrote about about my return to roller skating and how I'd try to keep it up. This didn't really happen and my skating venture was a rather one off affair. However, the recent good weather inspired adren-junk and me to grab our skates (although she does have blades!) and get out into the park for a bit of rolling around. The other day we gathered together a group of friends, a sk8er cru if you will, and set off to Kelvingrove Park. Some of the cru were dissing my skates and their hypercool hockey socks, but they're just not old skool enough!

As ever I was a bit tentative to start with, but the skates soon became like extensions of my feet - well not quite, but things did improve over the course of the afternoon. It was also fun to have other people there to skate with, despite there only being two pairs of skates between the group. This has also encouraged other people to buy some skates to (ellielabelle, nimoloth). Hopefully this will be incentive for me to keep the skating up this time round.

Rush hour

Copied from my post at Phys. Rev. X:

Yesterday evening a new sketch show was shown on BBC3 - well according to the website it was first shown on 19^th March, but I first noticed it last night. BBC3 sketch shows can be a bit hit and miss (generally miss) as they'll put out almost anything until they hit upon a winning formula with something decent that they can then go and push big time onto BBC2 (or the golden realm of BBC1), a la Little Britain. This new show is called Rush Hour and it features a few of fairly recognisable comedians, e.g. Adam Buxton (of Adam and Joe fame) and Frankie Boyle, plus many who I've never seen before. One of it's writers is Charlie Brooker, who's a regular Guardian columnist as has written on things like Brass Eye and Nathan Barley - a fairly good pedigree. As I said above, BBC3 (in fact pretty much any) sketch shows can be fairly dire for the most part, with the occasional one or two funny sketches per show. Rush Hour was a pleasant surprise. As the title may suggest the sketches focus around people driving to work, or on the school run, say, during rush hour. In the one show I've seen there was a good variation between the characters, and they were also fairly fresh i.e. they mainly weren't rehashes of characters from other TV sketch shows (with one major exception of the lecherous boss character, who just seemed very familiar). The comic acting was at a fairly high standard, with the one sketch including Frankie Boyle as a policeman driving his young daughter and a classmate to school, being particularly well done. But the most important thing was that it was funny. There was nothing side-splittingly hilarious, but it was all good quality comedy, with no moments when you had to cringe and wonder why someone though a particular sketch would be a good idea.

I'll watch next week to see if anything starts to really annoy me. If two episodes have been decent enough then it might be onto a winner - with me at least.

Literary surprise

I've never come across a book that suddenly turns into a musical before. That is until I read a specific chapter of Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver last night. All was normal until a sleep deprivation, but mainly syphilis, induced psychosis (the character in the books, not mine!), brought about a veritable Les Miserables style song and dance, including extras galore consisting of dancing skeletons, priests, slaves and fishwives! I'll write a proper review of the book when I've finished it, but I really recommend people read it.

From bad to worse

I chose not to write anything after England's dismal performance against Israel last Saturday in the Euro 2008 qualifiers. This was partly due to being inadequately able to express my contempt at the team and partly in the hope that we'd show some sort of improvement in form in Wednesdays match against the mighty Andorra. We won this game, but in a thoroughly unconvincing style considering the quality of our opposition. Now to many people a win might be enough and they'd settle for the much needed three points, but not for the England fan (or fans from quite a few other countries I expect). What we really wanted to see was the players give it some - I mean playing with some passion and looking like a team that's working well together - but this sort of spirit was clearly lacking (I only saw of the highlights of the Andorra game, but I did sit through the entire Israel game, and that was pretty depressing). We need the team to show these responses as it generally picks them up and makes them play better, it also gives us fans belief that the team want to win, rather than just turn up and jog around a field for 90 minutes. It's going to be a bit of a struggle, but we'll need to inject some spirit into the players (who constantly say that they're trying their hardest, but it definitely fails to show through in their game) if we're to progress to the finals next year. I should have heart though as Beckham still believes we can make it! I'll leave all the McClaren bashing to others!

A great results for Northern Ireland though, beating Sweden and going to top their group. If they can keep it up there might be a lot of England fans who become Northern Irish for a few weeks next summer!

Land down under

Not content with my trips to Italy and the US over the last couple of weeks, or my upcoming trip to Florida for the APS meeting in a couple of weeks time, I've gone and registered myself for an uber-trip all the way to the Amaldi/GRG18 meeting in Sydney in July. For these flights I may use the air miles I've accrued over the last few years to get an upgrade to business class, as I don't fancy flying all that way in economy. I now just need to do the work for the poster I think I intend to submit - this is subject to change though, and I've got a month before I have to actually submit the abstract.

Introducing the band

It's been a long while coming, but our band has finally got round to organising a gig. Now I've not said much about the band recently, in fact I don't think I've even told anyone our name (those that aren't in the know already that is), but as we approach the gig I'll probably write more.

So what are we called? Well in fact we are two bands, the second formed due to the very much lamented loss of our bassist, scri-minus, to the land of Brum. The original band (including scri-minus, but after our first line-up change with the loss of the Mole) kind of settled on the name Look up for danger for reasons too obscure to bother to mention for those who don't already know. This amazing four piece sailed the seas of rock for many months, but without ever recording our unique sound, or airing it to the general public (i.e. our mates). The second, three piece, band, is currently, somewhat unaptly named Corpse Full of Bees. We are dark!

When and where is this gig then? Well, we thought we'd start off somewhere smallish, and not try to play the Glasgow SECC just yet, so we're playing in the slightly more intimate venue of upstairs at the Research Club. The date is Friday 11^th May, so put that in your diaries all you music fans. The gig will be Corpse Full of Bees featuring Look up for danger (due to the triumphant return of scri-minus for one-night-only), and possible support acts from... well we've not quite thought of that yet.

Right, so now I just have to go and actually get good at playing the drums...

Wonder drug

Now I know aspirin has many thing going for it, but I don't know about the claim in today's Daily Express headline "Aspirin cuts risk of death by 25%" (I should just clarify that I'm not an Express reader, but just saw the headline on a newspaper when I was buying my lunch.) I can only assume that the rest of the story's a little more down-to-earth with its claims, but I didn't deem it worth reading since the headline was so patently absurd. Then again I'm sick and tired of these 100% death rates we seem to be prepared to live with! Doctors should be doing more to reduce that tragic figure and if aspirin can help 25% less people from dying then more research should be done to improve it's immortality rating. And any dangerous drug testing should be done on peadophiles and asylum seekers!

Sorry, I think I just got taken over by the spirit of an Express reader. The story is given a slightly more sober treatment by BBC news here.

It's here

I've been quick out of the blocks and have already downloaded the last episode of BSG. Too bad I've got to go to work. I'll have to build up that anticipation level some more and watch it later.

[Update: so I watched BSG last night and without giving anything away I can only say "guuh hhuuhhh whhaa baah... what the fuck!" I also now reckon that I'm probably a Cylon (just noticed that you can't write Cylon without the word looking like it should be the name for a washing detergent). It's the only thing that makes sense.]

In the (British) summertime

In a fairly pointless post I just thought I'd bid farewell to Greenwich Mean Time and welcome in the glorious British Summer Time. If only it didn't mean that we lose an hour that can't be clawed back for another six months. If I hadn't been travelling so much in the last couple of weeks the change in time might ever-so-slightly confuse me, but as it is I think I'll take it in my stride. Now, to change all my clocks...

Slumberland

Yesterday/today/last night/this morning/whenever(!) I flew back from the US after my whirlwind tour of two different meetings. As ever it was lovely seeing Britain hove into view from the plane window, causing me to sing myself a slightly altered version of Gerry and the Pacemaker's Ferry cross the Mersey, substituting "Ferry" for "plane" and "Mersey" for "Atlantic" obviously. An amazing thing happened on this flight. I actually managed to get some sleep! It wasn't the longest of snoozes, for sure, but it was probably a good two or so hours of fairly uninterrupted kip. How did I achieve this when previous attempts at airborne sonambulence have failed? Well I'm not quite sure, as I've been just as sleepy on previous flights, but it mainly involved contorting myself into every possible position that can be achieved in an airline window seat until I settled into the closest thing to comfort that the location would allow, and covering my head in a blanket - much like you might cover a bird cage with a blanket to get a bird to sleep.

Good as it was to get some sleep on the plane, I still had to have a few hours nap when I got home.

Man who?

So it looks like we'll be playing Man Utd in the FA Cup semi-final. Bring 'em on!

TV times

To update you on my present location I did finally arrive in Baton Rouge for my meeting on Saturday evening, after having no further flight complications. This meant I only missed a day despite all my travel problems!

There's been one slight advantage to being in the US in that I got to watch BSG live. I got to see it a full, probably, 16 or so hours before I'd have seen it, after downloading, in the UK. That said, I had to put up with the endless bloody adverts - I far prefer watching the torrent, in which people have kindly edited these annoyances out. With last night's episode being the penultimate one of the season it's getting pretty good again and ramping up the action. Can I wait till next week for the final episode? - I just don't know if I can, I'm that excited! The problem with the season ending is that it will be the first time I've had to wait all those months before getting a new series to watch. I think I'll have to find another show to fill the time.

Tell me WHY I don't like airports...

The reason is that they are the work of Satan himself. They are hellish places when you just have to spend the merest of timespans in them, but when you have to spend entire days, or more, of you precious life in them they become all the more unbearable and maddening. This rant is courtesy of a rather large amount of icey weather in the North East of America, and the general astounding lack of preparedness by the staff of Continental Airlines (as may have been picked up from my last post - BTW I'm now approaching 36 hours of sleep deprivation). The reason these things have effected me is that I had to leave the gorgeousness of the Moriond meeting in La Thuile to attend the rather less attractive prospect of the LSC (my collaboration) meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So let me take you back two days...

A slightly hungover me leaves the Moriond to travel the much trod road to Geneva. This all goes well (apart from having a large - yet reclaimable - amount of money extracted from my wallet by a greedy coachman). After about 40 mins semi-random wandering I find my hostelry, where I will rest before my early flight the next morning. I partake in victuals at a local eatery, dispatch myself to a pubbe to quaff ale and watch borish sporting endeavours, and then drink with a local comely wench - sorry Helen ;) - forgive my olde worlde tone in the last sentences for I have mostly been reading a lot of Quicksilver in the last day, which is set, for a large part, in 17^th Century England.

This flight was directly from Geneva to Newark Airport, for which I arose at the ungodly hour 5.30 am (cue the start of my sleep deprivation). The flight was as pleasant as any long hall trip can be, but the pilot said there might be some light snow in New York. No-one's too worried as there was no word of delays. We get to Newark and it's fairly snow laden all around, with snowplows whizzing around the tarmac a breakneck speed to clear the snowy slush, but the planes seem to be moving ok. Little did we realise that this movement was a rouse. The planes are leaving gates and new ones are arriving, but barely any are actually taking off. Various people are sitting on their planes on the runways for several hours before being recalled. This seems an obvious point for the local airport staff to start preparing people for the fact that their flights are rather unlikely to take off, and maybe diverting some of the incoming flights to more hospitable airports. However this isn't what happens. They just keep putting back and back the departure times of all the aircraft, with more and more people arriving all the time. When the staff do eventually bow to the inevitable there are thousands of people with cancelled connections all wanting the same thing and with very few points of call to get it. The connections desks develop huge queues, which move at a snails pace and snake around with many hours waiting time. No-one really knows if any flights will be able to take of the next day either, so people just have to hope that a connection can be found. Continental, who were the only people I dealt with, as they control pretty all Terminal C of Newark, where I had landed, gave out a phone number to ring to get a connecting flight, but this was inundated by half the North East of America, so became practically useless - which I found out after many failed attempts at getting through, including a brain sapping, 2 hour 10 min stint, which almost LEFt mE InnSAyNE! I hadn't done the clever thing if just brazening out one of the check in queues from the start (which would have been at least a six hour wait), but had assumed things the numbers of people would dwindle as the night progressed - the only dwindling of people was from the check in staff though, slowing progress even further. This meant that, after a few aborted attempts to sleep in variuos parts of the terminal building, I had to try to rejoin a queue in the morning check in, which would start at 4am we were assured. At 4.40am the check in staff finally arrived. This time I stuck out the line (to use an Americanism), before being told that I wouldn't be able to get a flight to my destination until Monday. The attendant I had spoken to didn't seem to have tried particularly hard to find alternative routes, but I accepted things (in most situations a couple of free days in New York would have been great, but my mood was rather strained at this point) and said to just book me the earliest flight back to Glasgow - I just wanted to go home and sleep - but again this wouldn't be until Monday evening. I walked off to collect my baggage, which had spent the night all comfy in the hold of its plane, feeling distinctly emotionally drained. There was so much stress and high tension in the air from the mass of pissed off and tired people that it just got into you.

Now I don't blame (most of) the check in staff for the situation, or the weather for that matter. What I blame is just piss poor management and planning. Snow and cold weather aren't exactly uncommon phenomena in the northerly parts of America. Indeed it's pretty much expected during the winter, so these situations must occur at least yearly. However there seemed to be no contingency for it at all, with people having a very poor idea of what should have been done and when. The fact that planes weren't going to be flying should, and could, have been spotted earlier. This would have allowed people to arrange their connecting flights as they arrived, which would have been in a more orderly manner with a far smaller flow of people to deal with. Flights that could have been diverted, should have been, so that so many people wouldn't have been stuck in the one place. The phone system should have been more helpful, and at least given an updated message of how long it would be for a call to be answered. I just don't know whether any of this will be done, and it's certainly taken the sheen off what before was one of my least hated airports.

However my luck did change. When attempting to arrange for Continental to at least put me up in a hotel for the next couple nights I came across a rather more competent and professional set of check staff, the very people who I should have gone to in the first place. In their room, which was tucked away at the far end of the main terminal, past the luggage carousels, the atmosphere was a lot calmer. This eased me and when I got to the desk I asked whether a more concerted attempt could be made to get me to Baton Rouge. After a short while it was found that this was indeed possible, and all that had to happen was that I went via Memphis, rather than the original route via Houston. So now after about 26 hours in Newark I'm nearing my flight time. I've still not slept, so no doubt soon my normal sleep deprived experience or audio hallucination's is just around the corner, but hopefully I'm actually on my way somewhere. In fact at this point I don't care where, I just want to be moving and get out of this BLOODY AIRPORT!!!

From the sublime to the ridiculous

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

Connected

This post is brought to you courtesy of the free wireless of a McDonalds in Chamonix (yes I'm in France now) as I sit outside it in the sun. I just paid the extortionate sum of 140 euros (modern keyboards need a euros key) to get a taxi here from La Thuile, and in half an hour I get a bus to Geneva. But whilst waiting I thought I'd take the opportunity to download a bit of the last Battlestar Galactica episode.

That is all...

Missing all the fun

The only disappointment about being at this meeting (well other than the fact that I have to leave it today and head to a proper meeting where there aren't any ski breaks) is that I missed seeing Daniel Kitson last night at the Glasgow Comedy Festival. I organised for a load of people to go to the gig before I realised I was going to be away. From a very preliminary report I hear that it was amazing, so I can only hope that he'll be in Edinburgh during the summer and I can get to see the show. Whilst not watching Daniel Kitson I was mainly dancing like a man possessed to Eurodisco classics in a videodiscopub (yes that's what it was called) and drinking copious amounts of Leffe (thanks Christian!). I now don't feel to hot.

Hard at work

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

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

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

Telephone exchange

At the weekend I finally did something I've been meaning to do for sometime. It really needed doing as it had been causing me immense amounts of frustration and occasional bouts of rage. I got rid of my Sony Ericsson piece of crap - with its shitty, unresponsive, or sometimes just plain random, joystick. I've traded it in for a much sleeker phone - the Nokia 6300. This phone is rather nice with attractive metal looks and an ultra thin (without being too small) body. It's got a very decent screen and all the main features you expect from a modern phone i.e. digital camera, radio, music player, etc. I have noticed, however, how similar everything on it is to the general Sony Ericsson layout. I assume that Nokia decided that the easiest thing to do was copy all the features that the Ericsson had, but remove a lot of the annoyances - maybe they were trying to tempt back people who'd previously moved over from Nokia (which used to be the dominant phone a few years back) to an Ericsson. I know this has made the switch easier for me.

Wembley, here we come (almost)!

As I was travelling to Italy I missed Watford's FA Cup quarter final tie against Plymouth Argyle, but on checking the results via the internet today I'm very happy to see we progressed. It seems, from the reports, that our success had a lot to do with our excellent keeper, Ben Foster, being on top form. In the semi-final we face the winner of the replay between Manchester United and Middlesbrough - this could see Foster up against the team who actually own him (Man U). We're only one step away from the final at Wembley now, let's hope we can do it. I think the FA Cup would be at least some consolation for the fact that we're going to be relegated.

Meet me in the mountains

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

Steal from the rich...

...and present to the poor.

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

In the land of the one screened computer...

...the two screened computer is king.

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

Celebrity zoo

It seems like it's impossible to walk around London and not bump into celebrities these days! Well, maybe that's an exaggeration - ok, it's definitely an exaggeration, but yesterday I did indeed walk passed a famous person on Oxford Street. Who was this megastar that I casually strolled passed without being overcome by starstruck awe? Well let's look at the clues. After being a Cambridge footlight he initially rose to prominence when him and his comedy partner won the 2001 Perrier Comedy award. Since then he has gone on to co-write and star in a string of cult Channel 4 comedies. Above his mantel piece he has a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, who lives in a house like... ok, that's enough.

Those in the know will have guessed that it was none other than star of Darkplace, The IT Crowd and Man to Man, Richard Ayoade. The encounter went like this: When he was approaching me I was like "Hey, that looks like Richard Ayoade, star of Darkplace among other things", and then he got closer (close enough even that if I'd reached out my hand I could have touched him) and I was all "Hey, that is Richard Ayoade, star of Darkplace!", and then he went passed me and I was totally "Hey, you know who that was who just like walked passed me on Oxford Street, it was Richard Ayoade, star of Darkplace." The rest of London, however, went on as if nothing had happened! They just don't know how good they've got it, what with vaguely famous people walking on the very same streets that you or I can tread.

Get your motor running

Last weekend was Veitchfest (for those not quite in the know, Veitchfest translates as a trip to visit, and warm the flat of, our friend [and band-mate] John in his new home in the Midlands). This involved a jaunt down to Birmingham - unfortunately it wasn't a jaunt in the Alfred Bester sense - but required me to drive for several hours across vast swathes of the UK. I can't recount what happened at Veitchfest (what happen's at Veitchfest stays at Veitchfest), but I'll tell part of the story.

I was the designated driver for the trip, being the only person who could drive and of an age for getting insured by a hire car company. We hired an MPV, in the form of a Kia Sedona ("heavenly luxury and a down-to-earth price"), which provided ample space for our group. I'd asked for an automatic transmission car, being as the last time I'd driven a manual was in my driving test over three and a half years previously. It wasn't to be though and I got a manual car. I thought it would be pretty hard to get to learn the car, but it proved not too bad - mainly because it was a diesel which are far harder to stall than petrol cars. I felt quite at home to start with and was driving around Glasgow quite confidently. The next thing to do was go on the motorway - I'd never been on the motorway before. The motorway is in fact a piece of piss to negotiate. It's three lanes all going in the same direction! That wasn't my main problem. On going onto the motorway I got into 5^th gear, but the car was making a fairly high pitched noise, the rev counter was in the red and the speed wouldn't go over 70 mph. I found this quite odd, but just assumed that diesel's were a bit weird and the car had a speed limiter on it. After a while of driving, and with the music on, I forgot about these problems. It wasn't until after a break in a service station, and re-entering the motorway that I realised that the car would go above 70mph and didn't have to make a whiny sound. We realised that prior to the stop I'd been in 3^rd gear the whole time! I don't think the engine/gear box/clutch will have particularly liked it, but we made it the rest of the way to Birmingham and back in the car, so it can't have done too much damage.

The rest of the car trip was fairly uneventful although I did manage some fairly close shaves with cars, bollards, walls, multi-storey cars parks, etc.

Indestructible

You may have heard about the Virgin train derailment that happened on Friday evening. It was a London to Glasgow train that came off the track in Cumbria whilst travelling at about 90 mph. What you probably haven't heard, as it's not really the main news story, was that Britain's top gravitational wave scientist (my boss, Prof. Jim Hough) was aboard the train. Luckily he was one of the few people that emerged completely unscathed. Jim isn't the first eminent UK gravitational wave expert to emerge from a major transportation disaster, as a few years back the University of Birmingham's Prof. Mike Cruise survived an bus crash in Austria. Hopefully these two aren't setting some sort of precedent for being involved in transport accidents.

A little to the right

Read this recent post from Cosmic Variance. It's about a new rival to wikipedia, called conservapedia, that doesn't hold too much hat with all the woolly liberal views that wikipedia expounds. By God, they aim to set things right and they'll do it by ridding entries of the scourge of liberal non-American spelling (see conservapedia commandment number 5) - non-American spelling leads to homosexuality, rape, and cruelty to cats, or something like that! Some of the entries detailed in Sean's CV post and comments sections are obvious piss takes and have been removed, however the posts on Atheism, Einstein and "Anything Goes" are still as stated - I think they might be serious! I know that wikipedia can sometimes have some dubious statements and citations for articles (which you're free to correct), but how's about this for a "true and verifiable" (commandment numero uno) statement:

"Since atheists have no God, as a philosophical framework atheism simply provides no logical basis for any moral standard. They live their lives according to the rule that "anything goes". In recent years, this has led to a large rise in crime[1], drug use,pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy,[2] pedophilia[3] and bestiality."

Particularly amusing/disturbing is that the citation [1] is to a website called www.creationtheory.org.

Express yourself

Tony Blair's an arse! The Queen's a crack ho! Christianity smells! God's a bastard!

Now I like the fact that I can say and write these things, even if they're insulting to people. I like the fact that I can write them as my honest opinion, or as a joke. I like the fact that I can criticise people or institutions that I don't agree with. However, I might think differently if I was in Eygpt, as a blogger who expressed his opinion has just been sent to prison for four years. His crime was "for contempt of religion, insulting the president and spreading false information.", or basically speaking out against an establishment he felt was deserving of some criticism. This type of state censorship/punishment isn't limited to Eygpt (see the UK religious hatred laws for example), but I hope that it wont spread too far and too wide. There's a huge amount that has already been written about freedom of speech and civil liberties, but I just thought I'd bring up this case as a recent example of where things can lead. You can see more about the Egyptian blogger Kareem here.

Flipping out

Just a quick pancake based post this having just been Shrove Tuesday, aka pancake day, and all. This evening I made up some pancake batter with about 4oz flour, 2 eggs, a pinch of salt and half a pint of milk (as described here - normally I just add stuff until it looks about the right runniness, but I decided to use other people's empirical experience this time round). This was all mixed together to the prerequisite consistency and then blitzed with a hand held spinny-bladey thing to remove any lumps - last year I did all the mixing by hand, but the electronic help made things a fair bit quicker. As is the way with pancakes you have to make sure the pan is helluvah hot before you try and cook one, or else it just become some sort of mess. I let the pan reach temperatures that would make the devil sweat before pouring in some mix. Normally I have one duff pancake to start with, but this one turned out fine. My pancake flipping skills were still there and hadn't atrophied from a year of not being used. I made a savoury filling of bacon, red pepper, onion, mushroom and tomato fried up, to go in my first two pancakes. With this went a liberal helping of grated mature cheddar and it turned out to be damn tasty. I can't have a pancake day without having the classic lemon juice and sugar pancakes though, so the remainder of my batter went on these - I was even generous enough to make one for my flatmate.

Where have all the white towels gone...

Today I discovered that, after months of threatening, the University of Glasgow gym (aka the Stevie) has removed their service of having small white towels freely available for exercisers. These towels come in useful for wiping your sweaty brow after a hard work out, and also wiping your sweaty imprint off the exercise machine you've just used. Unfortunately many people abused this service, and instead of returning the towels to the given receptacles for laundering at the end of their session, they would selfishly steal the towel. This even lead to an attempted towel amnesty by the gym, but I don't think it wasn't hugely successful, hence the disappearance of the towel service completely. Now we're left with the far lesspleasant scratchy paper towels to do the job of the old soft and fluffy cotton towel - maybe I'll just bring in my own flannel!

Look up to the skies and see

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there were 8

After a very fortunate win against Ipswich on Saturday Watford have been drawn against Plymouth Argyle in the quarter final of the FA Cup. They're the only non-Premier League club left in the competition, which should hopefully make things slightly easier for us - although they'll probably be more up for it than some of the Premiership clubs left in, particularly Arsenal and Manchester United who gave lacklustre performances at the weekend and have still got replays to get through. The Cup run will hopefully give us momentum and hope for the league, in which we have a crucial home game against Wigan on Wednesday. If we win it'll pull us up to 18th above West Ham and Charlton, a only be four points behind Wigan.

Reading into things

A lot of people seem to use their blogs to review books/films/tv shows/video games/restaurants/foods/drinks/whatever and I've decided to join in by reviewing (or at least briefly commenting on) the book I finished reading last night. It was Cities in Flight by James Blish. This book is actually a collection of four Blish novels following man's expansion from being bound to our solar system to having a galactic civilisation, and it spans an approximately 2000 year period of future history from around the present day to about 4104. The books weren't quite written in their internal chronologies' order, with book two being written first, followed by book one, and then three and four. I may give some spoilers here, but I'll try not to give away anything major.

Firstly I should say that I did enjoy this book, but it's definitely a book of two halves (I know I already said it's made up of four books, so in reality it's a book of four quarters). The first novel follows the development of the technology that allows humans to eventually begin flights to other stars i.e. faster-than-light (FTL in sci-fi speak) drives - called spin-dizzies - and what Blish calls antiagathics, or drugs that prolong human life almost unlimitedly. This book only covers a short time-span of a few years and holds together very well, with enough characterisation for you to appreciate the main characters and a really well developed plot that stays interesting throughout. The second novel jumps forward about a thousand years and we get to hear about the cities in flight of the title. Many worlds have been colonised in a first wave of expansion after the invention of the spin-dizzies, however things on Earth are fairly bleak. The spin-dizzies enable entire cities to lift themselves off Earth and fly about the galaxies to look for work on colony worlds. We hear of one city and a boy press-ganged onto it as it takes flight to find work. This story also takes place over a relatively short period of time and concentrates on this boy as the main character as he experiences first the harsh life aboard the city he was press-ganged onto, and then the completely different experience of being on New York - which had taken flight many years before and was well used to the wandering lifestyle. Again it all hangs together well and is a very compelling story which makes you want to hear more about the characters.

Things start to go a bit wrong in the third book. This is set a few hundred years after the previous novel and now concentrates on the travels of New York in its searches for work, with the major player being its Mayor Amalfi. The main problem with this book is that it spans several hundred years, which leads to the reader feeling that there are quite large inconsistencies in the time frame. This is because the characters don't seem to evolve as you'd expect that they would over such a period of time - this is on purpose, I expect, because the characters have such long lifespans (due to the antiagathics) that it's natural that things take such a long time to unfold. Unfortunately Blish a) doesn't really give the reader a consistent grasp of the time frame, so things seem to happen at very weird rates and b) the characters start to grate on you a bit. You just feel that you're missing something. This feeling caries on into the fourth and final novel, which mainly however grates because of the very weird physics it invokes (I know that FTL travel is weird physics, but it's a mainstay of much sci-fi)!

So basically I'd say that the first two novels are very good reads. The second two are ok, but just seem poor after what's preceded them. You basically end up wishing that Blish had carried on in the same vein, with maybe some of the characters, as the first two novels. If you've read the book and think that I'm completely wrong (or right) then let me know.

You can now look forward to my next review. I'll be reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson which is pretty thick, so it may take a while to get through. I hope it's on a par with Cryptonomicon which was very good.

One to watch

After a bit of pushing from my flatmate I've started watching the new (well newish as it started last September) NBC sci-fi show Heroes. I'm three episodes in and I'm hooked - this adds to the list of House, 24, Lost and of course BSG that I (or my flatmate) have to download each week. The basic premise of the programme is that there are a disparate group of people who have special powers, because they're the next step in human evolution! They're only just beginning to know about these powers, or start to feel that there's something special about themselves, and they're each coming to terms with it in different ways. This is all building up to some climactic event (which is pretty much spelled out early on in the series) during which I expect all the protagonists will be forced together and the full extent of there powers revealed. It's kind of a mix of the X-men (maybe a rather large part of the mix) and Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. As I said I've been sucked in now, so will be eagerly anticipating each new episode.

999

Today I encountered an accident. A woman, who was a little worst for wear, fell over and cracked her head on the pavement. I rushed over to help along with another guy who'd been closer to her. Now I've encountered this sort of situation a couple of times before (with accidents of various seriousness), but am still rather poor when dealing with it. The woman had a fair bit of blood pouring from her head and was rather confused what with the fall, a bit of shock and her general drunkeness. My main response, other than being slightly bewildered, was to call an ambulance and hope someone else dealt with the situation at hand. Luckily a couple of medical students happened by who were far more equipped to deal with the accident. Now I know medical students can get a lot of stick, but I have to say that I was very impressed by these two. They had the right combination of dealing with the injury whilst also reassuring the woman and getting useful information from her. Doing things like trying to reassure and calm the person and even offer them a coat (which they did as it was still very cold) are common sense, but left my brain when really needed. All I could do was stand around sheepishly waiting for the ambulance to arrive. This highlighted to me how inadequate my own abilities were, but hopefully I've learned something for the next time.

Away win

We've done what's eluded us so far this season, we've got an away win in the league! Yes, you heard it, the mighty Hornets went to deepest, darkest East London and bested West Ham 1-0. Apparently we were deserved winner, but I'll have to watch the highlights on MOTD this evening. It's the same score line we beat them with to get through to the next round of the FA Cup (in which we're playing Ipswich next Saturday by the way). This bring us to a glorious 18 points (I know we're still bottom of the table), only 7 points behind Wigan in the tantalising 17th spot. I can see us staying up I really can (ok that's just a fevered fantasy, but I'll live it for a few minutes).

[Update: I just watched the match highlights and it game was pretty eventful. There were two penalties: the first one was for us, and in reality was a fairly soft foul, but Henderson slotted it home; the second was for West Ham, and maybe should have earned Gavin Mahon a red card, but the Hammers missed it. Phew! There were a few other near misses from both sides. Mackay cleared/deflected a goal bound Tevez shot, and Foster had to make a great save to keep us ahead. Foster did, however make a bit of a blunder when he dropped the ball in his area whilst Zamora was hassling him, luckily he somehow managed to snatch it back off Zamora before he could get a shot on. I'm just happy we got the win.]

In England rugby news we got a 20-7 win against Italy today. It was however a rather dull game compared to last week's Six Nations opener, so there's not really much to say about it.

I may be some time

Early this morning, walking home from an evening of poker at jakeybob and ellielabelle's flat, I found out what it was like for Scott of the Antarctic. I have a new found admiration of the madmen people who venture into the extremes of cold all for the simple joy of exploration. I think that the cold may have reached my pancreas and started to freeze it, and even then I only walked half way home before hailing a cab - I may have been fully frozen through if I'd walked the whole way!

Cracked pottery

After posting the paper the other day I received an email about it - "Hmmmm.. maybe I'll get some interesting and useful feedback!" I thought. The person that emailed goes by the name "Doc" although I wont give his full name as it'll probably make me the number one google link for him. Now this guy was just passing on information about a paper he'd written back in 1980 which related to some of our work and telling me about a talk on gravitational waves that he'd been to. The paper is genuine enough and was even published in Ap. J. - I've not really delved into it yet though, but I'll try and read it properly. However the first wierd thing of note was that he'd cc'd this email on to one of the head LSC (our scientific collaboration) people for no apparent reason! Does he know him? Possible, as he is an MIT graduate, but a bit strange none-the-less. The next weird thing was when I looked at his affiliation, first on his paper, and then on some of the other things he's written (obviously my first response to getting the email was to google the guy) - see for here for example. Now the guy's probably great and in all fairness in his email he was just pointing out a potentially useful paper, but sometimes you just get those warning signs of potential crackpot flagged up. I just hope he doesn't read this now, as he was only being helpful and here I go casting aspersions about his nature, and all from one email!

Clouded judgement

Thanks to some very useful code from phydeaux3 I've converted my rather dreary looking list of post labels, into a very modern and fancy label cloud. It takes up far less space and displays the post tags with varying font size according to how often they are used - this will be familiar to many people as it's used on a large number of blogs already. I now feel I'm almost up with the times, now I just need to get that Trackback sorted.

Finally

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

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

Second home

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

One man army

After a year (well a bit more than that actually) of utterly dire play the English rugby team have finally put a smile back on their fans faces. We started off the Six Nations with a 42-20 victory against Scotland at Twickenham. This was thanks in a large part to one man - Jonny Wilkinson. Now there's a lot of hype surrounding Jonny's return to the England set up and it risks being blown out of all proportions, but his performance today was just great - and this is from someone who's been out injured and not played for England in three years, and who's only played 40 mins for his club this season! I think this injury factor makes people feel for Jonny a bit more than other players and adds to the hype. There's also the fact that he was one of our World Cup heros, which means in England fans eyes he's something of a legend. I can imagine it was a fair risk including him at all, but I think he showed why he can be so important to the team. Just talking about Jonny does a disservice to the rest of the team like Harry Ellis, but as I don't follow rugby much except for internationals I don't really know who the majority of the team are, so I can't talk much about them. One match can't tell everything though, so we'll have to wait and see if the team can keep it together and build up to something decent in this World Cup year.

And yes, I know that Jonny's try shouldn't have counted.

Oh, what a night!

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

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

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

Defender of the thesis

This evening I got to experience a live German PhD thesis defense (the equivalent of our British viva). This defense was for one of the PhD students at the AEI in Hannover who has worked on various aspects of the characterisation of the GEO detector. A German thesis defense (and I think this is similar across France and Italy to) is somewhat different than our viva. The defense can be attended by anyone, and this one had pretty much all the staff and students at the AEI in the audience - including a few of us visitors. It involved a 45 min talk on the work done by the student, followed by about 25 mins of questions from the thesis examiners, and then it got thrown open to the audience to ask questions. Being as we were in Germany the defense talk and questioning was conducted in German, although as a nod towards the fact that there'd likely be some native English speakers in the audience the talk slides were written in English. As the subject area of the talk was pretty familiar to me I managed to pick up all our gravitational wave type jargon. It was an interesting thing to experience, but I'm not convinced its how I want to spend many more Friday evenings.

Travelling salesman

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