Changing rooms

By popular demand I've decided to post some "after" photos of our new flat. I hope you enjoy our handiwork.

This is the "red room" and was the first room to be painted (see here for comparison) - the fireplace is gone and the hole it left was plastered over and covered by a bookcase. As can be seen it is supposed to be the cats room.

The "blue room" - this was our main bedroom for the first few months in the flat (see here for comparison).

The living room - there's a brand new fireplace and the fancy engineered wood floor that we laid (see here for comparison)

The bathroom - the first major job to be completed in the flat was toilet and sink going in (see here for comparison)

The kitchen (see here for comparison) - this was taken just before our flatwarming, which is why there's a food spread out. It's a Magnet kitchen (but bought from Andersons for far cheaper than the standard Magnet price, so we'd definitely recommend them). Note the range cooker - there's a story to that which probably warrants a whole blogpost to itself, but here I'll just say that it was interesting getting it into the flat on an icy day last December.

The hall - the same flooring from the living extends through to the hall. It's taken from the opposite angle to the comparison picture, but where the hall narrows on the left there used to be a blocked off ceiling cupboard/loft space that extended to level with the pantry cupboards. The far door goes into a cupboard that was originally only accessible from the kitchen, but which we knocked through.

Last, but not least, the main bedroom - we actually did least to this room (see here for comparison). We painted the whole thing, but didn't do anything to the floor (this is a potential future project). Note that the cats appear to have claimed the bed as their own!

The flat

Thought I'd post something about the flat my girlfriend (actually fiancée now) and I bought seeing as it has been one of the reasons for the sparseness of my blogging. When we bought the flat we knew that it would require quite a bit of work - every room needed redecorating, a new bathroom and kitchen were required and the flooring in every room had to be replaced. All this might have been quite daunting, but my fiancées dad was keen to lend a hand. While we got on with the important jobs of painting and wallpapering, he was able to fit the bathroom, kitchen and flooring, so you can see it was a fair distribution of labour! The renovation is pretty much entirely done now (it took maybe slightly longer than we'd originally anticipated) - it's really only a few radiator pipe collars that are needed, but to show where we started from here are a few photo's of the flat before we got working on it (it may not look too bad in the pictures, but they don't do the true state it was in justice):

The living room - note the lovely carpet and fireplace! These have since been replaced.

Spare room 1 - this is now blue. This was our main bedroom whilst the room that was to become our bedroom was being used as storage space for all the renovation material.

Spare room 2 - again note the carpet, wallpaper and horrific fireplace. All these are gone. It is  the cats room now.

The kitchen - this had to be gutted. We (well mainly my fiancée) redesigned it ourselves!

The hall - this photo looks far less grotty than it was. More had to be done in this room than you might expect.

The main bedroom - this room actually had to have the least done to it. We repainted the walls and covered up some bizarre rag-rolling on the ceiling and cornicing. However, for the first few months of moving in you couldn't see the floor as it was covered in tools and other renovation paraphernalia. It also now contains a bed. 

The bathroom - obviously! This was also completely gutted and a new bathroom suite installed.

I might post some of the after photo's later, but as you might expect we spent a lot of time in the local B&Qs and travelling to and from the tip.

Stepping off the ladder

After a long break from posts I thought I return with a proper science-based post. A few days ago a couple of friends of mine posted this very interesting paper on the pre-print arXiv:

Measuring a cosmological distance-redshift relationship using only gravitational wave observations of binary neutron star coalescences

Chris Messenger¹, Jocelyn Read

Detection of gravitational waves from the inspiral phase of binary neutron star coalescence will allow us to measure the effects of the tidal coupling in such systems. These effects will be measurable using 3rd generation gravitational wave detectors, e.g. the Einstein Telescope, which will be capable of detecting inspiralling binary neutron star systems out to redshift z=4. Tidal effects provide additional contributions to the phase evolution of the gravitational wave signal that break a degeneracy between the system's mass parameters and redshift and thereby allowing for the simultaneous measurement of both the effective distance and the redshift for individual sources. Using the population of O(10³-10⁷) detectable binary neutron star systems predicted for the Einstein Telescope the luminosity distance--redshift relation can be probed independently of the cosmological distance ladder and independently of electromagnetic observations. We present the results of a Fisher information analysis applied to waveforms assuming a subset of possible neutron equations of state. We conclude that the redshift of such systems can be determined to O(10%) for z>1 and in the most optimistic case accuracies of 2% can be achieved.

It's a very interesting paper as it could provide a way to get round a reliance that has been at the heart of various aspects of cosmology - the cosmic distance ladder (you might also want to read Phil Plait's description of this). If you want to know the distance of an object that is very far away you need to be able to measure some aspect of that object that has a well know relation to how far away it is. For example, if you have a 100 W light bulb that's 10m away you know that the flux (energy per second per unit area, or basically how bright it looks) that reaches you will be 100 W / (4π x (10 m)²) = 0.08 W/m². The same light bulb at twice the distance will be four times dimmer as you know that the flux falls off as the square of the distance - the famous inverse square law. In this case you know the actual power output of the bulb, so by measuring the flux that you receive you can easily work out the distance. Things are a bit more difficult for objects in space as unlike for a light bulb, which tells you its power on the box, they don't come with instructions! So a bit more inference is required to make some so called "standard candles" for astronomical distance measurements.

For the Sun, we know its distance very well and we can also measure its brightness, so if we see other stars (much further away) that look a lot like the Sun (things like their spectral type/colour can tell us this) then by measuring their brightness and assuming they emit the same power as the Sun we can infer their distance. There is another way of telling the distance to nearby stars (within a few hundred light years of us) called parallax, which involves geometry - this uses the fact that as the Earth orbits the Sun the position you observe a star at will shift with respect to distant background objects (like how a close object will appear to shift if you close one eye then the other). The size in the shift and the well know size of the Earth's orbit gives you the distance to the star via simple trigonometry. So for these stars you can measure their distance and brightness (giving their intrinsic luminosity or power ouput) and their spectral type. Again you can use these now well defined stars to calibrate a distance scale for further away stars of the same spectral type that are too far away to get a parallax.

These distance measurements work relatively nearby e.g. in our galaxy, but as you get further away it gets harder to resolve individual stars to get their brightness and spectral type. There is a special type of star called Cepheid variables that allow you to measure distances a bit further. These stars are intrinsically bright (you can see them at further distances) and they have a special property - they pulsate - and the period of the pulsation is related to their overall brightness. So, if you can measure the period of some Cepheids nearby where their distance can be measured by looking at other close stars then you can calibrate the relationship and then stretch the distance ladder out further. A type of event that is even brighter and can be seen out to even greater distances is a Type Ia supernova. These events occur when a white dwarf star (the Earth-sized remnant of a star like the Sun after it has run out of fuel to burn) accretes (gravitationally pulls) material off a companion star. White dwarfs are only stable if their mass is below about 1.4 times that of the Sun and if enough material is accreted to exceed this limit they will explode! As all these stars are the same mass when they explode it is assumed that they will all emit the same amount of power. So again, if you can measure some of these events nearby, where other distance measurements are valid, then they can be calibrated to use as a cosmological distance measurement.

This is called the distance ladder because you can see it relies on several steps. There are other things that need to be taken into account, for example extinction (the dimming of light as it passes through the extremely tenuous, but nevertheless present interstellar/intergalactic medium between us and a source), which makes things appear dimmer than the should be and could lead to their distance being overestimated; or the small possibility that the physics of Type Ia supernovae is be different over the course of the universe's history, so they won't all have the same intrinsic luminosity.

So, why is this important for cosmology? Well cosmology is all about working out the history and geometry of the universe, so how the universe evolves over time is essential to this. Edwin Hubble showed that the universe is expanding and the further away you look (from Cepheid distance measurements) the faster that expansion (as given by a redshift) is happening - know as Hubble's Law. [Redshift is causes by the Doppler effect - light, or any wave, will appear to have a longer wavelength (i.e. be redder) if its source is moving away from the observer than if they were stationary with respect to each other.] In Hubble's Law the relationship between the velocity and distance is constant, but working out the Hubble constant's value (or indeed whether it is constant) requires well known distances and redshifts. [Redshift can be measured by looking for certain features in the spectrum of a star and seeing how much they are shifted by, or by seeing how much the overall spectrum is shifted to the red.] This also relates to the geometry of the universe - is it flat, or curved on the largest scales? One of the major recent(ish - well late 90s) discoveries, using observations of Type Ia supernovae, showed that distant supernova appeared dimmer (e.g. further away) that would be expected from the simple Hubble relation, suggesting that the expansion of the universe has started accelerating in its relatively recent history (the last few billion years!)

The above discussion has talked about using electromagnetic radiation to work out the redshift vs. distance relation, but now we'll switch to the crux of the paper I mentioned which instead uses gravitational waves. The paper is trying to provide a way to get the distance vs. redshift relation without relying on the standard distance ladder of Cepheids and supernova. This could either independently confirm the current cosmological models, or show up systematic errors in the distance scale, both of which would be very important to know. The basis is that certain sources of gravitational waves, namely the inspiral of two neutron stars (the ultra dense remnants of massive stars the cores of which collapse during a supernova [described in a bit more detail here]), are "standard sirens" - like standard candles, but a sound-based analogy is generally thought more apt for these gravitational wave sources as they are in the audio frequency range of around 10-1000 Hz. In these systems the pair of neutron stars will orbit around each other gradually losing energy (and shrinking their orbit) via emission of gravitational waves - this was demonstrated to be true by the Nobel prize winning discovery by Hulse and Taylor of a pair of neutron stars behaving in exactly the way predicted. The amount of energy released via gravitational waves increases as the orbit decays, but still would only be observable with planned ground-based gravitational wave detectors in the very final stages of their evolution - when their orbits have decayed so much that they're about to collide and merge together. This signal is useful, because (as shown by Bernard Schutz) the strength and evolution of the signal gives the source distance directly, independently of the distance ladder - the way the frequency evolves gives the system's redshifted mass, whilst the amplitude contains a combination of the redshifted mass and distance, so the former can be used to get the systems distance from the latter.

Unfortunately the signal doesn't directly enode the source's redshift, it gives a combination the the source mass and redshift that cannot be unentangled, so independent measurements of the redshift are required using a regular telescope. Unlike regular telescopes gravitational wave telescopes are omnidirectional, which means they see the whole sky all the time (although their sensitivity is not equal over the whole sky due to their antenna pattern), but on their own they cannot pinpoint a source's position. You need multiple detectors to get positional information by working out the differences in a signal's arrival time between detectors and triangulating the source's position - and many detectors have been built to give such an array. However, even with several detectors the positional information is not great (even if you can pinpoint a small patch of sky, say the angular size of the moon (or about half a degree), it contains a lot of galaxies that could have been the home of the gravitational wave signal), so finding the home of the signal and measuring its redshift is difficult. In some cases if the gravitational wave signal is coincident with a gamma-ray burst then that helps localising the host with follow-up observations, but this will not be the case for all events.

The holy grail is therefore to find a way to get the distance and redshift information from the gravitational wave signal alone, and that is what the paper provides. How you do this comes about by including some extra physics in the how the orbits of the binary neutron stars decay. For the majority of the binary lifetime you can calculate the gravitational wave signal by assuming that the neutron stars are both point particles i.e. all their mass is in a single point. However, neutron stars are not point particles and there will come a point when they get so close that their very strong gravitational fields will start to distort each other and pull the stars apart. This distortion will be encoded in the gravitational wave signal and give information about the stars' masses. As noted before the combined mass and redshift can already be measured from the signal, so this other mass measurement can unentangle these and give you a redshift. So, voila! Distance and redshift can be measured all in one go.

Unfortunately (again!) there are some caveats. For example: the accuracy that you can measure the redshift depends on redshift - due to how the strength of the signal changes, and how the gravitational wave detectors work, there's a sweet spot at about redshift 2; the accuracy depends on what exactly the neutron star is made of (the star might be stiff or soft and therefore harder or easier to distort), and what a typical neutron star is made of needs to be know beforehand (currently there are many theoretical models, but no conclusive evidence for which is/are correct); and finally these measurements require a gravitational wave detector called the Einstein Telescope, which is currently only a design concept although hopefully will be built some time in the 2020s. It's still very interesting work though and I think the above caveats are by no means insurmountable in the not-to-distant future.

[Update: another similar interesting paper has also been recently posted.]

[Update: I should just note that the method works because the known neutron star radius can be used as a reference length in the waveform, which is kind of analogous to knowing the rest wavelength of a particular spectral line and therefore working out the redshift by measuring the difference from the observed wavelength.]

¹Chris was the instigator and lead guitarist in our famous bands Corpse Full of Bees and Look Up for Danger

Waiting for the envelop (sic)

Read this if you want to find out what's being keeping us gravitational wave types occupied for the last few months. At some point I might elaborate a bit more in this. (The title of this post will become clearer once you've read the link)

Apologies for the interuption to service

Before the end of the first month of 2011 I thought I should at least get one post out. My blogosphere hiatus has mainly been due to the new flat I mentioned nearly two months ago, but there's also been lots of work things to keep me busy.

Working on the flat (which among other things, and thanks mainly to the efforts of my girlfriends dad, now has a fully functioning bathroom) has meant neglecting other things that have been a mainstay of my blogging life, like kayaking (I've not been to a pool session for a couple of months and no rivers have been paddled this year - although the cold weather had it's part to play in that regard), football updates (although I'm pleased to say that Watford have had a good start to the year) and travel (although I've, for me, had a rather long spell without going abroad), but I'll try and put a bit more into it soon. You may even get to see some before and after photo's of the flat, which will be exciting!

Keys

On Friday my girlfriend and I picked up the keys to our new flat. It's exciting to have a new place, but there's plenty to do to it to get it ready for habitation (well it is/was [before we started attacking it] in a livable state, but we're doing it up). So far we've stripped wallpaper, painted some walls and started ripping out the bathroom, and this has actually been very satisfying, but it'll still be many a week before things are looking as they should be. Tonight will see the back bedroom walls being set upon with the matt white emulsion.

Aargh-and diagrams

While eating lunch I was browsing the BBC News website and started reading this article by Marcus du Sautoy on how diagrams have aided and furthered our understanding of scientific concepts. All fine.

Recently the BBC have become quite good at providing hyperlinks within their articles (potentially in part due to Ben Goldacre), but in this article they seem to have let themselves down a bit in the choice of links. About half way down the article there is a section about visualising complex numbers - these are numbers that consist of a real part (a standard number between -infinity and +infinity, like 1, 4, 1097890624 or -0.78524385 say) and an imaginary part (a number that is a multiple of the square root of -1, or i, e.g. plus or minus the square root of any real negative number). It describes that you can plot these complex number on something called an Argand diagram, but the link it provides for this is bizarre - true that the linked to page does have an Argand diagram on it, but the rest seems to consist of bizarre pseudo-science nonsense about the nature of consciousness! Now I don't know how whoever was editing the article (presumably not du Sautoy) found that page, but a quick google search for "Argand diagram" provides some slightly more reputable sources that they might have chosen. After noticing this I didn't actually get to the end of the article and instead wrote a comment to get the link changed, so I'll see if that worked.

But, anyway enough petty pedantry for today.

The Leny

This is just a quick (but rather late) post aimed at continuing the documentation of the river's I've paddled. A couple of weeks ago we had a trip to the River Leny - the original plan (made the morning of the trip) was to head to the Tummel (which I've done before), but minibus issues (i.e. its cutting out all the time) meant that nearing Stirling we decided not to risk driving it any further and headed to Callandar and the Leny (luckily on this trip I didn't have to drive).

When we arrived there it was a frosty start and not pleasant for changing or standing about waiting for the guys who'd driven the minibus to the get out to come back. However, it was good to do a new river and this one turned out to be good for an intermediate level trip - we'd been worried that the river might be a bit low, but it turned out to be fine. The Leny's a fast river, with quite a lot of waves trains and some good rapids, but the speed meant that it was important to be able to get in and out of eddys when needed - this was good for me as this is something I really needed the practice doing. The main eddy that really needed making was the one above the Falls of Leny - a grade 5 waterfall that looked particularly menacing. Everyone managed to get out (although we had one swim, after which the swimmers boat did run the falls, but survived) and check out the fall, then a few people went back in and ran it, but I wasn't one of them - I've since read about people being cut to shreds by the rocks in the falls, so was glad I didn't swim down it. After the falls the were a couple more good rapids on which I took a bit of a beating, but stayed upright and in the boat.

It was good fun to get on a bit more of a challenging river, so the Leny rates as one of my favourite trips.

Back on the ladder

It appears that after three and a half months out of home ownership I'll soon be back on the property ladder. My girlfriend and I decided a month or so back to buy a place together, but hadn't actually seen that many properties in that time. We did see some reasonable properties, and a couple that we liked, but nothing that we'd settled on. However, last week we did see something that we thought was very promising and this morning put an offer in. We were surprised to hear back very quickly that our offer had been accepted. We now just need to sort out the finances, look at kitchens and bathrooms, think about decorations, etc...

Help desk

I'm down in London at the moment it's transpired that I've spent the last two days working in the cloisters (and student union, and quad) at UCL (my alma mater). While sitting in the cloisters with my laptop it's seemed that I've become some sort of student help desk. Yesterday, first up I provided vague directions to a room in the physics department and I then had to help a chemistry student to find out his course timetable (it turned out that he'd missed the lecture he was supposed to go to by a day!), and today I've had to help out a Czech girl use skype to phone Westminister Council about her council tax bill, and another girl to find the UCL computer services department. I wonder what I'll be called upon to help with this afternoon?

Awe-some

Last weekend was my first canoe club trip of the new academic year. As it's the start of new term this was a freshers trip and we had a good contingent of beginners (about 6 of them to the 5 of us seasoned paddlers) - I managed to get a place on the trip by volunteering to drive the minibus. Despite the beginners nature of this trip we set out to a river that's new for me - the Awe - this goes to show up the lack of rivers I've actually paddled.

We managed to get the bus packed with gear relatively quickly (which hopefully bodes well for future trips). I'd like to say that the drive went without incident, but I did managed to slightly damage the minibus when attempting to squeeze past a large bus coming in the opposite direction on a particularly narrow bit of the A82 - all that happened was that the left wing mirror popped out when it clipped the rock wall at the side of the road, but it was annoying for this to happen on my first trip of the year (and just after we'd had a meeting about looking after the buses). The weather conditions weren't great either, with unpredictable heavy rain showers happening out of nowhere.

When we got to the Awe the weather was behaving better and we were able to get changed without getting wet. We didn't have anyone else who'd driven up in a car, so I then had to drive the minibus to the get-out 3 miles away and work my way back to the put-in. After jogging/walking about a mile back I managed to hitch a lift off a kindly old lady who took me the rest of the way.

The river is a dam release river, and despite all the rain there's been no release, so it was pretty low. This made the paddle a bit more interesting as there were lots of nice rocks about to help people capsize! The river's pretty tame, but there were enough level 3ish rapids to test the freshers. We had quite a few swims on the first rapid, but no-one was too disheartened by going into the river that early on. I was generally managing to takes lines down the river that found every rock in the way, but I was in the big Dagger Mamba, which is so big that it'll just ride over most rocks (I did suffer the odd pin, but was either able to extract myself, or get helped out, and I managed to stay upright). The rocks also managed to pin a few of the freshers causing further swims.

Despite the quite tame nature of the river it was still a lot of fun after a few months off the water. There were a few small waves to play about in, although I was quite tentative on these, and I was able to practice my rolls and ferrying across the river. All the freshers seemed to enjoy it, and even those that swum quite a bit, didn't seem put off (there were none of the hysterics that we've sometimes had in the passed). The weather stayed ok as well and the water wasn't too cold, which I think helped. I'm not sure what my next trip will be, but I'm looking forward to it.

Sur le Pont

I was away travelling a couple of times last month, but have been remiss in writing it up, so here's a brief roundup of where I got to.

My first trip at the start of the month was to Nice and was an actual holiday rather than my standard work trip (my girlfriend was there for a meeting, but I just tagged along). I got to spend the first few days relaxing in the Sun, wandering round the city (in particular the old town) and sitting on the beach. The was no lack of places to eat and in general the food was very good - I didn't take a note of anywhere in particular that we ate, but there were a lot of place round the Marche aux Fleurs.

After Nice we got the TGV up to Avignon (home the the famous pont) - there are some great views over the Côte d'Azur from the train, but despite the trains famed speed it has to go pretty slowly between Nice and Marseille before hitting the high-speed lines as it heads inland. We got to Avignon in the late afternoon and after getting our bearing's with a brief wander around the Palais des Papes managed to stumble across a great place for dinner. We found La Vache à Carreaux - a place that specialises in cheese and wine (so very French) - and the it was very, very nice. I had a duck dish with a manchego cheese sauce I'd definitely recommend to anyone.

The next day we went into the Palais des Papes and found out all about Avignon's 100-or-so years being the seat of Popes (and antipopes) - unsurprisingly it's a very impressive building with an interesting history and definitely worth a visit. We followed this with a trip to the famous bridge, although the room dedicated the song was closed. We then got a ferry across (part of) the Rhône and had a walk around Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

The next day we started off with a trip to the Pont du Gard - a Roman aquaduct that's still in great condition. We then headed to Châteauneuf du Pape (which means new castle, rather than castle number 9 like we thought!) - the old Papal holiday home and now a famous wine region. It was excessively windy there, but there was a great view over the whole region and you could see back to Avignon. We got to do some wine tasting, but despite the fame of the wines (and the high price) we weren't too impressed by them (the Rose wine we had over dinner were very nice though). The for the afternoon we went to another very impressive Roman artifact - the theatre in Orange, which is one of the three best preserved Roman theatre in the world (although much of it has had to be restored and it's had a lot of uses over the last couple of millenia). Again it's a site that is well worth seeing, but the rest of Orange didn't seem to hold much else to do or see.

The next day we headed back Nice to fly home. We got to spend some more time by the beach, but were mainly surrounded by leathery old people wearing far to little. It was a very good holiday and the weather was great for the whole time - Provence and the Côte d'Azur will probably be getting a return visit at some point.

My other trip for the month was my first to Poland, but this time it was work trip with a collaboration meeting in Krakow. I didn't get to see much of the city, but what I did see was very nice. Food-wise there wasn't quite the refinement of the French cuisine - more of a meat and potatoes approach - but it was good and certainly very filling. I also found out the interesting story of the Wawel dragon.

Stood up

For my birthday some of my friends grouped together to give me money to get some drum lessons (not that I really need them of course given my already excellent drumming skills, but it would be ungrateful not to accept them). A local drum school was found in a very convenient location for me (above a Starbucks!) and I was booked in to have my first lesson this evening. I turned up expectantly at the given location, but no drum teacher appeared! I waited and waited, but still no-one turned up to teach me how to perfect my drumming. I phoned the teacher, but got no answer. Eventually I had to accept that I'd been stood up.

Later on I did get a message from the drum teacher. Apparently all lessons had to be cancelled due to "location problems" - whatever they may be!? I'm not sure whether these "problems" can be solved, but I may have to find myself a new drum school.

Fringe round-up

I thought I'd quickly round-up the shows I've been to see at this year's Edinburgh Fringe Festival, to which I went twice over the last week. This is more a reminder of what I went to see than any attempt to give proper reviews of the shows (like the last couple of years) - I will mainly be using phrases such as "it was funny", with maybe a sprinkling of my favourite adverbs "quite" and "very", so the level of review will not be particularly insightful.

The first trip was last Tuesday, and first up on the bill was As It Occurs To Me (or AIOTM [AIOTM] as it is know by all the cool kids). This is Richard Herring's sketch show that's performed in front of a live audience (of geeks - and how true that was!), but then gets put out unedited in podcast form. This was the first performance of it outside of its two previous London runs. I very much enjoyed the show, although prior to it had been worried about it's quality given the fact that Richard Herring had been tweeting about how little time he'd put into writing the script (it's normally written in a huge rush in the day or so prior to the performance, but this one had been cutting it even finer than normal!) If you'd never listened to the podcast before the whole thing should be complete nonsense, but there were a few AIOTM (AIOTM) newbies in the audience and even they seemed to go along with it and enjoy everything too. It was fun to see how it worked live on stage compared to my normal method of listening to it via the podcast - one problem with the live performance though was that I couldn't make out some bits (which I expect were picked up by the microphone) when the audience were laughing or cheering, plus Richard's Scotch accent could become unintelligible at times. At the end, of course, we had the return of the dead Tiny Andrew Collings, and also the real Andrew Collins, which provided the highlight that all the regular fans of the show were after. Another highlight was Tam Dalyell and Susan Boyle's duet of "(I've Had) The Time of My Life".

Next up I went to see the follow on to a show I saw last year: Two Episodes of Mash - which consists of selection of short sketches. Last year we'd seen this show with a pretty small audience, but the room was far fuller this time round. It was enjoyable show with a consistently good level of jokes - often you could see the punch line coming, but it was still very amusing to see how it would be delivered, or whether it would be subverted in some way.

The day was capped off with seeing spoof hospital radio DJ Ivan Brackenbury. I'd noticed this show in the Pleasance on several previous years and had seen it get consistently very good reviews, but had never been to see it. This time Tim Binns (the comedian behind the character) had decided to just do a best bits show as he was also doing a another show with a new character. I should have been to see this show in previous years, because the very good reviews were well justified. Essentially the act consists of giving shouts out to, or requests for, hospital patients with various ailments and then playing an (in)appropriate song based on that. This sounds like it may get a bit same-y and repetitive and just descend into bad punning, but it's done in such a good and likeable style, and with such good timing, that I was laughing along all the way through.

On Saturday a crowd of us went through for some birthday celebrations for me. We kicked things off with the mildly amusing Big Comedy Breakfast featuring three stand-ups (Marc Burrows, Sarah Pearce and Barry Ferns). It's quite hard to do comedy at midday and the audience generally weren't really ready for laughing hard, but each set had it's moments and a memorable joke or two. One of my friends even managed to make a name for himself during the set (he bonded with Barry over both their parents poor choices of first names), and I was closely beaten in an audience game of rock-paper-scissors and denied a chance to play TME (Tape Measure Extension - although it's a game I have played myself in the past). The show has also given further amusement to a friend of mine who was being told about one of his officemates spending the weekend "canoeing".

This was followed by Itch: A Scratch Event in which a variety of comedians/performers are given a stage to try out some new material such as a sketch, mini-play, or character - it's a different line-up during the festival, so you don't know who you're going to see. This was good value show and provided some interesting and funny performances - we did get told at the end who all the performers were, but I can only remember that the first sketch had Simon Munnery in it, and the Segue Sisters did a couple of song. I'd recommend going to this show in the future as there's a decent chance that you'll see at least one thing that's really good, and it's definitely value for money.

Finally we went to see The Roaring Boys Will Set you Free, which had a 5 star review in Chortle! The main premise was that depression had driven Danny, one of the two performers (Danny and Jonny), to start watching The One Show, which he soon realised was a source of unending mundanity and had to be stopped. We then saw him formulate a plan about how it could be stopped and his attempt to carry it out. I don't think we got quite the show that got the 5 star review (there was not corpsing from the performers), but it was still a very fun and funny show. There was a level of audience interaction that worked very well and added to the show, rather than making anyone in the audience feel awkward or picked on. There were several songs too (the theme of their show is still stuck in my head several days later) mainly performed by Jonny and based around his failed romance. Despite the premise being routed in depression it's a very upbeat show with a lot of energy, which rubs off on the audience.

That's my round up for this year. There was obviously a lot of stuff I couldn't see that I'd have liked to, but there's always next year.

Decadal survey

Today is the last day of my twenties. The weather's been glorious and I should have been out frolicking and cavorting, making the most of my final flush of youth, but what have I been doing instead? I've been inside on the internet writing blog posts is what! I don't deserve to be young if I'm going to waste the opportunities it gives me in such a flagrant way.

Anyway, I should probably thank my twenties. They've given me a couple of degrees, one of which enables me to be called Dr. They've seen me move from London to Glasgow - in fact I've lived the majority of the decade in Scotland. They've seen me visit far flung parts of the world as part of my job. And they've seen me buy, and then move out of, my (part) own flat. There are many other smaller things as well from my recent life (chosen because I've blogged about them), for example learning to kayak, snowboard, buying my own bike, learning(ish) to drum and being in a band, and probably far too much drinking (but that's probably brought about some of the most fun times even if my own memory of several is vague).

What could my thirties bring? Well if many of my friends are anything to go by it seems that 30 is pretty much the time to get married. Buying a house is also on the list, but as I said that's something I got our the way earlier in a way. There are also kids. But, who knows? I'll settle for getting a few more scientific papers written for now. And hopefully this'll be the decade in which I get to actually detect some gravitational waves.

[P.S. if you managed to get to this post looking for information on the US Astronomy and Astrophysics Decadal Survey 2010 (probably more likely now I've written this postscript) then sorry, this isn't what you're looking for - instead maybe try here and here for US perepctive, and here or here for more UK oriented views.]

Balloch to Tarbet

Yesterday my girlfriend and I did our first cycle ride for a while (not counting our recent cycle round Munich) on our bikes - I forgot to blog about our last ride some time last month from Glasgow down to Lochwinnoch, which was a good, but quite tiring ride.

This ride was actually a rather tame ride, which was fine giving that we weren't feeling too energetic. We decided to do the West Loch Lomond Cycle Path starting at Balloch (which we got the train to) and unsurprisingly heading up the west bank of the loch. It in part just follows a path along the A82, occasionally splitting off from the road, but after Inverbeg it seems to mainly be along what must have formally been the main road along the loch before the A82 was built - you can see it in this aerial photo. We had a nice lunch in Luss, which was surprisingly quiet giving that it was a reasonably pleasant afternoon in the middle of August. We made it all the way to Tarbet in pretty quick time, even at a relatively slow pace, as it's only a 16 mile ride. Our plan was to get the 18:01 train back to Glasgow from Arrochar, but struggled to find the station (we were there in plenty of time, so this wasn't too much of an issue) - we went all the way into Arrochar, and almost beyond, before we found out that the station was actually half way back to Tarbet. We found it in the end and had enough time to go for a pint in the nearby pub. Due to just going along a main road it wasn't the most fun ride, but it's probably better as part of a slightly more challenging route.

Munchen Glad-to-be-bach 3: Too Much Luxury

On the morning after the wedding we again managed to make it up just in time for breakfast at the hotel. I think I wasn't feeling too bad, although there was definitely some hangover there. At around midday we left the hotel and got taxis back to Plattling - not everyone who'd been with us on the way out was heading back at the same time though. Our return train to Munich was huge - a double decker with loads of carriages - so we had plenty of space to spread out. Why they'd not put on such a train on the Friday afternoon when we'd been travelling out I don't know! This time there were no unexpected stops.

For the next couple of days in Munich we were going to be staying in the Sofitel - a very fancy hotel (if you left your shoes outside you room at night someone would take them away to be cleaned overnight!), that my girlfriend had managed to get on a cheap deal from lastminute.com and which a some other friends had also decided to stay at. It was right next to the hotel, so was easy to find when we arrived. We didn't get too much time to indulge in the luxury to start with through, as a couple of my friends had to leave for the airport that afternoon and wanted to see at least a bit of Munich before they left. We wandered into the centre of town towards the Frauenkirche (Munich's main cathedral) and found a place to have lunch next too it. Most people had the roast pork, but I decided to go for a wurst dish that sounded quite nice (as far as my translation of the menu went), although didn't realise until it turned up that the sausages were boiled in a bizarre oniony vinegarette - it was ok, but not something I'd go for again. Luckily one of my friends wasn't able to finish her pork and crackling, so I was able to clean her plate.

After lunch our two departing friends had to head back to the station, so the rest of us went back to the hotel. Getting back there we realised how tired we still were after the exertions of the wedding the day before, so managed to fall asleep for a couple of hours on the extra large and comfy bed. That evening those of us that were left met up again and headed to the Löwenbräu beer garden, which is set in a pretty park (it's pretty if you can avoid the few local alcoholics that hang out there). It was a nice evening, warm with clear skies, so we were able to sit outside for a couple of hours with a Maß or two and a flammkuchen.

The next day my girlfriend and I decided to go exploring on our own by hiring a couple of bikes. Last year during Oktoberfest I'd done a bike tour, so I basically followed the same route we'd taken in that tour. After taking a slightly convoluted route we got to the Englischer Garten and had a look to see if any surfers were about again - there weren't any. We headed up back passed the Chinesischer Turm and out the north of the gardens. We then headed along towards the Olympic Park (home of the 1972 Summer Olympics). We had lunch (I had Currywürst) at the restaurant at the base of the Olympic Tower and then went up the tower itself, which has a great view of Munich. By this time the weather wasn't great - it was overcast and had started raining lightly, so we actually didn't get that great a view (the postcards seem to suggest that on a good day you can see out to the Alps) - last time when I went up it was similar weather.

From the Olymipic park we travelled further west to the Schloss Nymphenburg, an impressive Palace with massive gardens. We briefly wandered into the gardens and had an ice cream (not that the weather had really improved to make ice cream particularly appropriate), but didn't stay long as we needed to get our bikes back and meet up with others. We headed back toward the station where we'd hired the bike, taking a brief detour through the Hirschgarten (the biggest beer garden in Munich) - last year we'd stopped here for a drink, but this time decided not too (it was very quiet anyway, and the rain didn't make it that appealing).

After returning our bikes we decided to take advantage of the spa in our hotel. It was all very fancy with a bizarre shaped swimming pool. We decided to avoid the sauna though, being as it was
in the "Nude area" and us being prudish Brits.

The evening we decided to try to complete our visiting of the four major Munich brewery pubs (Hofbräu, Augustiner, Löwenbräu and Paulaner) by going to the Paulaner bräuhaus. This place had a reasonably small beer garden (although still massive by UK standards) and was described in our guide books as being "cosy" - it wasn't what you might term cosy, i.e. small, over here, but was very nice inside. Despite speaking pretty much no English the waitress managed to tell us that we were in on the all-you-can-eat buffet night - almost everything on the menu was done in buffet form for only €12.90 (or there abouts). We all decided that was the best way to go, along with another Maß. It was all very good - roast pork, wurst goulash, beef, fish, chicken and even plenty of vegetables - but general overindulgence from the previous few days meant none of us quite made the most of all the food on offer. However if you are in Munich on a Monday night I'd very much recommend it as the place to go.

The next day was my girlfriend and my last day in Munich - our flight was about 6pm that evening - but we tried to see a bit more of the city before we left. We walked from our hotel to the River Isar, where we'd previously been to the Deutsches Museum, and crossed to the Müller'sches Volksbad - a public baths - were we had lunch in the cafe. We then walked through a park along the Isar towards the state parliament building - the Maximilianeum. From here we walked to the Friedensengel (Angel of Peace), and then headed back across the river towards our hotel. We did get caught in quite a downpour on the way back, but managed to shelter in a department store. We got back to the hotel and sadly said goodbye to the luxury to head back to our normal lives.

That was it for our trip. We had an uneventful flight back and no-ones bag got lost. It was really nice to be able to see Munich again (and not with the Oktoberfest crowds about) and of course the reason for the trip, the wedding, was fantastic. The next holiday will be to Nice next month (although, airport strike willing, we're going to another wedding in a couple of weeks time in Cork), which I'm very much looking forward to.

Munchen Glad-to-be-bach 2: The wedding

Here's a follow-up post to my earlier Munich post.

Following a day of exploring Munich it was time to head to Auerbach for the wedding. There were a few of us planning on getting the train from Munich to the wedding location, but we had to wait until early afternoon until our whole group had arrived in Munich (not that we were in a particularly good state to have actually done anything in the morning). When at the station we went to get special Bavarian tickets, which each allowed 5 people to travel and only cost just under €30. After some help from one of the station ticket agents, we managed to negotiate the various screens on the ticket machine and come away with enough tickets for us all to travel. A good start to the journey at least. After this we took over a station cafe for a couple of hours, whilst waiting for our the final arrival to join our group from the airport. During the wait two of the best men (there were three in total, but the other one had travelled out separately) took this time to go over there speeches and I got a sneak preview of one.

By 3:20, once everyone had arrived, we were able to get a train to Plattling, from where some lifts onwards to our hotels had been organised. The train was quite busy, especially the front half of it (which would prove to be telling later on), but we just about managed to all get seats (one of our group decided to sit on the floor, but it wasn't entirely necessary). The journey was going smoothly until we pulled in to Landshut where everyone seemed to be getting off our carriage. Initially we thought that this was good - we'd be able to stretch out round the carriage a bit - but it soon became apparent that we probably should be getting off too (a man had tried to explain this in German to us, but we'd not really been able to understand a word of his explanation). On getting of we realised what was happening - the train was splitting in two with the front half carrying on to where we wanted to go and the back half that we'd been in heading back to Munich! However due to our tardiness getting of the train there was absolutely no way we, with all our luggage, could squeeze onto any of the front carriages. So we had to call ahead and say we'd be delayed about an hour and a half waiting for the next train. Luckily the station we were at had a bar in it, so we were able to occupy ourselves there by having a beer.

We were able to squeeze onto the next train and eventually got to Plattling. The group then split as half of us were staying in Auerbach (where the wedding ceremony was taking place), whereas the other half, myself included, were staying in Hengersberg (which was the where the reception was taking place - and in my opinion therefore the sensible place to stay). We got a lift from the bride and therefore got a bit local information on the drive. Our hotel was a nice place called the Hotel Erika.

After getting settled into our room it was soon time to head through to Auerbach for the evening for some pre-wedding celebrations. Auerbach is a small and pretty village (farming and hunting country) where the bride is from, and where a lot of her family still live, so we got to meet many of them - and also some of the brides ponies. It seem that it's a Bavarian tradition that on the evening before the wedding guns should be fired to scare off any bad spirits - the bride and groom were wearing traditional Bavarian dress of a dirndl and lederhosen respectively. So, to this end we had a lot of explosions being set off during the evening, but rather than guns being fired we had milk churns - milk churns with gun powder added, then a plastic football wedged in the top, and then the bottom being lit, firing the football 50 metres or so and making a very loud bang. Unfortunately the bangs didn't scare off the many mosquitos. There was also beer.

The next morning we were up in time for the hotel breakfast and decided to have a quick walk around Hengersberg before having to head to the wedding. The weather was sunny and hot, with only a few clouds in the sky - perfect wedding weather. It's a small town, and therefore there's not a great deal to see. We walked up to a church, which had a good view over the town, and then back to the small town square where we had an ice cream. It was then back to the hotel to get our wedding gear on.

We arrived in Auerbach just before the first part of the wedding took place - the official state bit involving signing of papers and such - during which time we went for a quick drink (although I stuck to diet coke for the time being) in the local pub/hotel/butcher shop. Then came the church ceremony part of the proceedings. This was the first Catholic wedding I've been to and I was quite worried that it could last quite a while, and I didn't know if I'd be able to make it through awake - the vast majority of it was also going to be in German. I needn't have worried - we were having to stand up and sit down so many times, and there were many hymns sung and readings given, that it would have been hard to catch any sleep. I thought the highlight of the ceremony (other than the fantastic looking bride and groom) was the singer (a friend of the bride), who had a great voice - there was also a very good choir and band (we couldn't see the choir and band as they were above us, and when I first heard trumpets with the choir I thought it might be recorded until I saw one of then pocking over the balcony above my head). During the ceremony there had been several people dressed in full lederhosen sitting at the back of the church. Just before the end of proceedings they all got up and filed out - the reason became apparent when we all got out. On leaving the church there were more load bangs - the lederhosen-ed group all had big pistols (wood and metal with a big blunderbuss-like end) that they were firing into the air - this went on for about 10 minutes. There was the standard photo time and then time to head to the reception - the bride and groom had a special white Citroën 2CV to take them there.

The reception, back in Hengersberg, was held in a big converted barn and courtyard - from the outside it looked slightly like a building site as not everything seemed completed, but once inside the courtyard it looked great. There was an Oompah band and lots, and lots, of cake - I think having cake at the start of a German wedding reception is another tradition. Chocolate cake, cake with fruit on it, and all very nice too, but quite light, which was necessary given the amount there was. The groom then had to tap the first beer barrel and the drinking could properly begin!

The whole reception was great. After spending a while in the sun in the courtyard listening to the band, socialising, drinking a few beers from the barrel, and trying not to eat too much cake, we headed inside for the meal and speeches. It's not normal in Germany for there to be best men speeches (in fact I don't even know if they really have best men), but seeing as this was a multi-national wedding we had them. These were only read out in Enlgish, as none of the best men were particularly well versed in German, but they all went down very well (each of the best men had there own take on the groom from the different times of his life that they'd known him) and the bride was able to translate some of the most salient points. The groom also gave a speech, but this time in both English and German, which was very impressive and very well pitched - it got a lot of laughs in both languages. Later in the evening there was a surprise "speech" - as a way of getting round the dual language problem some of the brides friends has put together a silent play enacting out how the couple met and got together. It was very well done and everyone enjoyed it. The beer flowed quite readily the whole night - and despite apparently later that evening telling my girlfriend "I don't like dancing or singing" I was quite eager to get on the dance floor and was energetically throwing myself (and her) around, occasionally causing some near misses with other dancers, and singing at the top of my voice to the cheesy, but wedding-appropriate, band - without too much persuasion we got them to play 99 Luftballons. Not content on just having beer (which was all free) we had to end the night with rounds of schnapps (the only booze that wasn't free) - I can't say that it was particularly good, but I did manage to keep it down. I forget if this was before or after we did the limbo-ing! Unsurprisingly my memory of the end of the night becomes vague-to-non-existent, but my girlfriend managed to guide me back to the hotel despite my "outer wibbles" which threatened to wibble me into a river.

As I've already said, and without wanting to sound too gushing, it was a great day and the perfect way to celebrate the newlyweds.

Newly discovered pulsar

Today it was announced that Einstein@home has made it's first discovery (a public version of the paper can be found here) - unfortunately not a gravitational wave signal (as it was initial designed to solely search for), but a radio pulsar spinning at 41Hz with the snappy title of J2007+2722. This is still very exciting news as it's "...the first time an astronomical object has been discovered by this kind of distributed-computing project,". In brief pulsars are neutron stars, which are the ultra dense, rapidly rotating, remnants of stars several times more massive than our Sun leftover after they have ended their normal life via a supernova explosion.

The Einstein@home project was set up in 2005 as a distributed computing effort (like the more well known SETI@home, which has a screen saver that searches for extraterrestrial life in radio data) to make use of the public's spare compute cycles to search for gravitational waves from pulsars using data from the LIGO gravitational wave detectors. It's since become one of the largest distributed computing projects there is. The sensitivity of data from the LIGO detectors is currently such that the chances of Einstein@home finding a gravitational waves from an unknown pulsar are quite slim (although more sensitive data in the next few years will give far higher chances), so it was decided a couple of years ago to turn some of Einstein@home's computing power towards searching radio data for pulsars.

Surveys with large radio telescopes are the prime way of finding pulsars (although some can also be seen in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum) - radio data from these surveys is searched to look for regularly spaced pulses, although these can be weak and the pulse time of arrivals at the telescope will be dispersed over different observation radio frequencies. The spacing of the pulses will also change due to the Doppler effect as the Earth revolves and orbits the Sun, or also if the pulsar is itself in orbit around another star in a binary system. For pulsars in extreme orbits, where the objects are very close together and circling each other with periods of minutes to hours (the current smallest binary orbital period for a pulsar is about 2 hours), the Doppler effect can be very large and cause the pulse spacing to change rapidly. Standard radio pulsar search techniques, which assume that the pulse spacing is only slowly varying, have a hard time time finding these objects. The Arecibo radio telescope has been conducting many surveys over the last few years, but there hasn't been the computing power to exhaustively search this data for these extreme binary pulsar systems. It is data from these surveys that has now been passed to Einstein@home, which is able to use it's large computing power to search for many different sizes of changing pulse spacing, included the rapid changes caused by the extreme systems.

Since starting searches for radio pulsars in Arecibo data with Einstein@home it has been able to find almost 120 pulsars that had previously been known about (although none are in extreme binary systems). However, this new announcement is for a pulsar that had not previously been known about - Einstein@home was the first search to find it! Using this initial discovery they were then able to get follow-up observations using the Green Bank radio telescope to confirm the pulsar signal and further study it. The pulsar itself isn't the most exciting object - it's not in a binary system, but it is reasonably rare as it's an isolated recycled pulsar. A recycled pulsar is one that has been "spun-up" from a slow spin-rate (probably about 1Hz, or one rotation per second) to a much faster rate by accreting material from a companion star (gravitationally pulling material from the other star onto itself). The only way for a pulsar to have a rotation rate as fast as this newly discovered pulsar is either for it to have been "recycled", or for it to still be spinning fast after it was born - this pulsar is slowing down it's rotation rate very slowly indicating it has a weak magnetic field, which generally is expected to not be the case for young, newborn, pulsar i.e. it must be an old, and therefore recycled, pulsar. However, as we saw above for a star to be recycled it must have had a binary companion, which from looking at the pulse spacings we know is not the case for this pulsar - so what's up? There are other known recycled pulsars that are isolated, i.e. not in a binary system, and it is thought that the system must have been disrupted due to the companion star going supernova and kicking it's own remnant out of the systm.

Anyway, this is the first discovery and it's a great boost to the Einstein@home project. Hopefully this will get more people to sign up. It should lead to more pulsar discoveries (maybe at the rate of a couple per year) and possibly some in extremely fast orbits. Ultimately we obviously hope that Einstein@home will also give us some gravitational wave discoveries.

Top of the league

I knew that the Championship season started today - or at least that's what I thought - but when it came to watching the results come in this afternoon I was surprised to see that Watford weren't playing. "Did we have a Sunday fixture?" I thought, but teletext (yes I checked that before going to the internet as I had the remote control to hand) told me "no". Further teletext-ing showed me that in fact the league started last night without me knowing, and Watford had been playing away to Norwich as the first game. Not only that but we won 3-2. That meant that up until the about 4:45pm today Watford have been top of the league! Unfortunately now that more fixtures have been played we're back down to 8th - 6 teams got a better goal difference than us, and one (Crystal Palace) seem to have got above us due to starting earlier in the alphabet. Hopefully we can restore our place at the top next week, when I know we will be playing on Saturday in a 3pm kick-off against Coventry (although we play Aldershot in the Carling Cup on Tuesday).