Where are all the Watford blogs?

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

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

Point on the board

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

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

Beg your pudding

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

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

Britain, Britain, Britain...

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

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

Red stick

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

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

Emo-a-no-no

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

Monkey see, monkey put on blog

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


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


And for the truely geeky:

Definitely have a look.

New York Cares

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ping-pong with a difference

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

Coming to America

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

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

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

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

Apocalypse now (well in a couple of weeks!)

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

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

Expect more to be added soon.

Mad fer it

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

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

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

My humanity to others (ubuntu) remains

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

Let the wall come down

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

They're floaty light

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

Semi-naked

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

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

Some things are like other things

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

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

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

Zi Zi Top

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

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

Space: Above and Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling hot, hot, hot

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

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

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

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