The bonnie banks

Yesterday I had my second ever kayaking trip out on actual open water (the first one was a couple of months back on a river called the Orchy, where we went down the relatively easy lower section [it was a beginners trip], but I neglected to blog about it.) The plan had originally been to get on a river and see some white water, but due to safety constraints we ended up on the rather more sedate waters of Loch Lomond. The trip was also my first time driving the GUSA minibus since taking the test at the end of last year. During my test I managed to stall the bus a considerable number of times and getting going yesterday was a similar experience with multiple stalls just reversing out of the parking space. After getting out on the open road I did improve and the stalls became far rarer as I gained a bit more control and experience of the clutch (although when they did happen it was generally only when I had a police car sitting behind me!)

The kayaking was enjoyable and we just paddled round the Loch for a few hours, stopping off for lunch on a beach, and generally enjoying the nice weather. It was occasionally a bit gusty and choppy out in the middle of the loch, but for the most part it was warm and calm. It wasn't the most taxing or exciting of paddles, but was still good experience of being out in a boat for an extended period. I ended up in the water a couple of times: the first time after my boat filled up with water and sank when we were playing a game involving two people swapping kayaks; and the second after I capsized when practising a high brace and couldn't manage to roll myself upright (this was just after I'd purposely done a roll and managed it fine.) The water was pretty chilly, but was bearable for a shortish period. I just have to live down the fact that I swam on flat water!

Next weekend we'll be out on another trip with me driving again - this time camping for the entire weekend and going on a river (the Etive). I expect I'll be in the water far more when there.

Staying put

It's been a few days since the sad events happened and maybe it's taken a while to sink in, but it's true... Watford will be staying put in the Championship next season. The play-offs against Hull didn't start off particularly well with us losing 2-0 at home, although we apparently didn't play too badly and were unlucky to have an opening goal disallowed and our captain sent off. Things went from bad to worse in the second leg with us being thrashed 4-1 - we started off fast and managed to pull a goal back early on, but obviously that was not enough. We've only ourselves to blame for the position we were in due to our very poor form towards the end of (well for most of the second half of) this season. If we'd kept going how we started we'd have walked it into top spot in the league, but I think our brand of dull, long ball football (the true lower league mainstay of how to play the beautiful game) wasn't something that we could keep doing and still guaranteeing decent results^*.

I'm sure all the Premiership clubs are bitterly disappointed that they won't be able to pit themselves against the might Hornets, but they'll just have to wait another season! However, if Hull do go up it could see a bit of a blast for the past for the Premiership what with Nicky Barmby and Dean Windass in their side - that is if they're not sold/retire over the summer.

^* My views are in no way based on informed opinion as I've not seen a single game this season, but are only speculation from the few things I've read/heard about our games.

To boldly go where no name has gone before

Get NASA to send your name to the moon (courtesy of some memory storage device on NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.) It's ultimately a pointless exercise, but could generate a small frisson of excitement in you dull, workaday life - you get a certificate you can print off to!

Scraping into the play-offs

The Championship season's ended and Watford have just about managed to scrape through with the final play-off spot. We were saved from being in the dreaded seventh position in the table by virtue of having a goal difference one goal better than Wolves! After spending large chunks of the season in an automatic promotion place with the potential of winning the league we somehow managed to let it all slip away (by playing shit) in the last couple of months! The play-offs are a complete lottery, so who knows what will happen, but I do remember when we previously went up it was after finishing sixth.

Terror in the Arctic

Due to having being lax on the blogging front last month I'll begin with a post I meant to write a while back, but obviously didn't. It's a brief review of the last book I read called The Terror by Dan Simmons. In my opinion The Terror is a return to form for Dan Simmons after his last couple of books, Illium and Olympos, which tried to cover too much and ended up being rather convoluted and disappointing. The Terror is based on the the ill-fated Franklin expedition to find the north-west passage (a sea route through the Arctic between the Atlantic and Pacific) - the expedition consisting of two ships: The Erebus and The Terror. The fate of the ships' crews, and the ships themselves, was never discovered, making the story rife for fictionalisation. The book is presented as a horror book, with one of the main premises being of something in the Arctic night picking off the crew (you get this from the blurb of the book, so it's no spoiler), but don't let this fool you as the book a mainly a brilliantly researched and realised account of 19th Century Arctic expeditions, survival and maritime history. Simmons has done a great job in getting across the atrocious conditions that the expedition would have gone through. His characterisation of the large cast of people is also done excellently, obviously with some literary license, but also with a great deal of historical research. It's very easy to feel empathy with the characters and develop an attachment to them early on, meaning you care about their fate despite knowing that the expedition doesn't end well. The book is undeniably very, very bleak and this potentially could get too oppressive throughout a nearly 1000 page book, but it's so engrossing and interesting that you want to keep going. The end of the book does diverge substantially from the rest and I wasn't satisfied with it (except for the very end), but was obviously done to give the monster a meaningful background and again was very well researched. I would really recommend this book, but far more as a historical fictionalisation than for it's horror aspects.

Live from NAM

There are always a never-ending procession of meetings to attend and following the collaboration meeting I was at a couple of weeks back I'm now at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) at Queens University Belfast. I don't think I'll be blogging about it that much, but for news from the meeting you can visit the official NAM blog. Now back to the talks...

Road trippin'

After the meeting at Caltech myself and three other gravitational wavers have headed on a bit of a road trip around parts of California. We've done too much in the last few days for me to give you a full update on them all just now, but here's a list of most of it. Last Thursday we drove up to Mount Wilson Observatory, where Hubble made his observations that showed the expansion of the universe - it was very impressive. That evening we made the long drive out to Death Valley national park, where we spent the night (sleeping in the boot of our hire car) under the light of the full moon at the lowest point in the western hemisphere (Badwater Creek.) On Friday we drove back to LA, via quite a few other sights in Death Valley including Artists Rocks and Darwins Falls, and had a night in a motel in Hollywood. Saturday started off with breakfast in West Hollywood (home of many a star) before continuing the drive up the coast to Santa Barbara. That evening we went to a Saul Williams gig in a small bar called Velvet Jones. The gig was brilliant! The next day we woke up slightly worse for wear, but had a whale watching cruise to go on to get us through the hangover. We saw several Grey whales, dolphins playing around our boat, and leaping sea lions - amazing stuff. After that we hit the road (route 1) and drove around the very windy, but stunning, highway along the Big Sur coast. We spent the night in a cabin overlooking the pacific and took in a brilliant sunset. This morning we spotted another whale while having breakfast. Today we driven along more awesome coastal road to Monterey, where we took in the aquarium, and Santa Cruz. We are currently in the hippy-est hostel in the world in Berkeley. Basically so far the trip has been fantastic (I need more adjectives to say how good it's been.) When I get more time I'll probably write a bit more about some of these events and add in some detail. Hope you're not too jealous ;)

My god, it's full of stars

At the ripe old age of 90 Sir Arthur C Clarke has died. It's something I'd been expecting for a while (he was getting on a bit), so doesn't come as much of a shock, but is a pretty big deal to the sci-fi world. My formative science fiction experiences were certainly dominated by Arthur C. My dad had a reasonably extensive collection of his books and as a teenager I read them all, from the really early stuff like Childhoods End (which I actually did an English essay on at school) to the more recent collaborative Rama sequels. They formed my baseline for good science fiction and led to it being the almost exclusive genre that I now read (although I occasionally branch out into more mainstream fiction.) Some of my favourites books include the above mentioned Childhoods End, 2001 (obviously, although I read 2010 first for some unfathomable reason!), Fountains of Paradise and Rendezvous with Rama, although I can't say that there are any that I've read that I've not enjoyed in some way. He was also a master at short stories to and I've not found anyone that can match him in that area. I'll miss the fact that they'll be no more output from Clarke, but I think he's made big enough contribution and I'll be sure to return to some of his work in the future.

Relieving the boredom

Have you ever wondered what it sounds like if you strap eight guitars together and then hit them with a big stick? Well I can't say I had, but yesterday I found out when I went to see a band called Boredoms at The Music Box on Hollywood Boulevard. The band is Japanese and (currently) consists of three drummers and a guy who shouts, screams, jumps about, does various electronic effects and hits the eight-guitar-thing with sticks. The gig was pretty good, although rather intense and unrelenting, as you might expect from a band with three drum kits. There wasn't much in the way of subtlety or variation in any of the songs, which meant that it did get a bit samey at times. There were times when you'd expect a song to have a lull and then build up, but they didn't really bother with the lull... or the build up - it was all full tilt. At their best, when some tune started coming through in the music and their electronic effects were used effectively, they were very good - they sounded quite like Orbital, but with more drums. And in general the drumming was impressive, especially the tempo that they managed to keep up. I was knackered before it started and felt even more drained after watching and listening to it. Oh, in case you were wondering the eight-guitar-thing sounded good and looked cool, although it did require an extra roadie person to constantly tune and replace strings on each guitar.

Travelling light

I'm currently in Pasadena (part of the urban sprawl that is Los Angeles) at Caltech attending the LSC-Virgo meeting (one of our fairly regular collaboration meetings.) Unfortunately the majority of my clothes are not also attending the meeting. I arrived here last Thursday (13th March) evening, but my baggage apparently didn't get the same flight as me and has so far failed to arrive. Due to increasing feelings of skankyness from wearing the same clothes for several days I yesterday did a bit of a clothes shop, but have the feeling I'll be having to add to my new wardrobe in the next couple of days.

Complaining about my lack of luggage aside I have to say that I've been really impressed by Pasadena and the Caltech campus. It's really, really nice. And I definitely can't complain about the weather!

Matt's jumbo jambalaya

After seeing Rick Stein make a rather nice looking Cajun jambalaya at the weekend I decided to take myself on a taste trip to the deep south and make one myself. Here's my recipe below - note that I had a slightly sacreligious jambalaya as I wasn't able to use the complete "holy trinity" of onions, green peppers and celery.

Ingredients

• 400g chicken breast
  
• 1 large smoked sausage
  
• 1 large onion
  
• 1 large pepper (as noted above this should be green, but I had to make do with a yellow one)
  
• 4 pieces of celery
  
• 1 green chilli pepper
  
• 2 heaped teaspoons of hot chilli powder (approximately - vary as to your liking)
  
• half a teaspoon
  
• 4 cloves of garlic
  
• 2 large tomatoes
  
• 2 large mushrooms
  
• sweetcorn
  
• 1 mug of rice
  
• 1 chicken stock cube in a pint of boiling water (or you could use proper chicken stock)
  
• oil
  

Now the majority of those ingredients were just what I decided to put into my jambalaya, but you can play around with the meat and vegetable combo of your choice (Rick Stein had fresh prawns in his as well as the sausage and chicken, which adds to the whole Creole-ness of it.)

Method
To cook this first you will need a large deep pan (generally a larger one than the one I had to use). Slice up your sausage into and place into your pan and fry in the oil for a minute or two. Dice your chicken and place into the pan and fry until it's white on the outside. Now add your chopped onion, garlic, celery and peppers and fry off for a couple of minutes. Add the rest of the vegetables and spices and again leave to cook for a couple of minutes. Add the rice into the pan and allow it to soak up some of the moisture already in the pan for a couple of minutes. Add the stock and bring to the boil. Cover and leave to simmer for about 25-30 minutes. This should be enough to serve about three people, or two if both of those people are me.

Top priority

Despite the current funding problems at STFC it seems that the future's looking pretty good for the UK gravitational wave community. Yesterday saw the release of STFC's programmatic review (found here), which informs how funding gets distributed. In it the ground-based gravitational wave detector GEO600, and the upgrade to the LIGO detectors, Advanced LIGO, (which are a very large part of what the IGR group at Glasgow works on) were given highest proirity, and the future space-based detector LISA and its precursor technology testing mission LISA Pathfinder (also a major part of the Glasgow work) were given medium-high priority. The review is now in a three week consultation period, in which the Particle Physics and Astronomy community will discuss whether this is the way they want to go forward. Inevitably there will be people trying to argue their projects position up the priority list, which means that they'll also be people trying to argue that some of the things in the high priority section shouldn't be there, but in general things are looking pretty rosy for gravitational waves.

[Update: I should point out that despite there appearing to be two gravitational wave projects in the "High priority" category (Advanced LIGO and GEO600), these in reality should be just one project under the heading of "Ground-based gravitational wave detectors". They are part and parcel of the same thing and not two separate funding entities.]

Roll with it

Yesterday at canoe club I managed to roll (often called an Eskimo roll) unaided for the first time. Essentially you tip your kayak over and then use you paddle and a deft flick of the hips to right yourself again. When I first joined the canoe club I was under the false impression that this was the first thing you learnt to do and that it was reasonably easy - that's not quite the case. It was only a few weeks ago that I first attempted to roll and this was with someone moving my paddle into position and holding it while I struggled to right myself. After a couple of weeks of similar struggling I'm finally starting to get the hang of it - you've just got to make sure that you get the paddle blade above the surface of the water before using it to lever yourself up, you've also got to keep you head under until your kayak starts righting itself. This is easier said than done when you're upside down under water. Now I just need to keep practising until I can consistently do it and then try doing it without setting myself up into position first. Then there are the other types of roll to learn!

Not so smashing Pumpkins

Last night I went to see the Smashing Pumpkins at the Glasgow SECC. This tour is their second big tour since their reformation in 2005 and features Billy Corgan and Jimmy Chamberlin from the original line-up, with newbies in the form of Jeff Schroeder, Ginger Reyes and Lisa Harriton. The main member of the band though is obviously Corgan's ego, which is as big as ever. I wasn't sure what to expect from this gig, but having really enjoyed the Pumpkin's when I saw them on their farewell tour back in 2000, and what with really liking a large chunk of their music (Siamese Dreams is a fantastic album and up their as one of my favourites) I hoped for something good, with possible verges onto excellence. Obviously the one thing that could throw a spanner in the works of my expectations was the aforementioned ego of Corgan's - he was always going to be an arse, but just how much of an arse was the question.

One of the first things that was in general to the detriment of the gig was that it took place in the SECC. Now the SECC is a conference/convention centre and isn't designed for rock concerts. It has all the atmosphere of your Gran's living room on a wet Sunday afternoon, so it needs something really special to get you over that barrier and into a rock concert mindset. The set started off with the song Porcelina of the Vast Ocean (from disc 1 of Mellon Collie) and it was well done and an enjoyable opener (they'd played a blinding version at the last gig I saw), but it was going to need at least another 30-45 mins for me to get over the SECC atmosphere damping barrier (obviously a fault of the venue and not something the band are really responsible for - I'm sure the tour organisers chose the venue and not the band.) It was obvious from the get go that this was the Corgan and Chamberlin show - which is fair I suppose as they really are the band, with the new members being interchangeable/expendable pawns in Corgan's game. As it went on they played a decent selection of material from all post-Gish albums - there was some stuff from their most recent album, which I've not heard, but this was decent. With some of their most popular songs they'd decided to play around with the tune - I expect out of boredom from playing the same thing over and over again - but in general I didn't feel the changes worked, one example being for Bullet with the Butterfly Wings. In part this is because I wanted to hear the songs as I knew them, but also some of the time the new tunes just didn't fit. There were some very good versions of songs that weren't played around with and I did enjoy them, but nothing blew me away. Towards the end of the gig was when things started to get weird though and Corgan went into full on prog-rock wankery mode. We got over half an hour of pissing around that just got boring - and I'm someone who doesn't mind a bit of prog-rock wankery, but it has it's place and this wasn't it. From the Pumpkins I just wanted to hear some more of their songs, songs that I really like and would get me into rock mode, not some strange never ending rock soundscape. Then their was Corgan's bizarre address to the crowd in the encore, basically saying "I really like being in my band, but I don't give a shit about the fans although if you still want to give me money I'll take it". To be fair I found it quite funny and not that unexpected. They ended with Cherub Rock, an iconic anthem that's one of everyones favourites. However during the monologue quite a few people had started leaving and any atmosphere that had build up deflated quickly. The song was played well, but didn't really have much feeling.

So overall I was rather let down by the gig and won't be going to see the Pumpkins again if they play near me. There were bits that showed up the band that I'd wanted to see, but nowhere near enough. The one thing I can say I really enjoyed though was watching Chamberlin's drumming - the man can really work a drumkit and played excellently, occasionally mesmerising me with his arms flying around from tom to cymbal and back again and his impressive control of the hi-hat pedal.

[Update: Other people seemed to enjoy the gig more than me and you can find a couple of more favourable reviews here and here.]

Back on top

The rightful order has been restored as yesterday saw Watford regain their place at the top of the league by beating Ipswich away 1-2. Prior to the game Ipswich had had an unbeaten home record for the season, so the results went against the form books. However our away record for this season has actually been a fair bit better than our home performances, with 10 wins away compared to just 6 at home. That said our recent performances have been somewhat inconsistent after the great start to the league, meaning that our once mighty 9 point advantage over the other Championship high-fliers has completely disappeared, and our current position is only thanks to other teams around us slipping up. It's still very tight at the top with four teams separated by only two points. It's definitely going to be a scrap until the end of the season for the two automatic promotions places.

In the world of rugby England just about managed to hold on to a win against Italy today, but did our absolute best to try and give the game away again! We just can't play for a full 80 minutes apparently! Hopefully some players will have new arseholes well and truely ripped and we'll learn how to hold on to the ball for a bit.

Funding press release

Today the STFC gave this press release on the current status of their funding crisis (see here and here for a detailed break-down of the past few months events with regards to the UK astronomy and particle physics communities respectively) following the discussion at the council meeting at the end of January. There's not really much new information in the press release and more info on the councils priorities probably won't be known until the end of February. It does seem however that current levels of funding are going to be safe until the outcome of the Wakeham review (a "fundamental review of the strength and role of UK physics") are known. The STFC chief's Keith Mason and Peter Warry still can't help but put a positive spin on the crisis though, which was annoying to start with, but becomes more and more frustrating each time you hear it.

The Italian Job

So today we (aka the England football team) had our first outing under the new management of Italian coach Fabio Capello. We won 2-1. It was just a friendly against Switzerland, but it was always going to be a bit more interesting than a regular friendly because of the interest in what the new manager would do. He set out with a 4-5-1 formation with Rooney as the lone striker to start with, and called up the not-so-regulars Jenas and Bentley to start in the midfield. The first half started off at a rather dull and slow pace. There were lots of sloppy passes and neither team showed much in the way of crisp, decisive forward play. Things were fairly even and stable, but boring as fuck - things looked not much better than in the prime of the McClaren era. Why England don't play internationals at the pace of the Premiership I just don't know, but when we did decide to up the tempo in the last 10 minutes of the first half things improved drastically. We got balls into feet, got people in space and enabled the ball to be played into people in their natural attacking positions, which was how we got the first goal - a neat bit of passing into Joe Cole, who was then able to take on a defender one-on-one and slot the ball into Jenas in front of then net. Things didn't keep at such a pace for the second half, but we did show far more flare and cut out a lot of the sloppiness that had dominated the first half. Gerrard, who so often has lacked when it came to England games, did really well taking up a centre-left role and pushing forward. When the England substitutes were made things didn't fall apart, and with Crouch coming on the were some more attacking options. Overall Bentley, Cole and Rooney were most impressive (Rooney's work rate and occasional touch were as good as ever.) I've been rather positive here, but during the match I was still disappointed with the first half attitude. The goal we conceded was fairly undefendable i.e. the Swiss striker hit the ball really early and the defender (Ferdinand) and keeper had no real chance of getting to the ball, so wasn't too disappointing. But I think that the team can show a bit more cohesion and will do from playing together more under their new regime. It's been a reasonable start for the new manager, but I don't want to count my chickens just yet as things could easily have been different if we'd conceded a goal before scoring our first and our head had gone down.

Despite the brief flush of football success the less said about our second half performance in the weekend's rugby the better!

Battered

For pancake day this year I thought I'd prepare early. I made my batter the night before (from this generic recipe) as I'd heard that leaving batter to rest in the fridge for a day was good. This year my batter also had another advantage over previous year's attempts as I now have scales and a measuring jug to precisely weigh out the ingredients, rather than my normal method of mixing the various things together until it gives about the right consistency - although to be fair to myself that method has generally worked. The batter isn't the most exciting thing in itself though, it's what you do with it. This year I went for a couple of savoury pancakes to start with - amazingly my first pancake in the frying pan didn't stick, which is a major turn up for the books. These were filled with spinach, grated mature cheddar, bacon and tomato. Unsurprisingly these were rather filling, but I pressed on with some sweet pancakes. The first of these was filled with strawberry and mascarpone with a light sprinkling of sugar, the second was a classic lemon juice and sugar effort, and the final one contained banana and real maple syrup. I enjoyed all the pancakes, but in all honesty I have to say, despite my efforts to be different, the best one was the lemon and sugar one. It's nice and simple, and that really nice citrus tang and sugary combination just means pancake day in my mind.

Waxy Monkey Tree Frog

It's been a while since I've watched a David Attenborough wildlife show on the beeb (I didn't see any of Planet Earth and only caught a bit of Blue Planet - the last thing I remember watching properly watched was Life in the Freezer [I remember those evil, wickedly smiling, Leopard seals eating the lovely penguins - bastards!], which was apparently aired back in 1993!), so this evening I decided I get back into a bit of natural history by watching his new show Life in Cold Blood. As the name suggests this is all about your cold blooded beasties - the reptiles and amphibians. I enjoyed the show, which essentially follows the general BBC natural history format of showing lots of weird and wonderful animals doing their thing with Attenborough occasionally saying hello to them (all animals love Attenborough - it's programmed into their genes), watching them court each other and then copulating. There was real science content in the program, with the odd smattering of CGI animals internal organs, but I was mainly absorbing these facts without really knowing it - there was however a slightly shoehorned in bit about dinosaurs. It never tried to go into too much detail, with the main point being to show that the animals are pretty cool (excuse the pun.) I particularly liked the Waxy Monkey Tree Frog (in part for it's name, but also because it secreted it's own sun tan lotion/wax), the tortoise trying to right itself after losing a fight, the lizard that curled into a ball by biting it's own tail, and the really, really, really tiny Pygmy Chameleon. That said I wasn't as impressed by the program as I've been by, the admittedly viewed long ago, other series'. Maybe it's just that cold blooded creatures aren't as cute as birds and mammals, or there weren't any big action set pieces - watching two tree frogs fight isn't quite the same as a pride of lioness's taking down an elephant - or maybe I now need a higher level of science content from my natural history programming. But I'll see how the series pans out as Attenborough's looking pretty old now (although still spritely) and he may no be doing too many more.

Do you want to make it BIGGER!!!

Before the lecture I gave today I was searching on google image search for a nice diagram on how telescope magnification worked. On my cursory glancing I couldn't find any that I thought were particularly good, so I decided to use the highly non-intuitive power of Adobe Illustrator to create one myself. My effort can be seen below. Feel free to use this if you think it's good, or send me any comments on how to make it better, as I still have the Illustrator file which can be edited (I can email this to anyone who wants it.) By the way the image of Jupiter isn't mine - I have to credit Cassini for that.

Week in brief

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

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

That is all!

My marrow's your marrow

Today I decided to get myself on the bone marrow donors register for the Anthony Nolan Trust. It's not something I'd really thought of doing before, but after being told of a sign up in the University of Glasgow med school I thought I'd check out what it was about. It's not as light a decision to make as just giving blood as the procedure to donate bone marrow is quite a bit more complex, invasive and potentially painful. There are two methods to harvest marrow: the first, and most invasive, involves marrow being extracted from your pelvic bone with a big needle whilst under general anesthetic; the second method, which doesn't involve an operation, uses a drug to draw out the blood stem cells from the marrow into the blood stream and then having the blood extracted. While these did require some pause for thought I decided that given what the bone marrow could mean for the recipient it was worth signing up. My blood has been sent away for testing, so I could be a match for someone now, sometime in the future, or I may never be needed.

You may want to consider signing up yourself, but be sure to read over all the information about what it means first, because, as I said, it's not that light a decision to make.

When the music stops

I've not released this information to the internet for fear of the public despair and hysteria it would cause, like when Take That split, but you deserve to know - it's been just over a week since I learned that the band I was in is no more! Corpse Full of Bees is now truly decomposed and Look Up for Danger didn't see the car plowing into them head on. We'd been through a few iterations as a band and it was probably about time to call it a day, but it was rather disappointing nonetheless. The end was partly down to work load commitments for several members, but also a general lack of energy, excitement and, to be fair, fun that has been present since our last gig and band restructuring. We're hoping to conitnue some collaboration in the future with some side projects and expanding on our original material (my lyrical stylings just can't be kept from the public), but I'm thinking of taking thing's in a new direction. One stage, one kit, one drummer, nuff said! I mean who needs guitars, keyboards, vocals, when you got some pumping drum beats! On a serious note I still really want to continue playing (in a band preferably to on my own), so if there's a novice band out there (well in Glasgow at least) that needs a novice drummer I'd like to hear from you. On the other hand I could just wait for a record company to set up a massive million pound stadium tour deal that could herald a triumphant reunion for Look Up for Danger.

Linky

In an effort to point out the obvious if you want to find out more about what's going on at the AAS meeting there are plenty of people blogging away, and you can check out a few via the google blog search. Of the more well known blogger's that are here there's Phil Plait here and Chris Lintott here.

Whether the weather be good

Yesterday I saw on the BBC new website that there had been gale force winds and heavy rain back in central and west Scotland. Here in Austin it's sunny with temperatures in the low 20°s C. Hmmm, where would I rather be at the moment?

6th Street blues

The hotel I'm staying at in Austin is right next to East 6th Street. This street is essentially full of bars and a live music haven and is pretty much the place to be. Now if I was here with my friends this street would be rife for the picking, but unfortunately I'm at this meeting on my own so have not been using the nightlife to its full potential (there're a few people here that I know and will hopefully be going out with them over the next couple of nights.) I could have tagged along for a night with a random group of astronomers, as there are plenty roaming around downtown Austin at the moment, but I'm generally not the sort of person who'll do that. Tonight I did venture out onto 6th street on my own, after a couple of pints with dinner (which was at a rather disappointing Mexican restaurant called Rio Grande, especially when compared to the excellent meal I had at the Moonshine Bar and Grill the night before), and managed to have a good night out. First I went to a bar called Friends where a band was playing that featured an apparent Austin guitar legend Gary Clark Jr.. They were playing covers (I think! - there were at least a couple that I recognised), but entirely in their own style, which involved lengthy rock-bluesy noodling, and I thought they were very good. I was mainly listening to the drumming and, as is now the case, just wanting to play myself. I then moved on to another bar called Darwin's Pub for a final drink (I was on my own so wasn't going to be doing a pub crawl.) In this pub I was tempted by the t-shirts that hung above bar, which I have seen in other bars before, but for the first time I actually decided to buy one. So people that know me will occasionally see me sporting my Darwin's Pub t-shirt and will hopefully be envious. It should go down well back in Scotland as it's main feature is a Lion Rampant.

Astronomy now

So here's my first report back from the first day and a half of the AAS meeting. With these big meeting's I generally find that the plenary session overview talks are most interesting. From these you get a good idea of what's going on in a specific field without having to have any expert knowledge of it. This has been true of this meeting so far with some rather good talks that have informed as well as entertained (well less of the entertained, but at least they kept me interested.) Yesterday started off nicely with a talk on searches for exotrasolar Earth's by James Kasting. It was interested to find out the current status of all the different future searches, for example TPF (the Terrestrial Planet Finder) for which I didn't know that there are two different design proposals (one using a coronagraph to block out the host star's light to enable direct observation of planets orbiting it, and the other using interferometry), and the very ambitious, and potentailly NASA budget breaking SIM. There was then a very frank and candid talk from NASA Administrator Michael Griffin (he only does "candour" apparently). It was a rather good talk actually and he was full of praise for all the things that the astrophysics community does, but wanted to remind them to be realistic about the NASA funds available for various mission. He also wanted to point out that human spaceflight and aeronautics are as much a part of NASA as pure astrophysics and that wasn't going to change. So astrophysicist better learn to work with that it mind and not throw their toys out the pram, complaining that if there wasn't a human spaceflight plan then there'd be more money for real science, when their particular mission doesn't get funded - that's just the way the world works, and in particular publicly funded institutions work. He also advised people that for the good of the whole field of space research they should try and promote, and speak with one voice, on all that NASA does (see here and here for possibly better informed discussion on this talk.) There was also a very nice talk on the science that the New Horizons mission to Pluto has been able to get during it's Jupiter flyby (see for example the very nice picture that was on APOD yesterday - now my laptop desktop background.) This included monitoring and tracking storms in Jupiter's atmosphere, and studying a large eruption from Io (see said picture again.) This morning there was another very interesting and science packed talk on milliarcsecond astrometry (measuring the position and motion of objects in space) with the VLBA. I hadn't realised how well parallax distances and motions within our galaxy could be measured, but apparently it's pretty damn well. They're also able to do some very impressive cosmological distance measurements to like measuring the Hubble constance to ~10%, which is comparable to the Hubble Key Project.

Anyway, I'd better get back to the talks now, but I'll try and do another summary before the meeting ends, or expand on some of the things I've written. I'll also let you know about Austin (e.g. there's a street that's almost entirely bars!)

Meet an astronomer

Tomorrow I head off to the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. It's apparently pretty big as far as astronomy meeting's go with several thousand attendees. It should be very interesting to get to go to a wide variety of talks from across the whole field, and maybe do a spot of networking to. Oh, and there's a talk that I'm giving to. I'll attempt to report on anything interesting that I hear and maybe say a bit about Austin, but first I need to hope that I can endure my flights out there.

Playing with the big boys

Today the big clubs (in which I of course include Watford) enter the FA Cup fray to do battle with the lower league minnows. There're still three non-league teams in the mix with British Gas Business League Division One team Chasetown currently taking on Championship team Cardiff City (GOAL FLASH: WTF! Chasetown are 1-0 up after an own goal!), and later today Havant & Waterlooville take on League One high fliers Swansea and Cambridge Utd take on Wolves. The big game, in my eyes is, Watford's clash against fellow Championship team Crystal Palace in which we'll have to improve on our recent poor run if we're to get a result. Other people may argue that the biggest game of today is the all Premiership tie of Aston Villa versus Man Utd, but what do they know!

In other sports news today sees the start of the BDO World Darts Championships in Lakeside Leisure Complex, Frimley Green. I think the big match of the first round might be Martin "Wolfie" Adams versus Phil Nixon which is a repeat of last years final! Can I hear a "LETS PLAY DAAAAAARRRRTTTSS!.

[Update: We won 2-0, hurrah!]

For US 2008 look elsewhere

My blogging plans for this year generally didn't involve keeping up with the whole US 2008 electioneering (what with all the caucuses/primaries and so forth), but if they had I think I'd probably have had to become a professional blogger - and also become someone with some actual insight/knowledge/personal experience into American politics. I may make the occasional (un)informed US election post, but if you're interested in some of the competition I would have had (if I'd taken up the professional-blogger mantle) then there's veteran political blogger Andrew Sullivan, who managed a massive 48 posts/links mainly on the Iowa caucuses today(!), and the slightly less prolific Justin Webb of the beeb (there'll be many more blogs devoted to it, but I'm sure you web savvy people can find them if you want.)

On a sombre note there is a rather poignant posthumous blog from a US soldier killed in Iraq yesterday posted here (via CV.) If you're opinion of the US military was that they're all a bunch of meatheads then I recommend you read it and I hope it'll help change your mind.

Shakey hand man

I don't know if it's a Scottish thing, a Glasgow thing, or a thing that everyone does and has just passed me by, but among certain people that I work with at least there comes the need for them to vigorously shake your hand whilst wishing you happy new year. It's the first thing, above all else, that they have to do on seeing you in the new year. Work has been rather empty the last couple of days, but today I received my first of these handshakes. I was accosted by one of my research groups technicians who thrust out his hand to me and preceded to attempt to crush mine - my hand did actually hurt for a good few minutes afterwards. You see this new years handshake can't be a light limp wristed affair (not that my handshakes are feminine), it has to be a full on, manly, lets-see-who-can-brake-the-most-metacarpals, job. I'm not complaining about the act, indeed it's a rather friendly thing to do, but I'm quite pleased that I'm away from work next week, so my hand should survive intact for a while longer.

Here come the first footer

Last night I partook in the Hogmanay tradition of first footing. Despite my many years in Scotland I'd not heard of this particular tradition before, but it essentially involves going round to a neighbour's house and being the first foot of the new year through their door. It's also supposed to be a lucky if that person is a tall, dark and handsome man - naturally I was perfect for the job. Armed with a bit of coal (also apparently traditional), and some booze, a small group of us headed out to the streets of Glasgow to welcome in the new year and get our feet across new thresholds. This venture proved to be a great success and we were welcomed into a house (myself leading the way of course) and given food and drink. Next year we might have to up our ambitions (and the amount of coal we carry) and go for a double or triple first footer. Happy new year everyone!

On a slightly different note (courtesy of Dave) how's about The Intermission for an idea.

Let there be heat

This week I've been surviving without heating or hot water. As an early Christmas present my parent's boiler broke down leaving us shivering and smelly for the rest of the week. To wash we've reverted to more primitive methods of boiling up water on the stove in a big pan and taking it to the bathroom to splash over us - it's not quite a communal tub in the kitchen, but almost. We've also gathered together all our electric heaters and have had them on constantly. Luckily this week hasn't been anywhere near as cold as last week. My parents plan is now to get a completely new boiler as their current one is getting on a bit, so hopefully next time I'm back things will be toasty warm.

Today I get to have a much needed proper shower as I'm heading back to Glasgow!

Cut it out

Just in case you're someone that reads this blog and aren't one of my friends who've already posted the link on their own site, go here to sign a petition about the snafu at STFC. In the words of the petition creator:

"Due to cost overruns the UK's funding agency for particle physics and astronomy, STFC, is recouping £80M with deep cuts to UK physics operations in these areas. These include ending the UK's involvement in the International Linear Collider - the next generation of particle physics experiment. This risks relegating the UK to second tier involvement in future research and critically damaging the country's standing within the community. Furthermore UK Astronomy will be seriously hit with up to a 25% cut in grants. This is incompatible with the government's stated aim of making Britain a world leader in science. A review of this decision has recently been announced and we urge the Prime Minister to press for another solution to this problem before UK physics is set back by decades."

I won't add my own thoughts on this as the internet is already awash with opinion.

[Update - it seems things aren't all a bed of roses in the US either!]

Meetings end

It's the last day of GWDAW12 and I think everyone's fairly drained after a long week of talks, networking, and the odd drink or two - especially those of us who've been in meetings since Monday. It's been a good meeting and there have been some very interesting talks. The best talks have been those from people outside my collaboration (the LSC) and the general gravitational wave community. The main reason for this isn't that the gravitational wave stuff isn't interesting, it's just that I've heard the same stuff ad nauseum at meeting after meeting. The more astronomy related stuff just brings in something a bit fresher. I think this view is held by the majority of the gravitational wave people here. Chris Stubbs gave a very enthusiastic talk about how future astronomy all-sky surveys (e.g. Pan-STARRS, LSST) could give a large number of astronomical triggers for gravitational wave observations. He was even saying there are many current searches for optical/IR variables and transients which we should be aware of and make use of. It was very good to see an astronomer who really wanted to interact with the gravitational wave community, which can only be good news for the future. Jim Cordes gave a nice talk about general pulsar astronomy and looking for radio transients, which could again be used as a gravitational wave trigger. Andrea Lommen's talk on using pulsar timing measurements as a gravitational wave detector, generally for a low frequency stochastic background, was also good and related to some recent work that I've been doing. Andrea also mentioned that they're trying to host GWDAW13 at the Arecibo radio telescope, which I'm all for - Puerto Rico would be quite a nice place to go for the winter :)

Also of note about this meeting has been the quality of the lunches. I've been very impressed with the meals, which have been varied, tasty and generally quite healthy. Unfortunately we don't get given any lunch today and will have to find our own source of food.

Now I just have to hope that the Boston weather doesn't prevent me from getting home what with all the snow and ice storm that is forecast.

At the toad

Last night a few of us braved the arctic conditions to go and see a gig at a bar in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not Cambridgeshire) called Toad. We went to see a man called Ed Hamell, who had been described (by John) as a shouty man with an acoustic guitar. On arriving at Toad, which was rather smaller than our expectations had lead us to believe, we received a long, cold stare from the locals. We didn't allow this to scare us away and made our move to the bar before settling ourselves inches from the stage. The gig, which was a much a comedy set as a music set (in fact it's described as "... a one-man theatrical show which combines story telling, comedy and songs into a brilliantly outrageous theatrical event." on his website), was great (and free!) It kicked off a bit later than expected, due to a difference of opinion with some local frat-boy types, but when it started Hamell put in a lot of energy. This energy level, and friendly, fun atmosphere, just built up even more as the crowd grew on him and he grew on the crowd, and there was some general banter later on. He did fast paced songs mainly about politics and his family life and background. These spilled over, or built, naturally into his comedy. He was really good both musically and comedically. Apparently he's going to be doing some gigs in London early next year, so if you see Hamell on Trial advertised anywhere I'd definitely recommend going to see him.

Let it snow

I'm in the North East of the US and it's winter, so unsurprisingly there's been snow. Yesterday it snowed for a good 10 hours and unlike any attempts at snow that the weather makes in the UK it settled and left a good foot on the ground. It was pretty exciting for us snow starved Brits. Did I make a snow angel? Of course. Did I get snow in my shoes, up my trousers and down my back, and consequently feel rather cold and damp? Why yes, I did that to. Unfortunately the snow was too light and fluffy to hold together as a good snowball, so no snowball fights were possible.

Cause and effects

Today I got round to figuring out how to get beryl to work on my Linux partition - I had tried before, but without any sucess. Beryl basically gives you lots of swish desktop effects familiar to Mac OS X users (and now in Windows Vista). So now I have a fancy desktop cube that I can spin around; my windows wobble and warp; and all sorts of other transparency, water drop, fire effects. Does it make using my computer any easier or productive? Well, probably not. In fact I'll probably just spend more time going "Ooooh! Aaah!" as my desktop spins around, but it doesn't half look good.

Notice anything annoying?

My first post from my latest trip to the US (yes, I'm out here again at another meeting) is going to be a bit of a moan (can a free trip out to Boston satisfy me, hell no!) On looking at the BBC news website out here some rather large banner adverts appeared saying "Notice anything different?". "Why yes" I thought, "There are some excessively annoying banner adverts filling up large chunks of my screen.". It turns out that the BBC have decided that they need to generate some extra revenue and when viewing their websites from outside the UK you'll have to put up with the adverts. I could get round this by viewing the site through a UK web proxy, but I don't think I should have to. I suppose I'll just have to get used to them until I get home again.

On other notes it's bloody freezing out here, but I think it should be a fun meeting.

Minibus master

Today I took my minibus test and you'll be pleased (I hope) to know that I passed. I managed to stall the bus a few times (and it was a diesel which are generally far harder to stall than petrol engines), but got round the test route without any major disasters. I'll need to try and get a drive of the bus as often as possible for GUCC trips to get used to it though.

Making up for past mistakes

Last night myself and a few friends went to see the comedian Daniel Kitson at The Stand. I've written before about how good I think Kitson is, but my plans to see him earlier this year didn't work out. His gig at the Glasgow Comedy Festival got waylaid by a work trip. My plan to then go and see him in Edinburgh over the summer was then scuppered by me taking too long to buy tickets and then them all being sold out. But I got a nice surprise a few weeks back when The Stand emailed me to say that Kitson would be doing a late gig of new material. This time I jumped on the chance at getting the tickets straight away. I reality the gig wasn't anywhere near sold out, due to it being not very widely advertised an on at 11pm on a Monday night. Kitson was testing out new material for his show next year, trying to whittle down his currently vague ideas from his quarter full notebook. Often when comedians are trying out new material there can be quite a large miss-to-hit ratio, but this wasn't the case here. It was pretty much quality stuff throughout the one and a half hour set - definitely worth the £5 entry. He says that his show will be very different from the stuff he performed last night, so I'll be looking forward to it and won't repeat my mistakes from earlier this year.

Home and dry

As you'll no doubt gather from the fact that this post exists I've returned from my trip to Macrihanish with the canoe club alive and well. This is mainly due to me not actually going in the sea at all! I saw the sea, and got reasonably close to it, but it wasn't exactly inviting me in with open arms. It was generally thrashing about looking intimidating. On Saturday no-one actually went in as it was far too windy and the waves were looking pretty dangerous. But on Sunday at lot of people got suited up and went for a paddle, whilst I stood on the beach and shivered. I think that with my very much novice status it was probably the best plan as I reckon if I'd gone in I'd have spent the majority of the time drowning. It wasn't a wasted weekend though as I had a good time and was able to join in fully with the drinking aspects of the trip.

Wet and wild

This (cold, rainy, windy, late November) weekend I'm heading off to Macrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre for some sea based activities with the canoe club. The plan is to get some kayaks in the water and also attempt some surfing, but I think drinking is at the top of most people's priorities. As the weather's supposed to be atrocious tomorrow it'll be interesting to see if anyone ventures into the water. Providing I don't get hyperthermia or washed out to sea I'll probably say a bit about the trip when I get back.

We're shit and we know we are!

It's not the worst England performance I've ever seen, but...

Well before last weekend everyone thought England were beyond hope of qualifying for Euro2008. We'd got used to the fact, but then we were thrown a lifeline. All we had to do was draw against Croatia at home - and Croatia had already qualified, so they didn't have anything to play for. What did we do with this lifeline? We pissed all over it is what! We took the lovely present we'd been offered and then jumped up and down on it, set fire to it and threw it out the window.

From this you might guess that England lost their crucial qualifying game against Croatia. Croatia played very well, but that can't excuse the dismal England performance. Our defense was crap, but then so was our midfield, and as we only started with Crouch up front there wasn't much he could do as a lone striker. After going 2-0 down early in the first half, from a dreadful goalkeeping error and then some poor defending, we decided the best way to respond was to not bother playing. In the second half, after a couple of substitutions, we started trying (a bit) and managed to pull the game back to 2-2, but then forgot we were in an important game and let things slip again. There were major tactical errors by the manager Steve McClaren and there was also a complete lack of passion and belief by the players. If you contrast how we played today to how Scotland played against Italy at the weekend there's a marked contrast. After Scotland conceded a poor goal and then got back into the game they knew the importance of the game and upped their performance (despite still having a fairly ropey defense.) The England players deserve a large dose of the blame for our failure, but McClaren's job as England manager is now untenable. His poor squad selection and changes in formation have confused and unstableised things in the team throughout the campaign.

We're now left with a European Championship next year with no home nations. I'd like to say I'll be as excited about it as if there was England, or even any home nation, playing, but I doubt I will. Well there's the World Cup qualification to look forward to at the end of the week!

New look, new sound

Since the final gig of Look up for Danger back in September the two remaining members (ellielabelle and myself) have been on a bit of a hiatus. There's been some song writing going on (and it's already produced a hit of pure genius), but we've not had a practice due to a lack of having a full band. However today we emerged from our downtime and resumed practicing with two brand new members. The Look up for Danger moniker will go, but in it's place will come a new sound including a keyboard and aforementioned original material. We had a pretty damn successful first practice and our new bassist/guitarist seems almost over qualified for us (he can even play drums, so I'll need to up my form.) The keyboard also added a new dimension to the songs and I think we'll be up to speed on a good selection of our old covers quickly. Here's hoping this new line-up can keep together.

Out and (maybe) in

Yesterday, after five years is Scotland, I really got behind the Scottish football team for the first time. Up until then I'd been rather indifferent when it came to Scotland's results with a "nice if they win, but it doesn't really affect me if they don't" attitude. But watching the game against Italy yesterday it was hard not to get caught up in the atmosphere and disappointing to see them lose. Obviously I couldn't bring myself to get fully worked up about it (and it would have seemed a bit disingenuous if I had), but my throat was still fairly raw from shouting at the screen trying to urge the team forward. It would have been really good for Scotland to be Euro 2008, but I don't think what they could do there (unless they got to the final) would have matched the atmosphere around the country before yesterday's game.

I had the consolation of the fortuitous results for England. Israel did England a huge favour by beating Russia, although it was a very tense second half with Russia pushing forward and threatening the Israeli goal constantly. I, and all other England fans, had written us off after the loss to Russia the other month, but this has given us the lifeline of having our fate back in our own hands. We now need a draw against Croatia on Wednesday to go through.

The wheels on the bus

Today I signed up to take a test to enable me to drive the Glasgow University Sports Association minibus. This is to enable me to drive people around for the canoe club (although I've still not officially joined that yet - I probably should) when we go on trips to rivers and the like - which I've also not done yet. The requirements for taking the minibus test are being over 21 (check), having a clean driving license (check), and having had a license for over 3 years (also check). What they don't require is for you to have actually driven recently, which is fortunate as my last bit of driving was in February and that wasn't entirely successful. Anyway I've got a couple of weeks to at least put driving back in my mind and the test's more of a 15 minute instruction course on how to drive the minibus, so hopefully I'll pass!

Pig's revenge

Last night I stupidly failed to cook a piece of gammon steak properly and since then I've been suffering the consequences. Unsurprisingly I didn't get much sleep and have spent most of today in bed being vomity, achy and feverish. Hopefully the nasty bugs will be purged from my system by tomorrow and I'll be able to eat something again. Let that be a lesson to me though.

The dreaming void

Last week I finished reading a new novel (of the pulp sci-fi space opera kind) called The Dreaming Void by Peter F Hamilton. The book is set in the same universe as Hamilton's last two books that formed the Commonwealth Saga and is the start of a new trilogy. To start with if you are going to read this book then you pretty much need to have read the Commonwealth Saga books beforehand. There are several of the same characters involved (despite being set 1500 years later) and many events that are referred to, so I think you'd be quite confused if you didn't have the background from the previous books. Like Hamilton's other major sagas the story has many threads that are jumped between at quite a pace, which takes a bit of getting used to as you try to absorb all the characters and events. There are a couple of threads which seem to flow better and held my focus far more than other areas, but none of it is high literature. The reason I enjoy reading Hamilton's stuff as that it's generally pure pulp fun. There's enough action and high-technology stuff going on to keep you going through the less absorbing parts of the story. One thing that does start to grate, as in previous books, is Hamilton's sex scenes. He does like his sex scenes and almost all the people in his books are outrageously attractive and randy, but largely they'll just make you cringe. It's not that I'm prudish about literary sex, it's just that he can't write it without it coming across a bit pubescent-teenage-boy-style. There's one particular scene that almost made me stop reading the book completely! If I disregard certain scenes though I did enjoy the book. It's not as good as parts of the Nights Dawn trilogy, which provided some great moments of pure space opera fun, but it seems on a level with the Commonwealth Saga. I'll keep on with it as it has left me wanting to know what happens next.

The Pitkin of Free Enterprise

A few weeks back I decided that I'd join a university club of some sort, so that I'd have something extra to do of a week. A friend had recently joined the university surfing club, and a water-based sport sounded quite appealing, so I went for the canoe club. The canoe club has sessions in the university swimming pool on Thursday's where you get to practice your paddling skills and learn new techniques and so far I've been along to two of these. Despite the name of the club it's actually kayaking (rather than canoing) that they do, and it's far harder than I'd thought it would be. Last week I think I managed to capsize a record number of times, and when not having my head under the water I was generally going in circles (when I was really wanted to go straight.) The number of capsizes was helped by the fact that my kayak was filling with more and more water and therefore sat far lower in the water. I'm hoping that my ability to stay upright, and go in the direction I want to, will improve when I get more time in a boat. Next weekend I want to get out on one of the clubs trips to a proper river, where I'll get to spend far more time in a boat and can start picking up some proper control.

Despite my current lack of prowess in the kayak-stakes I can probably get up to speed on the drinking side of university sports club life more quickly - although probably should take that a bit slower. How better a way to get to know a new bunch of people than getting unintentionally pissed with them and singing karaoke? I can't think of one!

The visitors

At the request of a friend who, along with some others, visited Glasgow last weekend to see me I've decided to right a quick post on what we did - hope this makes you happy Claire! This post will probably be fairly dull and should be ignored by most unless you want to read a list of pubs and restaurants in Glasgow.

For the duration of their stay my four visitors rented out a swanky flat in the centre of Glasgow - my flat isn't quite big enough to cope with that many guests. I was, however, required to show my friends around Glasgow. On our first night we started off at a bar called the Butterfly and Pig, where we saw a rather good cover band. We followed this with dinner at a Spanish Tapas restaurant called La Tasca - this is part of a small chain of restaurants, but does decent food for a very affordable price. After dinner we went on to Firewater on Sauchiehall Street, where after being asked for £5 entry fee, which we thought was a bit steep, and starting to walk away we were let in for free. We were all pretty knackered by this time, so we didn't get out clubbing and just went back to the rented flat for a couple of more relaxing drinks.

On the following night we decided to go out in the West End of Glasgow. My friends came by my flat to check it out briefly and then we walked down to Byres Road. Our first drink was in the Oran Mor, which is a bar/restaurant/club/theatre in a converted church at the top of Byres Road. My friends were pretty impressed by this place so we stayed for a couple. Next came the problem of finding a restaurant on a Saturday evening in a popular part of town without having a table prebooked. We tried the Salon, Bar Budha and Mimmos, before finding a table in the Ubiquitous Chip. However it wasn't until we got seated and given a menu that we realised how much a meal was, in any case we decided it was beyond our budget and quickly made our excuses to the waitress and left. Further down Byres Road we tried a few more restaurants, all in vain, until we eventually got ourselves a table in the Japanese noodle bar Ichiban. Following dinner we headed back up to Aston Lane where we had a pint in the Loft, but moved on fairly quickly as it was a bit to busy. We decided to have a final couple of quiet drinks back a the Oran Mor, before heading home for the night.

It was a fairly sedate visit, in that we didn't have any wild nights clubbing or drinking huge amounts, but we all had a good time and hopefully I was a decent guide to Glasgow.

(Almost) down and out in Moscow

Today possibly saw the England football team missing out on the qualification for Euro2008. We lost to 2-1 to Russia in Moscow leaving us needing to win our final game against Croatia and relying on Russia losing some points in their next two games against Andorra (unlikely) and Israel (possible, but I wouldn't bank on it). There was a great goal in the first half putting England ahead (Owen flicked a nifty header on to Rooney who scored a great volley). But, agony in the second half when we had a bad penalty decision given against us (to be fair Rooney was rather reckless in pulling a Russian player back near the penalty area, although the foul was actually outside the area), and then conceded a further goal. There were a couple of chances that England should have taken to level it, but to no avail. We can only rue those dropped points against Macedonia at home (what the fuck were we doing there!) and Israel away, and keep our fingers crossed that other results will go our way.

Scotland also lost today 2-0 to Georgia. It obviously wasn't the result they wanted after their fantastic recent run that left them top of their qualifying group. I couldn't actually watch the game as I was still reeling from the England defeat. I do however envy the Scot's position over England as qualifying is still in their hands if they can beat Italy at home in their final game. They don't have to rely on other results going their way. With England looking very unlikely to be their it would be nice to have at least one home nation in the finals next year - that said I'm sure they'd rub my English face in it if Scotland got through and England didn't. I'll just have to hope the rugby result goes England's way at the weekend!

No mercy for Ming

Well it's been coming for the last couple of weeks, but Sir Menzies Campbell has given in to all the recent talk and quit as Liberal Democrat leader. Was it just an age thing, or was there pressure from inside the party? Well I think Ming just realised that he wouldn't be able to sustain another couple of years as leader of the Lib Dems before the next election, especially if his age kept coming up as a media issue. There's obviously been a lot of pressure on the party since the high profile that the main two political parties have come out with from their party conferences and the fight back that the Conservatives have made in the polls. Labour have a newish leader and Cameron has got a bit of a new lease of life. The probably was a lot of talk amongst the higher ranking Lib Dem MPs that Ming should go, but I don't think anyone out and out pushed him - although that said there was one quote on Newsnight last night, from a Lib Dem MP, saying that they thought the people talking against Ming were a "shower of shites"! I think getting a new leader will actually help the party in that a leadership election will keep them on the news agenda. I don't really have a clue who'll become the next leader, in fact there are several people who's names I don't recognise at all that have been speculated about, but it might provide a bit of excitement. Maybe they'll get Charlie back :)

Appeal

After last months fairly regular postings you've had to deal with a rather sparse period devoid of my opinion. I expect you were wanting to hear what I though of various new US TV shows like Bionic Woman and Life, or maybe just the scientific impact of the recent Nobel Prize Laureates, but have only been disappointed! Well you might hear about these things in due course, but I've just not been in the mood to talk about them. One distressing thing that I will mention though is the fact that the band I'm in has come to a crux. After just getting over the fact that our guitarist (and founder member) Chris was leaving us, we've been dropped with the bombshell that our new bassist is quitting the group! This leaves a two piece, and we're really not ready to start a White Stripes style thing going on (well we have done a White Stripes cover before, but that don't mean a thing.) Also this has occurred just after I've started to become a lyrical maestro by, so far, writing two masterpieces (they're not ready to air just yet!) To allow us to fulfill our promise as an ace rock band I now appeal to the good bassists/guitarists of Glasgow to join us. Only you can help us reach our destiny.

Returning heroes

What do I make of the first episode of series two of Heroes? (No major spoilers) Well, it carried on pretty much as it left off (albeit 4 Months Later.) We're reintroduced to the majority of the previous characters and what's happened in their life since we last saw them (there's a lot of dialogue devoted to the standard exposition of what's gone on), with a couple of new faces put in there (in what'll probably be the new Nikki Sanders-type story.) Due to the who'll catchup nature of it there's a lot packed into the episode. But, I think the show has kept its style and pace really well. The opening episode has certainly asked a whole heap of new questions, some of which seem glaringly obvious, but others are more intriging. I certainly really enjoyed it and am now eagerly anticipating the second episode.

I've also watched the first episode of series four of House (Spoiler for end of series three if you've not seen it yet). I'm not quite sure why I persist with watching House, as, in classic medical drama style (well even more so in this case), it repeats very similar stories over and over. You'd think I'd be bored of it ny now. I think I just enjoy watching Hugh Laurie play House, while the same predictable things happen around him and his work colleagues seem duller and more annoying. At the end of the last series House's three employees either resigned or were sacked (and don't appear in this episode despite all the actors names being in the opening credits) and here we see him trying to solve a case himself without the help of his team. The whole point of the episode (as Cuddy and Wilson keep telling him in ever more irritating ways) is that he'd do better with I team and he should employ some people, but I didn't really get why as he solves the case perfectly well on his own (the main point of the entire show being that he's really bloody good at what he does.) I'll keep with the series, as I do perversely enjoy it still, until the supporting characters really do drive me insane.

There are a long list of other shows that I have in the pipeline to watch (some of which wee-n-sarcastic mentioned) including: Reaper, Bionic Woman, Life and of course, in the hopefully not too distance future, BSG. I'll review these as I get round to watching them.

Quote of the week

"... once you have tenure its all edible panties, firearms and blow." from Mark at CV.

Is it coincidence?

For those interested in gravitational wave detection you may be excited to note that as of this morning at 00:28 UTC the three LIGO detectors have taken one years worth of triple coincidence data. What this means is that there is now one years worth of overlapping data from all three detectors. Overlapping data is essential when hunting for unmodelled short duration bursts of gravitational waves (e.g. from a supernova or GRB), as seeing an event in multiple detectors gives you confidence that the event is real (one detector would never be enough for you to rule out that an event wasn't just some random instrumental glitch, or environmental contamination) and allows you to get some positional information about the event. The current LIGO science run (S5 - meaning the fifth run of data taking) had this one year target as its main goal, also the detectors have generally been at their design sensitivities, meaning there's lots of nice high quality data for us to search through.

Stick breakin, hard rockin

Just a quick post to say that yesterday's gig went very well. There were a few vocal level worries when we were soundchecking, due to our incomplete knowledge of the mixing desk we were using, but they got sorted out. The crowd mainly consisted of our mates, but they provided a decent turnout, and many were even wearing their official Look Up for Danger t-shirts.

I was a bit overenthusiastic for the first few songs, but calmed down to a better tempo for the remainder of the gig. I didn't take it that easy though, as I managed to snap two drumsticks (taking the total of stick I've broken this week, including during rehearsals, up to 5, after going a year and a half without breaking any.) I also had to finish one song with just one stick after dropping, and not being able to recover, two others, but it was fine. All the other band members played very well and it was great fun to play together, but sad to know that our guitarist (and founder) was playing with us for his last time. We did end on a high though, as at Chris's request we performed a footstomping, handclapping, barnstorming version of We Will Rock You with the full on Brian-May-style guitar solo ending. Marvellous! For those that have rocked, we salute you!

The final countdown

Only 10 hours to go before the final Look Up for Danger gig (well depending if we decide to keep the name or not after today.) This time round we've got a set of 19 songs which will hopefully all rock! We just have to collect equipment (aka the drum kit), take it to the venue, have our final rehearsal, get some food, set up, sound check and then have a pint before it starts. Bring it on!

Top table

I've been lax in not commenting on this sooner, but last weekend Watford went top of the league! Yes, with a mighty 12 points (from a potential 15) we took top spot in the Championship. Unfortunately, due to my slowness in reporting this news, we've now slipped down to second behind Bristol City following their 0-0 draw with West Brom last night. Never mind though as they are only ahead on goal difference and we have a game in hand. However, with a win or draw (preferably a win, obviously) in tonight's game against Cardiff we can reclaim our rightful spot at the zenith of the table.

[Update: We did it, we beat Cardiff 2-1 and went back to top of the table. Come on you mighty Hornets!]

Six from two

After the recently rare decent performance from the weekend England have managed to reproduce it with another very good win - this time against the tougher opponents of Russia. We started off the game very well, holding on to the ball and putting together precise forward looking passes which ending up with three goals. Gareth Barry again had a really good game and Michael Owen showed his quality with some class finishing on a brace of goals. We were a tad lucky in the first half when we were 1-0 up and the Russians had a goal disallowed for a dubious handball decision - well it wasn't a handball, but from the angle I first saw it, and from where the ref was, it did look like one. But other than that we did deserve to win, despite being a bit lacklustre for large parts of the second half - Shaun Wright-Phillips was looking very lethargic after his feisty performance on Saturday. Now we're second in the qualifying group. Croatia look like staying on top, but provided we can keep up the decent performances we have every chance of going through in second...

I should also give out a big congratulations to Scotland who beat France in Paris to go top of their group. It was a really good performance and despite being put under a lot of pressure from the French the Scottish defence held up brilliantly. It does now look like, of the home nations, only Scotland and England have chances of going through to Euro2008. Hopefully both of us can make it.

183 days later

Last week, after about six months of reading, I finally finished Neal Stephenson's trilogy of books The Baroque Cycle. This consists of three rather chunky (just under 900 page each) volumes: Quicksilver, The Confusion and The System of the World. The books are kind of a follow on from Stephenson's previous novel Crytonomicon which is a very good book itself, and highly recommended by me to be read before or after these books.

You can read the wikipedia entries for a description of the stories' main plots and characters and I can't be bothered repeating them, but very briefly it's set in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, mainly in Western Europe, and follows the lives of several people mixed up in Natural Philosophy and the politics of the time, and includes many real historical figures. From here I'll just give my opinion on the books. Firstly if you're interested in the history of how much of modern science started (like the formation of the Royal Society), of English and Western European monarchy and politics, and of modern economics, then these books are great (especially the first one Quicksilver.) All these topics are covered as integral parts of the diverse storylines and are handled excellently. I'm not sure how accurate the historical accounts are, and there's obviously a fair bit of artistic license with real historical figures characterisations, but it all appears very well researched and timelined. You feel that your learning a lot and it makes you interested in finding out much more about the period. The two main storylines of the first book, that split into several others during the later books, before converging towards the end, are both equally interesting and well written so that you generally don't get disappointed when there's a switch between the two. Stephonson is prone to giving very long descriptions of things (hence the length of the books), but for the most part this enhances your enjoyment, however in the final book The System of the World these descriptions can seem overly long.

I really enjoyed the books and would recommend them to anyone who has half a year to spare (I can be a fairly slow reader, but they're going to take a while for anyone to get through.) I'd probably say that Quicksilver was my favourite, and that I was slightly disappointed by The System of the World. Quicksilver interest entirely throughout and didn't dragged at all, but The System of the World, despite probably being the fastest paced with regards to things happening over the shortest timescale, just had moments that I felt did drag and could have been left out or got through with fewer words.

I'll be looked forward to more or Stephenson's work in the future, but I've currently got three more books to keep me occupied.

Finally!

In a major turn-up for the books yesterday's England v Israel Euro2008 qualifier was actually a decent game - for the English team at least. It was always thought that the Israeli team would be very defensive in this game (even more so than in their home leg in Tel Aviv), and in that they didn't disappoint - they only mustered a couple of meaningful attacks in the whole game - but that meant that England would have to keep up tempo and take the game forward. That's not been England's forte recently and things could have carried on in the same vein, but fortunately the team decided to play. There were a couple of interesting decisions in the squad forced by various injuries, like having Emile Heskey (who's not played for England for three years) and Gareth Barry (who's not played for England in over four years) in it, but their inclusions seems to have been one of Steve McClaren's best decisions since becoming England manager. Heskey was very impressive, and strong, in holding up the ball and knocking it on, and there wasn't a sign of his old trick of falling over at the slightest touch - he did however have a chance on goal that he should have done better with. Also very impressive was little Shaun Wright-Phillips who scored the first goal and had so much pace and energy during the game (we really don't need Beckham back down the right, he's just not got the pace or ability to run at and frighten defenders), unfortunately we didn't get to see Ian Wright's reaction to the goal up in the BBC pundits box. Deserving a mention are the performances of Joe Cole, Micah Richards (who scored and is looking like he'll be a regular at right back and probably push Gary Neville out the squad) and Michael Owen who scored one of his best ever England goals. The game was good because we took it to the Israeli's and didn't just sit back. Even when we'd scored a couple of goals we saw the opportunity to score more and kept things going. We should in fact have had more goals as on several occasions some great build up play was let down by poor finishing. Hopefully this will set us up well for Wednesday's game against Russia, although they'll likely be tougher opponents than Israel and will attempt a more attacking game.

After the football I watched the England v USA rugby game (our first game in the Rugby World Cup). Despite England winning (which they were expected to do easily against a team like USA) we played really poorly. It was a really dull performance that didn't show any real passion to win. It's not the most promising of starts given the performances of teams like New Zealand, Australia and South Africa in their opening matches.