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.