Claims

Some of you may remember that on my trip to Los Angeles a few months ago my luggage went missing (you may not know that on my return flight the stuff I'd had to buy in the US also went missing for a couple of days due to the Heathrow Terminal 5 debacle.) My luggage (from the outbound flight) was never recovered, so on returning I made a claim on my travel insurance for the cost of everything I'd lost. I received this payment a couple of weeks ago, which was nice as I've had to buy quite a few new clothes to replace everything I lost. However, there was still the cost of things I had to buy while I was out in the US to keep me clothed, and not to pungent, through the two weeks I was there, and I want this reimbursed. To this end I've written a strong, but not impolite letter to British Airways (who I flew with) asking them to cover these costs (which is their policy) and giving them a couple of tips on how to deal with lost luggage in the future. I've only waited this long to do it, because they wanted my insurers claim reference number which I only just got given. In the letter I have suggested that when someones luggage goes missing they contact all the airports that that luggage has been through on it's journey in case it is stuck at one. Apparently this isn't what is currently done, because I was informed that the only airport that knew my luggage was missing was Los Angeles, and neither Glasgow or Heathrow airports, through which I'd travelled, had any idea to look for it. I was also told, by the BA lost luggage phone operatives, that they couldn't phone any of the airports as they didn't have the phone numbers. I think it's a bit strange for an airline to not supply their people who deal with lost luggage phone numbers that might allow them to find out where it is. They did, however, say that they could Telex the airports - now I'm not sure what century BA are living in, but Telex doesn't seem the best option to me. The other thing I discovered, which I've informed BA about, was that my lost luggage wasn't considered urgent priority until 10 days after it went missing, and only then because I asked them to try a bit harder to find it - what, in reality, making it urgent priority meant I don't know, but I don't imagine it was anything more than something to placate me. However, I'd have liked to think that they considered it urgent right from day one. At the time when I talked to any of the BA customer relations people on the phone I was always polite, as I really don't like shouting at people down the phone, especially when I don't think it'll do any good, but I'm hoping my letter (which I'm sending both by email and regular post) will have the desired effect i.e. get me some compensation money.

[Update - I got a very prompt reply from BA basically saying that they were very sorry for losing my luggage twice, but they wouldn't be giving me any compensation seeing as I'd already made an insurance claim. Oh, and they did hope I would still continue to fly with them. Now I'm not too concerned about getting money out of them as I have received my insurance payout, but I would like some form of compensation other than a letter of apology, because as it is they have got away scot free from the whole affair. It's only the insurance company that have had to pay anything. Needless to say I'll be writing back to them to extract something.]

A day at the fair

Yesterday a few of us visited the Schützenfest to check out the festivities. We were surprised at the lack of actual shooting (where all the Schützen were we didn't know) as the main festival area is just a big fairground. Despite the disappointment at not seeing anything getting shot at we decided to explore the fairground. It had all the rides you'd expect from your general fun fair in the UK (bumper cars, ghost trains, fun houses, roller coasters, ferris wheels, and every kind of spinning machine you care to mention) along with a good selection of more German-style-fayre in the form of sausage vendors and beer tents. I went on all the rides I could find that had "Star" in the title. The first of which, Star flyer, was your general spiny-round swings on chains set up, but then elevated a good 30 metres or so into the air. It gave a good view of the surrounding and was a rather relaxing ride. The other ride I went on was the Star gate (you know, like from the film and TV series) except it wasn't a worm-hole that you could step through to other far flung parts of the universe, it just spun you round in different directions and at various angles to the horizontal. Perhaps the strangest thing we saw was a tent in which a man was trying to get members of the public to take part in what I can only assume was an illegal, unlicenced, boxing match. He paired up the punters with his own fighters and then took them into the tent followed by a crowd of the public who were baying for blood (well not really, but some of them might have been.) We could only assume that some kind of bare-knuckle fight-to-the-death style action went on. The fest is on for the whole week, so at some point we're going to have to find out where the shooting's at.

Ain't talkin' 'bout dub

Getting to see an English language film shown in it's original form without it being dubbed into German is apparently quite a rare thing in Hannover (I suppose for the obvious reason that it's in Germany and generally people are statistically more likely to speak and understand German.) So when a film is being shown in English here it can be a big event for those that can understand it and prefer to see the unadulterated version of the film - you get to hear the actual actors who were paid to star in the film rather than their, not-necessarily similar sounding, German counterparts. I'm giving this set up to lead into a cinema outing that a group of about 25 or more of us (who work at the AEI) went on on Friday evening. Someone had heard that the new Will Smith movie Hancock was being shown (for one showing only) in English, so despite it not being at the top of many people's lists of films to see (I'd heard only bad reviews) we all jumped at the chance of going. Having now watched the film I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. It wasn't great, but it was a decent action movie with good effects and a story that had its funny moments and didn't drag. The film is probably saved by only being about one and a half hours long and if they'd tried to keep it up for longer it would have started grating, although the shortness did mean a lot of stuff had to be left unexplained. I also enjoyed the fact that I could buy a beer in a big multiplex cinema and take it into the screen with me, but that's not really to do with the film.

Shooting up the place

Today sees the start of the world largest Schützenfest, or German markmens festival, in Hannover. The main thing I've noticed for this is a large fun fair in town, but apparently (according to wikipedia) there's going to be of order 5000 marksmens trying to become Schützenkönig by shooting at, amoung other things, wooden eagles! In addition to this there're beer tents (obviously) and a very long parade. It runs all week, so I should have some more to say about it when I go along to some of the events.

Politcal correctness gone mad!

Here's a funny story (via Pharyngula) about how the right-wing American Family Association's news aggregation site over zealously (well not really just over zealously, but just plain stupidly) used an automatic auto-correct on the news stories it received to correct the word "gay" to "homosexual" - heaven forbid the good, god-fearing folk, of America's perceptions should be sullied by the word gay being used to mean homosexuality! A screen cap of the particular news story, which has now been corrected, can be found here. Scroll down that link to see some of the previous headlines that the auto-correct has produced - a particular favourite, although they're all good, is "Close call: Homosexual barely averts major flop in 100".

The horn of loss

Last night a few of us went to the football stadium in Hannover, outside which they'd erected a big screen, to watch the Euro2008 final between Germany and Spain. There was a pretty big crowd of people there (you could hear the general crowd hum from several hundred metres away), a lot of German flags being waved and also painted on peoples faces, and a reasonable, but not that excessive, amount of noise being made. For the first half of the match the crowd were fairly subdued, with one or two groups of people occasionally trying half-heartedly to start a chant of "Super, super Deutchland". In terms of the football the German's got off to a fast paced start in the first 10 minutes, but that was about it from them as Spain took over the match and scored towards the end of the half. The crowd picked up a bit in the second half (maybe created by the DJ during half time trying to gee the fans up a bit with some tunes) despite being a goal down. There was a bit more of a buzz in the air, and hope that Germany could pull it back. However it didn't translate to the match as Spain continued to dominate and quickly closed down any German plays when they were on the ball. Spain were the deserved winners in the end, but surprisingly it didn't put that much of a dampener on the German fan's spirits around Hannover. In fact they seemed more animated and rowdy now that the game was over and they'd lost. On the streets every car was going by with people leaning out the window's waving German flags and beeping their horns. It's quite different to how a similar event (if we ever make a final that is) would be back in England, which would have involved a properly ludicrous level of chanting, singing, shouts of support/abuse/derision during the match, but then a very sober silence when we lost as everyone headed home faces held in hands.

Stretching the skins

One of the selling points for me coming out to Hannover for the summer was that our former Corpse Full of Bees/Look Up for Danger guitarist was here and we planned to start up a band again. However this did mean that I needed some drums. So this week I bought myself an actual real-life drumkit on ebay, unlike the electronic kit that I already own. After a bit of searching on ebay I found a German seller (o-trading-company) who offered various instruments, generally pictured being held by naked women, at very reasonable prices. The kit I bought was dirt cheap at a whole £115(!), so as you can imagine it's not the highest quality (the single snare I bought last year cost around the same amount) and could well have been put together by small children in a Chinese sweat-shop. That said after putting the drums together yesterday and having a bit of a play I've been pleasantly surprised with their sound quality. The different drums seem to make the sounds that they're supposed to - you know, a kind of "boom boom" sound of various pitch depending on the drum size. The main problem, and an unsurprising one given the price I paid, is that the cymbals (a high-hat and small crash) aren't all that great - they're fairly thin and after just the one practice I've put some major dents in them. Now that I have the kit, and we have a room to practice in (next to the Atlas computer cluster that the AEI have just put together), I'll just have to get good at playing.

It was a dark and windswept night

This article's a few days old (seen via BA), but I think it deserves some more recognition in honour of it containing the best picture ever! (You could read the article, but it will only make you feel slightly sullied as it is from the Mail.)



But what could have spooked that helicopter so much (despite the notoriously jumpy sheep seeming as relaxed as ever)? Apparently it was some lanterns.

A game of four quarters

You may have noticed a lack of posts from me about Euro2008 (other than the initial one from just before the tournament started) and assumed that this was down me being completely disinterested by the whole thing because England aren't in it. Well if you did assume that then you'd be wrong as I've been avidly watching as many games as possible (probably about 85% of games so far.) It's been quite relaxing to not have to worry about when England were going to let me down, so I've been getting quite a lot of enjoyment out of just watching games for the football's sake.

So far the tournament's been pretty good, although the quarter finals have shown how variable in quality the games can be. The Portugal vs. Germany game started off the quarters quite well with an open game, a good number of goals and an exciting finish, but Portugal definitely weren't the team they'd been in the group stages and Germany's full backs were still as motionless and drab as before. The Croatia vs. Turkey games was a dull, uninspiring affair for a good 115 mins of regular and then extra time. It was only saved by the shear craziness and excitement of the last few minutes, with Croatia looking all but through with their late goal and then conceding an equiliser with literally the final kick of the game. This produced the lottery (yeah it's a cliché, but what you gonna do) of a penalty shoot-out, with Turkey coming out victorious. This now lines up what will hopefully be a tasty encounter between Germany and Turkey, which should be rather interesting to watch here in Hannover with its large Turkish community.

In the other half of the draw we started off with an interesting and good watch in the Netherlands vs. Russia game. The Dutch never seemed to really get going into a flowing style and the Russian's just outplayed them with pace and tenacity. I think that the young (he's only 21 you know, as the German commentators were very fond of pointing out) Russian Arshavin (and yes I had the same thoughts about his name as Andrew Collins) will be snapped up by some big side during the summer. In contrast to that game we had a very lacklustre show for Spain vs. Italy. Neither team seemed to want to go at the game and win it, with lots of slow, dull build ups leading to nothing. To be fair Italy hadn't shown signs of wanting to play in the previous games, but I'd expected more from Spain. In the end a penalty shoot-out was probably the best option, as neither team deserved to win from what they'd shown in the previous, tedious, 120 mins, and it at least gave us viewers some tension and excitement.

One major disappointment about the quarter finals is that they've not been kind on my fantasy football team. I had no Russian or Turkish players, as I'd stuck with the more conventional teams. Now I just have to decide whether to go all out crazy and compose my team of players from the two teams that I think are going to win the semis, or have a general selection from the 4 teams left.

World music

Hannover was abuzz with music yesterday as they were hosting a Fête de la Musique. This involved putting up a load of stages at various places around the centre of the city, each having bands with a certain musical style e.g. there was a pop stage, a jazz stage, a rock stage, etc. On wandering through the city with jakeybob for a bit of a look around we saw various of these stages. We didn't stay in any one place very long and didn't hear anything particularly great, but there was a generally happy atmosphere about the place which was nice - it was a really nice day to, so that might have added to the feeling of pleasantness. Other than the music festival our best discovery was that at the reservoir in the town (the Maschsee) you can hire sail boats, row boats, or pedalos. This has now been put at high priority on the things to do while here list.

Een nieuwe start

Unsurprisingly Steve McClaren's had to move away from England for his next football management job (he's gone to FC Twente, a Dutch top flight team, with a prospect of qualifying for the Champions League.) Also, unsurprisingly a large proportion of his new team's fans aren't best pleased - "Ninety per cent of fans think why him? But he is used to working with top players," said club chairman Joop Munsterman!

Changing priorities

A while back I briefly posted about the release of STFC's programmatic review in which it ranked the priorities of varies particle physics and astronomy research projects (much, much more can be found all over the internet e.g. here and here.) The programmatic review was based on the advice of the Physics, Astronomy & Nuclear Physics Science Committee (PPAN) which was made up of a relatively small group of physicists and astronomers. This process was highly criticised by the wider UK physics and astronomy community for not being informed by a much broader consultation of experts. So for the last few months the priorities have been reassessed by a variety of ad hoc panels with the aim of giving a more truthful representation of where the community believes the UK's priorities should lie (although even this process has not been entirely well received, due to it's untimely and hurried nature.) Obviously it would be nice, and most profitable scientifically, to see everything being given a high priority, but with the current climate some hard choices have to be made. For the projects receiving high to medium priorities I think things should be reasonably safe funding-wise at least until the government's next comprehensive spending review, however it does leaves the projects with the lowest priority facing the very harsh reality of having funding completely pulled. The reason I'm writing this post is that yesterday the reports from these ad hoc consultation panels were released. I've not read all of them, but from this BBC article it's seems that things are in pretty similar shape priority-wise to how they were after the programmatic review. However, various things like eMerlin and some solar projects seem to have been slightly bumped up the list (although I think it's mainly a result of another tier being added to the bottom of the priority scale and they've been moved off the bottom one.) The one report I have looked at is that for Astro-particle physics, in which gravitational wave research lives, and it seems to have been kept at the highest level of prioritisation. According to the report there had been some grumbling from the wider community that there were too many high-to-medium priority gravitational wave projects in the list, but I think the report answers the that criticism well. For the relatively small level of funding that we (the UK) put into gravitational wave research (a few million pounds) we get a disproportionately large amount back i.e. we have access to all the data from the current GEO600, LIGO (a billion dollar scale project!) and Virgo detectors, as well as that which will come from the next generation of detectors. Also the potential reward for being the gravitational wave game is very high. People may well disagree and cite the fact that nothing's been detected yet, but I think these are very valid reasons to keep up the funding of these projects. Of course I would say this as it's my field of research. These reports aren't yet the final outcome though and we'll have to wait until 8^th July until the final version of the programmatic review is published.

Not the 9 o'clock news

In my apartment in Hannover I have access to a variety of TV channels (I don't know if it's satellite or just plain digital TV) in which I have two English language news networks: CNN and Sky News. In the past I've occasionally flicked past Sky News, but I've never really watched it for an extended period. Until now. It really is bad, despite proclaiming itself "News Channel of the Year". It's like the Sun, but on TV - even having right-wing pundit, Sun columnist and talk radio host Jon "Gaunty" Gaunt doing its newspaper review. This probably isn't surprising given it's ownership by Rupert Murdoch's News International, but it is slightly disappointing (I at least want BBC World and even that's pretty shit.) It's only saving grace is that it has that nice Eamonn Holmes presenting its breakfast show.

Germary, Germany over all!

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

C'est trop cher

One of the things you notice when staying in central Paris is how expensive it is to buy drinks. I think this is especially the case in the more touristy areas, in one of which my hotel happens to be. Now drinks in London are generally considered to be pricey by UK standards, but they're nothing compared to the cost over here. For example last night I paid €8.50 for a half litre of Heineken - at current exchange rates that's £6.72, and it's not even quite a whole pint!

Your goose is cooked

After the other days culinary adventures I had another first last night. I ate some, most likely inhumanely (or ingoosely) produced, foie gras. It was very nice and I would recommend force-feeding grain to a goose and eating its distended liver to anyone.

When in France... eat weird shit

Just to give a context I am at the moment in Paris (at the Universite Paris-Sud) at a collaboration meeting. Last night going out for dinner allowed me to try a couple of dishes that I'd normally wouldn't expect to eat (and no, it wasn't frogs legs and snails - don't stereotype.) A friend of mine ordered Os a moelle not knowing what it actually was (well none of us really had an idea until it arrived and we remembered what the word os meant - bone. It was a plate of bone marrow served from some nice bits of femur by the look of it - it looked like something you might put on the floor for a dog to gnaw on. I ventured to try a bit of marrow (which I suggested might have been better off being used to cure a poor calf with leukemia) and have to say it wasn't bad - it's pretty slimy, but is fairly tasteless and just kind of like eating fat (which I'm not averse to.) The other dish I tried was again sampled from another friend order, which was Steak tartare. This was essentially a quarter pound of raw beef patty. It was also quite good and nicely seasoned with herbs, but you couldn't get over the fact that you were eat raw meat. These are both things I'm glad I tried, but I'm also glad I didn't order them myself and had more conventional food choices. Maybe I'll have the snails and frogs legs tonight!

[Update: I actually did have a frog's leg on my last night in Paris. It was tasty, but lacking in quantity of meat.]

Weekend break

After heading out to kayak on Loch Lomond a couple of weeks back last weekend I got out on a river for the second time. About a dozen of us from the canoe club went for a weekend of camping and kayaking on the Etive (near Glencoe.) We drove upon Friday night, with me again taking the wheel of the minibus (a different one than the previous week) - there were still quite a few stalls, but in general my driving got more confident over the weekend and I managed to get by without any crashes or scrapes and I am now reasonably proficient at performing three-point turns on country roads. We camped on some ground behind the Kings House hotel, which is semi-officially a campsite - at least it seems to be quite well used. The campsite sits near the head of the Etive and from looking at the level of that, and due to it having been pretty dry during the week, we knew that the water levels for our kayaking were going to be pretty low. Heading out to the river the next day confirmed this, with our main view of the river being stone dry rocks. However, we headed to a section called triple falls (a series of three small waterfalls unsurprisingly) where there was enough water to go down. Despite the falls looking quite daunting from above, especially for a relative beginner like me, they were reasonably tame to go off. Later on we headed to another waterfall called Right Angle, which was quite a bit higher than any of the drops at triple (about 20 feet.) As I'd been down the earlier falls I decided to give this one a go as well. Even quite a few of the experienced guys going over the falls were capsising at the bottom (although they were all able to roll themselves back up.) The three times I went off I also capsised, almost managing to roll on the first time, but then having to swim. The following day we again went to triple falls and right angle and also attempted to kayak between the to. This mainly involved scraping the bottom of our boats over rocks, but there were a couple of other good falls along the way. Overall the trip was really good and great experience for a beginner like me. I'm pretty eager to get out again, but will have to wait for Autumn when the university starts back up. Hopefully next time I'm out they'll be a bit more water and fewer midges.

Euro-phoria

Tomorrow (or today as it's past midnight) the European Championships start. This fact would be slightly more exciting if a home nations team were in it [I would have been supporting Scotland if they'd got through and England hadn't cos I'm above petty national rivalries ;)], but I'll have to cope without a local team to cheer on - at least there won't be the huge disappointment, frustration and pain of watching England fuck things up. During the competition I am mainly going to be in countries with teams involved as I'm in France next week and will be heading to Germany the following week. This could add to the excitement, although I'll have to deal with foreign commentators (at least that means I'll avoid Motty.) Other than that I'll have to add to the excitement by hoping my work sweepstake (there's a huge prize of £16 up for stake) team of the Netherlands (I know they're in the group of death and they notoriously managed to implode with internal squabbles during major tournaments, but its not the worse draw - I could have got one of the hosts!) and my fantasy football team do well. I may comment more on the tournament as it progresses.

Eyes to the right

After a bit of a boozing session last night I suffered today, not from the regular hangover experience of a headache and general lethargy, but rather from an eye related disorder. I've had this problem before in that a night on the piss leaves me with degraded eyesight the next day, but from last night it was more acute - my right eye just couldn't focus at all. This lasted a good 10 hours from when I got up, initially starting with my right eye being all but useless as an optical device, to earlier this evening when it was just giving me a bit of double vision. I'd prefer a regular hangover than this style of alcohol infliction, but maybe it was just what I was drinking that caused the problem - for the time being I'll lay off the £1-a-can Red Stripes.

Budgetary constraints

Way back at the end of 2006 I wrote about a project I'd been working on about searching for gravitational waves from the Crab pulsar (see that post here for more links and details) and how that work had lead to an exciting new result i.e. that we beat pre-existing limits on the amount of energy that could be released via gravitational radiation from the Crab pulsar as it's rotation slows down. Since then we've added more to the search and firmed up the result and I (and others) have presented it at several meetings (e.g. at the AAS) , but we now finally have the paper submitted to the pre-print arXiv (you won't be able to see it until Sunday evening unless you have the secret password.) In my previous post I wasn't able to say what the result was (we'd embargoed the exact numbers until our collaborations internal review process was finished), but now I can reveal them. The main result is that we can say that less than 4% of the energy available from the slowing down of the Crab pulsar is radiated away via gravitational waves. This is a result that it's not currently possible to get via methods other than direct gravitational wave observations, because electromagnetic observations and models of the Crab pulsar and it's surrounding nebula (which is powered by the pulsar's slow-down) are full of too many uncertainties and assumptions that they can't give a good constraint on the energy budget i.e. you can't accurately add up all the possible mechanisms which could contribute to the Crab pulsar slowing down. There should be a press release about this on Monday, so keep your eyes peeled.

[Update: The University of Glasgow's press release can be found here.]

[More updates: The paper has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, which is pretty prestigious :)]

Mac life

Last week I crossed over from a loyal PC person to being a Mac user! I needed a new work laptop as my previous Dell was getting on a bit and not quite able to hack the fast pace of life as we live it today. Seeing as several of my friends and colleagues (not to mention all the new research students in my group) have gone the way of the Mac, and were generally very happy with them, I thought I'd join them. So now I have a swish new Macbook Pro (although I was told that a newer version was being released in June I couldn't wait.) So far I've been very impressed. I've had some issues with the keyboard not being as I'm used to ("@" and "~" are in a different place for a start, there's no "Home", "End" of "Delete" keys [although via a bit of googling I've found replacement for these - Ctrl a, Ctrl e, and Fn backspace respectively]), but other than that it's all been good. I'm sure I'll find more annoyances in the future, but at the moment I'm just liking the way it's Linuxy but with everything still working straight off.

Do you remember the first time

Just for the historical record I should note that last week I bought and ate my first ever donner kebab - well maybe it's not noteworthy, but I'm going to write about it anyway! I generally shun the donner in favour of a more healthy, from the look of it at least, shish kebab - shish's also consist of an identifiable meat. This is mainly to make me feel superior to the far more numerous donner eating hordes. However, I put my hands up, I have eaten donner meat in the past, but only small morsels picked off from other peoples kebabs/donner meat and chip combos (people I knew that is, not randoms or from discarded polystyrene trays off the street.) So it was about time that I lowered myself to the level of the ordinary man and got one for myself (plus it was late at night, I'd not eaten dinner and it was one of the cheapest things on the menu in the take-away.) I was reasonably impressed with my first donner. One of the main things to note about donner meat, other than its hideous appearance, is that it has very little taste. There's only the vague notion that it's some form of meat and the fact that it's lamb can barely be discerned. But, you see, the lack of taste really doesn't matter, because the whole point of a donner is to smother it in hot chilli sauce. So when I say I was reasonably impressed what I mean is that they did a good chilli sauce, supplemented well by some tasteless, greyish-brown, greasy slithers of meat, and some not-yet wilted salad. I'm not going to be adding donner's to my regular menu, and I'll probably more often stick to the shish kebab when I next visit a kebab shop, but I definitely won't be as disdainful of them as I've been in the past and, you never know, the feeling for one could grab me again in the future.

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.