SciMon Diary: Day 8 (week 2)

When I arrived at the detector we'd been in science mode for about 5 hours and that continued for another 7 hours of my shift - a nice 12 hours at a range of ~17 Mpc. I'd been hopeful that we'd stay in lock for the whole of my shift, which would have made things nice and easy, but unfortunately something happened. It did allow me to actually do something in trying to track down the source of the lock loss - it wasn't an obvious seismic event, and various accelerometers on on a variety of optical benches were inconclusive (I had a lot of help to show me what channels I should be looking to perform the diagnostics). By the end of my shift we had some clues, but still didn't know what the ultimate cause was, or whether the same thing had caused loss lock on other occasions. I had learned a fair bit more about the diagnostics software though, and the locations of a variety of optical benches.

Day off

I started my day with a nice 2 hour 45 minute drive from Richland to the White Salmon river (Google maps was quite accurate in it's allotted trip time). As I said previously I was off to raft the river with these guys. I arrived about an hour early (seeing as I wasn't completely sure how long the drive would take, so I left quite a bit of leeway), so went and had a look at the river and the Husum falls - there were a few kayakers paddling about. I was the first to arrive, but soon after a large group of guys who'd be rafting with us turned up, followed (a bit late) by another local couple. The group were a bunch of guys (mainly from Seattle) who were out on a bachelor weekend - they'd had a big night in Portland the night before, but seemed quite perky and up for it (well the groom-to-be was looking a bit pale, but he made it through ok). Our river guides for the day were Todd (one of the co-founders of the company) and Drew - they kitted us out and then drove us up to the get in.

At the get in (a private get in further up the river than the standard commercial get in, that allowed us to do a load more rapids) we had a introduction to whitewater rafting - how to sit in the boat; how to paddle; what to do if you fall in, etc. We then got split into two groups - it was the bachelor party in one boat with Todd, and the couple (Darrell and Amanda) and me in the other with Drew. Once in the river we did a bit of practicing paddling forward, paddling backwards, and turning, and then got going - the couple had both rafted the river before, so I was the only beginner in the boat. As we had fewer people in our boat we were a bit more nimble and manoeuvrable than the other guys. The top half of the river was a succession of class III rapids and we survived them all and I got the hang a paddling on a raft (which is unsurprisingly quite different that being in a kayak, it being a big open rubbery-ring thing rather than a plastic thing that you're enclosed in). About halfway down we reached a bit where there was a class V fall, which we walked around. After the fall there was the opportunity to rejoin the rafts either by jumping of a ~20 ft drop into the very cold (it being glacial melt water filtered through basalt) water, or walking down. Me and four others choose the jumping option.

After that there were a few more nice rapids, but the main event of the trip was the final Husum falls - about a 10 ft drop that's apparently one of the larger commercially rafted falls in the US. Before reaching it we practiced what to do when we went over the fall - drop onto the floor of the raft and grab onto the available lines. We ran the fall quite easily, but got quite a soaking at the bottom.

Rafting the White Salmon river

It was a fun trip. The guides were really good guys and the other rafters were very nice. But, I have to say, I'd have far preferred to kayak the river. In the raft you actually don't get to do much - you hardly need to paddle - and as it's so big you don't get the proper feeling going through waves and off drops (it kind of smoothes everything out). I do think it would be fantastic to run in a kayak though. I would recommend rafting, but probably you'll enjoy it more if you've not kayaked any class III or higher stuff before. I would also highly recommend doing a trip with Wet Planet Whitewater too.

My drive back was quite tiring and I actually now ache far more from sitting in a car for nearly six hours than from the paddling.

SciMon Diary: Day 7

So I've reached the halfway point in my scheduled shifts - 7 down and 7 more to go. Today was generally seismically quieter than previous days (maybe the workmen just don't work as hard on a Friday!) and there were no major earthquakes, so we were able to maintain lock for longer and get a better range. We managed to keep in science mode for about half of the shift.

At the start of each shift I have to talk to the outgoing SciMon, look at the electronic logbook (elog) that's kept, and then write an entry detailing the detectors' performance during the shift. We have a variety of figures of merit (FOMs) that are displayed in the control room, examples of which include: a running plot of the range; the detectors state vector (i.e. whether we're in science mode or not); the average power in various frequency bands; the time to which, at the current sensitivity, we could reach the Crab pulsar's spin-down limit; different frequency bands from seismometers located at various parts of the detector (i.e. the central station, or the ends of the two arms of the interferometer); and the glitchiness of the detector. At the end of each shift plots of these FOMs are automatically posted on the elog, and the entry we write basically describes what's shown in the plots, but giving details of things like why we lost lock (which may not be directly obvious from the FOMs), glitches that occurred, and events in the seismic channels. These notes can then either inform the people who work on the detector about potential glitches in the detector system (that they can hopefully fix), or be used if an interesting event is seen in an astrophysical analysis to check that there's no other more mundane reason for the event. Anyway that was a long winded way of me getting round to saying that the automatically generated elog FOM plots were not actually generated before my shift (the script that runs them had accidentally not been restarted following a change), so I had to try and generate my own FOMs to describe what had gone on. I didn't do quite as professional a job with my amateur effort as in the standard plots, but I at least displayed the science segments and range for the previous eight hours.

We again had a school group in the control room today, and again their first questions seemed to be about the two clocks - what is it with school kids and clocks? Have they never seen them before?

My shift ended with us increasing the laser power from the 8W of normal weekday running to the 14W normally used at night and weekends. More power means more sensitivity (see this nice tutorial on laser shot noise for why), but it can also make the detector harder to control and easier to knock out of lock, so that's why the higher power is generally only used when it's seismically quieter. With this higher power we were managing ranges of over 16Mpc. Hopefully that'll continue over the weekend and when I go back in on Sunday we'll have lots of nice data.

Now I just have to prepare myself for tomorrow's rafting trip. Here's a preview of what I'll be doing:

SciMon Diary: Day 6

There was a pleasant surprise this morning when I arrived at the detector. We were in lock, and the nasty noise I mentioned yesterday had gone (although there was still quite a lot of noise making the data below ~100Hz rather jumpy). This noise source caused there to be huge wings/sidebands on the 120Hz and 180Hz lines in the data (these lines are harmonics of the 60Hz line, which comes from the AC frequency of the US mains electricity). The noise seemed to have started when one of the optical benches (on which sits a variety of optics, like mirrors, beam splitters and such) was "landed" - it had previously been floated on a very thin layer of air. So, one of the things that was done yesterday was to re-float the bench. It looks like it was this that improved things, but it's not entirely conclusive (other things like slight realignments were performed). None of that happened during my shift, but it was nice to see the work payoff.

During the shift we were still troubled by the low frequency anthropogenic noise and we only stayed in lock for about half the shift, but that's better than yesterday (when there had been issues other than seismic noise keeping us from reacquiring lock).

We had some excitement in the control room when we were invaded by a large party of local school kids, but the seemed reasonably restrained and asked some questions about the various monitors in the control room (the group was split into two to visit the control room and both groups asked about the two big clocks we have, one of which shows the local time [PDT at the moment] and the other that shows UTC). While they were there I had some pieces of paper, with complicated looking maths on it, so hopefully I looked like a proper scientist to the students.

SciMon Diary: Day 5

Another poor day for the detector. We weren't having maintenance day today, but we were out of lock for the whole of my shift. It's those pesky workmen again making a lot of noise in the 1-3Hz seismic band. This is the frequency range that relatively local anthropogenic activity generally manifests itself in, so we have a monitor which shows this to check how it correlates with our being in lock, or our inspiral range. Earthquakes generally show up in the 0.03-0.1Hz band and can also knock us out of lock, so we also monitor this (there was a magnitude 6 earthquake today off Samoa, which showed up as a large spike in this band, but as we were out of lock anyway it didn't hurt us).

Seeing as it wasn't looking like we'd get any science data it was decided that we'd let people go and play with the detector in the afternoon. One of the hopes was that we'd be able to track down a source of noise that kept our range down for the last couple of weeks (we should be able to regularly see out to over 16-17 Mpc at night, but we've been maxing out at around 14 Mpc). Hopefully when I go in tomorrow I'll be pleasantly surprised to see that we had an increased range overnight, but it may well be a complicated problem without a quick fix.

Today I also sorted out what I'm going to do on my day off this Saturday - I'll be going white water rafting on the White Salmon river with Wet Planet Whitewater. This should give me my paddling fix and also give me something more exciting to write about on Sunday.

SciMon Diary: Day 4

Here's my next eagerly anticipated instalment of exciting tales from the LIGO Hanford Observatory. So what fascinating antics did the detector get up to during my shift today? Well... nothing actually. For all my shift we stayed out of science mode and out of lock due to today being a scheduled maintenance day. During this time there was a big magnitude 6.3 earthquake off Alaska, which most likely would have knocked us out of lock had we been up. Many important things were done to the detector, but it did mean that I wasn't required for much.

One strange thing did happen during the shift though - it rained, and has continued raining for most of the day. It's been completely dry for the previous week, and generally this is a dry place (it is the high desert after all), so it was a nice change to see the familiar weather of back home.

In lunch news it seems that my Philadelphia was as I left it yesterday, and I also discovered a sandwich toaster (which I'd previously though was a George Forman grill), so I was able to have nice toasted bagels.

SciMon Diary: Day 3

Today was a rather poor day for the detector. It wasn't behaving very well and refused to stay in lock. To be fair to it it wasn't entirely it's fault - there were some noisy workmen playing nearby (doing something to an irrigation canal apparently) and they kept disturbing it (we think). We only had short segments of good science data and even during those our range was quite low at about 12 Mpc.

A more disturbing occurrence was that I found that some of my Philadelphia, which I have placed in the fridge at the detector, was stolen! I'll see if this flagrant theft continues tomorrow.

SciMon Diary: Day 2

For my shifts I have to get up at the previously unknown time of 6:40am - it's quite a hardship I can tell you. I bet no-one else has ever had to get out of bed so early to start a job! I then have a 20 min drive along some of the most boringly straight roads you have ever seen (luckily my car has cruise control otherwise I think my legs would just cramp up from the monotony).

At the start of today's shift I was given the folder containing the visitor rules and regulations, which I've had to read. There's a computer use policy in there and I'm not sure if writing this blog constitutes allowed use of the computing infrastructure - it's probably fine.

I learned a bit about how LIGO compensates for the fact that tidal forces stretch the detector arms. We pre-calculate the expected change and perform some thermal adjustments to compensate. However in reality this only corrects for about half the total effect, so we also have to apply some actuation to the end test masses. Our first loss of lock today was caused by one of the controls for these actuators reaching the end of it's allowed range and getting stuck.

I've been trying to teach myself how to use the LIGO DataViewer, which is one of the software tools that allows us to quickly look at the data from all the different channels that the detector produces (it outputs data channels that contain any gravitational wave signal, but it also has hundreds of auxiliary channel monitoring various states of the detector systems). With this I can look at a snapshot of data, have a real time feed, or trend past data, from all the channels available.

I also submitted this paper to The Astrophysical Journal.

In other exciting news today I decided to make my own lunch rather than buy one of the very poor quality sandwiches from the 7-eleven on the way in. I have some bagels and a large tub of Philadelphia, and muffins.

Come back tomorrow to see I can keep up this scintillating, and enthralling, diary.

SciMon Diary: Day 1

Today saw my first day as an expert SciMon - the first of thirteen more days. It being the weekend there weren't really many people at the site, in fact for the most part it was just me and the detector operator (someone who actually knows how to run the detector!). During the shift was based in the control room at the observatory, which looks like this, and has a variety of monitors projected onto the walls - some of the most useful monitors show the current estimated range (the distance, in Megaparsecs, out to which we could observe a binary neutron star coalescence), the sensitivity curve, and a variety of seismometer channels (useful for seeing if there's been an earthquake).

The main (but not only) duty of a SciMon is to document when and why the detector falls out of lock - being in lock means that the interference pattern that the detector uses to sense length changes is held on held just off a dark fringe [I've updated this as I just got reminded that we no longer lock on the dark fringe, but instead use a system where we lock just off the dark fringe (a so-called DC readout) - this is to help us better control the detector] i.e. where the light from the two arms of the interferometer are almost completely cancelling each other out - during this state, and if the detector's behaving itself, it can be said to be in science mode and we can use that data for astrophysical analyses.

For the first half of my shift the detector was behaving itself nicely, and I thought we might make it through the whole 8 hours staying in science mode. But this hope was dashed when a reasonably local earthquake in Nevada knocked us out of lock. The disturbance from this lasted a while, but we got back into science mode and the end of my shift saw us back behaving well. There was also an unexpected interruption in the control room near the end of the run when a tour group came through to observe the detector in operation.

At the end of the shift I handed over to the next SciMon on the 4pm-12am shift, but I'll be back tomorrow. (Posts probably won't get much more exciting than this)

Trainee

On Monday I flew out to the US to start my time doing SciMon shifts (as I talked about here) at the LIGO Hanford Observatory (LHO). My first full day here (Tuesday) was not spent at the detector, but was mainly spent in bed overcoming jetlag (and also an illness I seemed to come down with during my flight - not pleasant). But for the last three days I have been out at the detector learning the trade of the SciMon as a trainee. There's been little for me to actually do, but having a computer has meant that I could just get on with my regular work. I have learned what a variety of the monitors that we have in our control room mean (it's a bit like a space mission control room, with banks of screens and computers), and I've seen the effect of the last weeks multiple strong earthquakes on the detector.

Tomorrow I start my first seven days in duty as the "expert" SciMon. After that I then have a day off followed by another seven days of shifts. I'm going to try and write something every day about my experience, so be prepared for 14, probably, fairly dull posts about my experience. I may be going slightly mad towards the end!

Back to the Clyde

In a late post that's just for the record (so I can keep track of what kayaking trips I've been on) I will briefly comment on the bit of paddling I did last Sunday. We had a beginners trip to the Clyde, where, according to this post, I apparently swam last time I did it. I not quite sure how, or where, I swam, because at the section we did it's a very tame river - useful for beginners trips to ease them in to things, but not too exciting for anyone else. I was still grateful to get on the trip as my last river paddling was a while ago and it's all good experience. In fact my general river skills, such as paddling out of eddys properly (eddying out) and paddling across a river (ferrying), aren't too good, so it was nice to practice these - even though I think some of the beginners showed me up a bit on both. The paddle was reasonably uneventful, although there were three swims from two of the new folk (but not me this time!). The beginners seemed to enjoy it and no-one got put off, so hopefully they'll all be back for more. I think I want to get back to rivers with bigger waves and more rapids, just because I don't look as stupid when trying to do simple river manoeuvres - going off weirs and waterfalls I can do!

Interrail

In about two hours I board a train to take me from Budapest, where I've been attending our collaboration meeting, to Munich, where I'll be partaking in beer and sausage at Oktoberfest. Hopefully it'll be a nice journey with lots of pleasant scenery, but it does involve a 7 and a half hours on a train. If there's free wifi on the train (I have no idea whether this will be the case or not) I might give you a running commentary of the journey - or I might just catch up on sleep.

Limiting factors

Yesterday the search that I've spent most of the last two years performing went on arXiv (following on from the search described in this post). I'll reproduce the abstract here and then try and explain a bit more about it:

Searches for gravitational waves from known pulsars with S5 LIGO data

We present a search for gravitational waves from 116 known millisecond and young pulsars using data from the fifth science run of the LIGO detectors. For this search ephemerides overlapping the run period were obtained for all pulsars using radio and X-ray observations. We demonstrate an updated search method that allows for small uncertainties in the pulsar phase parameters to be included in the search. We report no signal detection from any of the targets and therefore interpret our results as upper limits on the gravitational wave signal strength. Our best (lowest) upper limit on gravitational wave amplitude is 2.3x10^-26 for J1603-7202 and our best (lowest) limit on the inferred pulsar ellipticity is 7.0x10^-8 for J2124-3358. Of the recycled millisecond pulsars several of the measured upper limits are only about an order of magnitude above their spin-down limits. For the young pulsars J1913+1011 and J1952+3252 we are only a factor of a few above the spin-down limit, and for the X-ray pulsar J0537-6910 we reach the spin-down limit under the assumption that any gravitational wave signal from it stays phase locked to the X-ray pulses over timing glitches. We also present updated limits on gravitational radiation from the Crab pulsar, where the measured limit is now a factor of seven below the spin-down limit. This limits the power radiated via gravitational waves to be less than ~2% of the available spin-down power.

Firstly, if you follow the link to the paper, you might notice that there are actually 679 authors on this paper! That's quite a few more than you'll see on most astrophysics papers (by a couple of orders of magnitude!) and I'm somewhere in the middle of it. The reason for this is that the work has been done as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo Collaboration, and everyone who has put work into designing, building, commissioning and running the detectors and analysis infrastructure (like code libraries, computing resources, theoretical understanding) that we use is included. We also have a few extra authors from outside these two collaborations. These are a selection of electromagnetic pulsar astronomers who have provided vital information about the sources we're looking for in gravitational waves. Here we've used data from the fifth science run (S5) of the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which took place from Novmeber 2005 to October 2007, and during which the detectors were at their design sensitivity.

The aim of this search is to use already known astronomical objects - pulsars (neutron stars) - as targets from which to look for gravitational wave emission - these are probably the most promising targets within our own galaxy, although there are many exciting extra-galatic sources. These objects are very dense (about the mass of the sun compressed into a sphere about 20km across) and rapidly rotating (they spin round 100 times or more every second - i.e. the surface of the star is rotating at about 20 million km/hr, or 2% of the speed of light) - both of which make these potentially good sources of gravitational waves. It requires a bit more than just being massive and fast for these objects to emit gravitational waves - they have to have some sort of deformation making them triaxial (like a rubgy ball, but with the difference between the axes being far smaller at less than around a millimetre). Are they actually deformed at this level (or a larger or smaller amount)? Well that's something we want to find out by looking for gravitational waves from them. And if we do see something we can make constraints on the exact make-up of the material in the pulsars.

The reason to go after known pulsars (rather than neutron stars that aren't currently observed [which we are also doing, and you can help with]) is that it's relatively computationally easy. If you don't know where to look to find a source (in, say, sky position and frequency) then you literally have to look everywhere, which requires huge computational resources. Whereas, if you have a known object you know precisely where to look. So that's what we do. We take our gravitational wave detector data and look at the frequency of a particular pulsar and see if there's a signal sticking up above the noise floor at that spot (it's not quite as simple as that because our data is produced by a detector sitting on the Earth, which is a moving platform, so any signal hitting the detector will be Doppler shifted [i.e. the frequency will change slightly as we're travelling towards and away from the source] and we have to take this into account - luckily we know the position of the source and the speed and position of the Earth and can calculate this shift - and also the pulsar spins-down, so it's frequency changes as it loses energy [and some young pulsars have messy frequency evolutions due to still unknown effects]). This signal is parameterised by four physical quantities of the source - the gravitational wave amplitude (directly related to the size of deformity on the star), the initial phase of the signal, the inclination of the pulsar, and the polarisation angle - so we try and estimate these parameters from our data. Unfortunately in this search we saw no signals from any of the pulsars we looked at, so rather than being able to estimate these parameters we instead set an upper limit for each - a limit at which we say that, at a 95% degree-of-belief, the gravitational wave amplitude from the pulsar must be less than.

For this search our best upper limit on amplitude (i.e. the smallest value) is 2.3x10^-26 (or 0.000000000000000000000000023) for a pulsar called J1603-7202 (the name gives the sky position of the pulsar in right ascension α, and declination δ, so this pulsar is at α = 16^h03^m and δ = -72^o02'). This value is obviously small, but it's a dimensionless quantity called strain, so what does it actually mean physically. Well given our detectors are 4km long (well two of them were 4km and one was 2km) it means that the signal from this pulsar cannot be changing the length of the detector by more that 2.3x10^-26 x 4000m = 9.2x10^-23 metres (or 0.000000000000000000000092 metres, or, in the favourite units of human hair widths, its about 1 billion billion^th of a hhw). If you look at the displacement sensitivity of the detectors then, at their best, between about 100-200 Hz, they would seem to show that they can reach 1x10^-19 m Hz^-1/2 - which is four orders of magnitude worse than our result! However, that value has the funny units of m Hz^-1/2, which is displacement spectral density - if we have a continuous signal that we can track over long time periods (like a known pulsars) we can get better sensitivity than this by integrating over time (basically just using long observations), which allows us to dig into the amplitude spectral density noise floor by the square root of the observation time (is seconds) - hence our better limits.

We can use our amplitude upper limit to set a limit on the ellipticity of the pulsar (basically the size of the deformation) - this requires us to assume that we know the star's moment of inertia (which in fact could be uncertain by up to a factor of three depending on the mass and make-up of the star i.e. it's equation of state), and that we accurately know the star's distance (which are generally uncertain by 10-20%, but could be uncertain by a factor of 2-3!). However, plugging in standard numbers for these values, our best upper limit on the ellipticity for any of the pulsars in our search was 7.0x10^-8 for J2124-3358. Given that the star has a diameter of about 20km this would mean that any deformations on it are less that about 1.5mm i.e. our direct observations rule out hills on this star, which is hundreds of light years away, being larger than 1.5mm!

Is an upper limit by itself interesting? Well that depends on your previous ideas about the source. If you think that the source could, or should, be emitting gravitational waves at a level above your upper limit then you can infer new information. In our case, for each pulsar, we have something called the "spin-down upper limit", which says that if we assume that all the kinetic energy that the pulsar loses as it spins-down is being radiated as gravitational waves then we can calculate a limit on the amplitude of those waves. We can compare our direct observational upper limits with these spin-down limits, and if we beat them we're entering a new regime of knowledge about the pulsar. The majority of our pulsars are actually spinning down rather slowly (the fast, millisecond, pulsars are generally slowly spinning down, thought to be due to them having weak magnetic fields) so their spin-down limits are small and therefore our results are still well above them (by about 10-100 times). But for a few pulsars (generally younger pulsars) we approach, and in the case of the Crab pulsar (and if you assume larger moments of inertia also for J0537-6910) beat, this spin-down limit. So, we're in a regime where we potentially could see gravitational waves from the Crab pulsar. However if we look at the ellipticity we can estimate for it, given our measured upper limit, we get a value of around 1x10^-4. Normal neutron star equations of state would suggest that the largest possible ellipticities that could be sustained by the star would likely be at least an order of magnitude (probably more) less than this, so you have to go to more exotic, and probably less likely, equations of state (things like quark stars) to get potential ellipticities at this level. Unfortunately these values are maximum possible deformations that the star might have, they could just be far smoother. For the Crab pulsar even though we've not seen a gravitational wave signal it's still nice to think about what this results means - in terms of the fraction of the star's energy it is losing when it spins-down, we can now say that less than 2% of it is being emitted via gravitational waves (magnetic dipole radiation and powering the accelerating expansion of the Crab nebula seem to dominate the energy loss).

These searches are not stopping because we've not seen anything yet. New data is currently being taken, which will soon hopefully surpass the S5 run in its sensitivity. We also have data from the Virgo detector, which will allow us to look for pulsars at lower frequencies than are accessible than LIGO - this is a frequency range where there are quite a few young rapidly spinning-down pulsars, which we hope to be able to surpass the spin-down limit for. New pulsars are also being discovered all the time (Fermi is has observed several new pulsars in γ-rays) and hopefully one of these could be a large gravitational wave emitter. We've only really just started these searches, so there's still a lot more to do and a detection could be just around the corner.

Jury duty

Last week I was called upon to do my civic duty and go on jury service. I was in the Sheriff Court for the Sheriffdom of Glasgow and Strathkelvin, which deals with intermediate offences (and also some civil cases) - in fact prior to going into court (and in fact reading the wikipedia article I just linked to) I had no real idea of how the Scottish court system worked. One thing that the Sheriff court didn't have was a man with a star-shaped badge, a cowboy hat and leather chaps.

Having been cited to jury duty for Monday I didn't actually have to go into court until the Wednesday (I just had a number to call every evening to see if I was needed the next day). Glasgow Sheriff Court building was a big Orwellian block - quite cool architecturally, but very much like some kind of Ministry of Truth. On getting in there and going through security I discovered a quite ominous sign in the toilets stating that you needed to be careful when taking a paper towel as syringes have been found next to them before. After that I went up to my assigned courtroom where I discovered loads of people milling about - these turned out to all be jurors. There were some delays, so we all waited around outside the until we were lead into the courtroom, which was one of the smaller ones in the court. There were around sixty of us (which surprised me as I didn't expect anywhere near that number) and to fit into the courtroom some of the jurors had to sit in the dock and in the jury box (I got to sit in the jury box). We were then given a talk from the Clerk of Court about the court (apparently the largest and busiest court in Europe - not necessarily a claim to be proud of!), the role of the jury, and what would happen. Essentially what happens is the Sheriff, Prosecutor and Defence come in, followed by the defendant, the defendant give his plea (generally not guilty) and then the jury gets balloted from the group of people there. The balloting is very low-tech consisting of everyone's names getting put into a bowl, then 15 being picked out by the clerk and the jurors walking into the jury box. There was a case straight away once we'd been processed, so we got to see this in action. There was frisson of excitement as the names got read out - kind of like a weird bingo - but my number and name didn't appear (although the number before mine did).

After the jury was picked they had to be sworn in. When we'd been talked to by the clerk earlier he'd asked if we were picked whether we'd want to affirm rather than take the regular oath. Basically the standard thing is to take an oath swearing to God (I assume a Christian God, but maybe they're open to your own choice of divine being!) that you'll tell the truth, whereas the affirmation is a non-religious version. From those chosen jurors only two out of the fifteen chose to affirm. The oathers got to all take the oath together which required them standing, raising their right hands, and then saying "I do" after the oath had been read out by the clerk. The juror's affirming had to both do so individually and had to recite the whole thing, which was something of a tongue twister. I think it's about time that the oath is non-religious, i.e. doesn't require you to swear on any particular deity, by default.

After this all of us un-used jurors were asked to leave (although we could have stayed, as all the courts are open to the public [for nosey people I expect]), but return to another court after lunch in case we were needed as spares. Turning up at the court later on there were already about another sixty potential jurors waiting outside, so us extras were asked to leave and call back later. That was actually it for my time on jury duty as I never got called back again. I did get to sit in the jury box briefly, but never got to dole out justice to the criminal classes of Glasgow. At least this didn't happen.

Wallabies and wake

Yesterday saw my first kayaking trip since the Etive weekend in May. We only had a few people out and had to make do with a flat water paddle on Loch Lomond. This was my second time out on the loch, although this time starting out from Luss on the west side, rather than near Balmaha on the east side. It was a fairly sedate paddle as the loch was calm and the only thing really disturbing it was the wake from the many boats and jet skis that were out there as well. Our main destination that we paddled out to was Wallaby Island where we went exploring to see the soon-to-be-culled Wallabies - we managed to see at least 3 individuals. It should be noted (unsurprisingly) that kayaking gear is not the best clothing to go scrambling round an island in - you get a bit too hot. On returning to our get in point we played around a bit practicing deep water rescues and rolling - being able to roll in a river boat (rather than the polo boats we use in the pool), with a buoyancy aid and helmet on, and in cold water is something that's useful when it comes to going down a river. It wasn't the most exciting of paddles, but it was good to get a bit of practice in again before things kick off properly with the new university term starting in two weeks.

Youtube sensation

Every summer the LIGO Lab at Caltech takes on a load of undergraduate SURF students to do research. This year some of those students have put together (for outreach purposes I think) a medley of various California-based songs with a re-worked gravitational wave/LIGO theme.
.
It's a fun video, but also quite excruciatingly embarrassing to watch.

We urned it!

I'm mainly writing this post so I could use that lovely pun as a title, but well done to the England Cricket team for taking back the Ashes. We just have to try and go over there and win it some time! As ever there ends my expert cricket analysis.

Edinburgh festival highlights

Last Sunday (my birthday!) and Wednesday I had trips through to Edinburgh to take in some comedy. Last year I didn't get to see anything in Edinburgh as I was in Germany (my trip through two years ago is detailed here), and March's Glasgow Comedy Festival didn't have much that appealed (I think the only thing saw was Richard Herring's Headmasters Son), so it had been a while since I'd seen any stand-up.

On the Sunday we had one show booked, which was Stewart Lee's If you prefer a milder comedian, please ask for one playing at the Stand. But, we'd gone through earlier in the day to try and find something else to see. After a while of sitting around by the Udderbelly (in Bristo Square) and managing to come to no decision as to what to see, we decided we might have better luck at the Pleasance. As at every venue we were approached by many enthusiastic flierers, but nothing particularly tempted us until a very polite young English man (probably fresh from completing his A-levels) convinced us to go and see Two episodes of Mash (by this point we really just wanted to see anything). It was a decent sketch-based set that has some very funny moments, and in general kept up a good pace - the show, at just under an hour, went by pretty quickly and there weren't any times when it seemed to lag (I'd say the two stars that Chortle gave it in the last link was a tad unfair). After that it was pretty much time to get up to the Stand. The Stand in Edinburgh is a cosy venue (slightly smaller and a quite different layout to the one in Glasgow) a we were sat right up front - pretty much on Stewart Lee's lap. It was a very good show (I'm sure Stewart Lee would rate my ability to craft a review up there with the works of Dan Brown). I was actually a bit surprised at the pace of the jokes - Lee can often spend ages on a sentence or two, but it was a lot faster than I expected (there was still his standard repetition of key themes, but not so long seemed to be taken over them) - this was probably due to the fact that he had a lot to cram in in the one hour set. His stuff about a certain pear cider advert is particularly good, as is his surprising song at the end (the guitar on stage for the whole set was reasonably confusing up until the very end).

On Wednesday we decided to take a day off work and again head over to Edinburgh. We mainly, somewhat unintentionally, were stalking Richard Herring for the day. First off was a trip to the Underbelly (in an extremely hot cave-like venue) to see a live recording of the Collings and Herrin Podcast - they were doing five consecutive days of live podcasts and we went to the first day. They've done three live podcasts previously and I've generally not found them to be as good as the regular podcast, but I really enjoyed this one - maybe being in the audience helped! After that, at the behest of Herring, there was a lunch outing to the Tempting Tattie for one of their tasty, and good value, baked potatoes (there weren't as many of us as at yesterdays gathering).

After that we went down to the half price ticket hut to try and look for a random show before the two pre-booked shows we were seeing in the evening. We settled on going to see Jason Cook with his show Fear. For a mid-afternoon show on a Wednesday it was rather surprisingly sold out, but this could maybe be explained by the good reviews the show has been getting. And it was a nice show by a very likeable comedian. The premise of the show - peoples fears - kind of disappeared about halfway through, but that wasn't really to the detriment of the performance. Cook did leave the audience very intrigued though, by mentioning the three months he spent in a maximum security prison in Libya on charges of piracy (it would have been interesting to hear more, but apparently it would induce a panic attack in Cook if he thought about it too much).

The next show was back seeing Herring again for his show Hitler Moustache. This was again in another roasting venue in the Underbelly. As someone who follows Herring's work via his blog and the podcasts I'd read/heard the inception and growth of the vast majority of the stuff in the show, so there wasn't really anything that came as a surprise. It was still a good show, and well polished, but I think I'd slightly self-spoilered it (I did have the thrill of seeing my name in the program though).

The final show of the night was a midnight performance by Daniel Kitson (who I've seen several times before) at the Stand (which as it happened Andrew Collins and Richard Herring were also at). We were again down the front right by the stage. Kitson has been the comedian against who I gauge all others as he's been unswervingly excellent whenever I've seen him. He was again very good, but my enjoyment was slightly dampened by a couple of things. The heat of the venue (a recurring theme it seems) and the time and length of the gig meant I was rather too tired, and flagged a lot for the last half hour or so of the our hour forty minute performance. I think the show could do with cutting down a bit (that said I've seen Kitson do a three hours set that was really good for the whole thing!), but I may have found it better if it had been at an earlier time, or I'd not had such a long day.

That's probably my fill of stand-up for a bit, but expect I'll see some more come next March's Glasgow Comedy Festival.

Installing chrome

[Update: there is now an easier, more hassle free, way to install Chrome, which can be found here.]

This post comes to you courtesy of the web browser Google Chrome. In fact so did the last post, but that was from my Mac laptop, whereas this is from my office desktop which runs Ubuntu. Installing this development version of Chrome has been a bit more trouble on my office machine than on my Mac, so I thought I'd document how I did it. The first thing to do is to download the .deb package from here (I've got the version for 32-bit systems) - this is a development version, so be warned that it could be buggy. This should then be relatively easy to install, i.e. I should just be able to type: dpkg -i google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb and away it goes, but unfortunately it defaults to trying to create, and then install stuff into, the /opt/google directory and for me, even with sudo, I can't write to that directory as it's not local to my machine - I get an error stating:

dpkg: error processing google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb (--install):
error creating directory `./opt/google': No such file or directory
Errors were encountered while processing:
google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb

However, much searching has led me to find a solution to this (mainly from this page) that enabled me to install chrome in the directory of my choosing. Here's how it goes:-
Say you've downloaded the above .deb file to ~/Desktop, then create a directory to unpack it into:

mkdir ~/Desktop/chrome; cd ~/Desktop/chrome

then unpack the .deb file

ar -x ~/Desktop/google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb

Now uncompress the lzma file

lzma -d data.tar.lzma

Next you want to figure out where to install Chrome (i.e. somewhere that your permissions allow you to write to). I, for example, created a directory called /data/matthew/chrome. cd into that directory and then run

sudo tar xf ~/Desktop/chrome/data.tar

(If you're just writing to somewhere that your normal permissions allow you to write to then you don't even have to run sudo.) This will add opt, etc and usr directories to the directory you are in, with the main stuff for Chrome being in opt/google/chrome. I can therefore run Chrome with the command

/data/matthew/chrome/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome.

You can then just remove all the files you downloaded in ~/Desktop.

You can now also use flash with the development version of Chrome (as shown here), so it's all working pretty nicely now! [But, hey, Flash "...who uses that"!]

Highlands and Islands

Yesterday saw only my second trip to a Scottish island (the other being the now legendary trip to Gigha) - this is a rather paltry number of islands for having lived in Scotland for seven years. The new island I went to was Arran, which is one of the closest and most accesible from Glasgow.

To get there you can take the CalMac ferry from Ardrossan. We got the first train from Glasgow to Ardrossan that supposedly connected up with the 9.45am ferry. However, on arrival we found a massive queue that meant there was no chance of getting on the ferry we'd planned. There were at least 300 slightly annoyed people left with us at the ferry terminal, at which we weren't allowed to use the waiting room, and so had to brave the elements outside. Because there was a Highland Games in Brodick (one of the main villages on Arran) there were a few extra ferries on, so we waited for the 11.30am crossing. Again this was filled before we made it on (in fact it was mainly filled with pre-booked car passengers, so hardly anyone from the queue got on). After this we had to make the decision as to whether to bother waiting for the 12.30 crossing (it was to be the big 600 seater ferry) and thought that given we'd already waited 2 hours we may as well sit it out for another hour. We did however get given a boarding card for the ferry that we were told would guarantee us a place on it, and were allowed to actually wait inside in the waiting room (in which, for some reason, they'd decided to not open their cafe despite apparently being their busiest day of the year). When the ferry arrived everyone rushed to get on, but we thought we'd let the queue diminish a bit before we attempted boarding, safe in the knowledge that we had our "guaranteed" boarding card. However, on getting to the gang plank the CalMac employee who had guaranteed our place on the ship and told us we could go off and wait inside decided he'd refuse us boarding and told us we should have been there earlier (we'd been waiting for 3 hours by then, so I don't think we could really have been any earlier!). We started arguing our case and fortunately the guy from on the boat decided to let us on. Needless to say the first few hours of our trip did not give me a good impression of CalMac, especially as while we were queueing we were given no information about what was going on and just had to rely on hearsay and chinese whispers from other, equally irate, people in the queue.

Anyway, we did eventually make it out to Brodick by about 1.30pm. Our main plan was to climb Goat Fell and this is exactly what we did. We walked passed the Highland Games site, most of which had taken part in the morning and we'd therefore missed. The base of Goat Fell (and Brodick) was alternatively sunny and overcast, but the summit was completely hidden in a cloud, which we hoped would clear by the time we reached it. It didn't clear. Due to the cloud we had no idea of how far it would be to the top (our visibility was about 20-30m, which enabled us to see the path, but not much else), but had many false dawns when we thought we spotted the peak only to find it to be nothing of the sort. We passed one group who were on the way down and asked them how much further it would be and they looked quite dejected and said it just kept going on and on - I didn't believe them, but they proved to be right. Despite this it was still a fun climb though and we made the top in just over two hours - there was obviously no view! They way down was a less dispiriting experience, but was quite harsh on the legs and knees. It only took about an hour and a half to get down and it was glorious to get out of the cloud and see Brodick harbour again.

The other plan we had, being on Arran, was to have some Arran Blonde beer. We didn't want to miss our only chance of a ferry home (the last one being at 7.15pm), so instead of heading straight to the pub we dragged ourselves, on tired legs, to the ferry terminal to check on the length of the queue. It wasn't too large, so we risked a brief trip to the pub. Around this time there were a few pipe bands marching down the main street who'd been there for the games. After our pint we went back to the ferry terminal where all the pipe bands had gathered and were playing for the queueing crowds. Now I don't mind the odd lone piper, but I didn't find that the pipe bands sounded very pleasant. That's maybe just because I'm English, or it could be just that the pipe bands I heard weren't very good, or were drunk (I think a lot of the pipers had been drinking most of the day), but really it wasn't something that could be listened to for any great length of time - unfortunately we did have to listen to it for a considerable length of time as they all boarded the ferry and continued playing (there are also only so many times you can hear Scotland the Brave and Flower of Scotland!)

As we crossed the sea and made it back to Ardrossan the sun came out and everything looked lovely. It was good to get out for the day and was a fun walk, but I hope my next trip to an island goes slightly more smoothly.