Scientists on tap

I have been worrying about the Professor Nutt story, for personal reasons. For those who don’t know, this business is about the science adviser fired by the Home Office for criticising the government in public. Of course the gut instinct of most of our scientist colleagues will be to side with the Prof – Science versus the Barbarians ! Man the Barricades ! I am not so sure . Its the Government’s job to govern, and the Adviser’s job to advise. I wouldn’t quite go with the classic Winston Churchill quote – scientists should be on tap, not on top – but a little humility is due. On the other hand, the current government can be a tad brutish, as we know. It all depends what Nutt actually said, which I haven’t found out.

This is on my mind because I am about to take the Kings Shilling. As of next year yours truly is becoming chair of the Astronomy Grants Panel. Early Warning. Do not expect the inside dope. Do not ask. I will still be free to talk of matters Ess-Tee-Eff-ical, but anything connected with my newly privileged position will be off limits. STFC have asked me to help them, and that is what I will do.

Meanwhile, there is a renewed sensitivity to public comment in RCUK-land.  Upstairs of STFC they were very concerned about the Sunday Times story a few weeks back, that reported that STFC were seriously considering leaving CERN. The Sunday Times was able to write a somewhat alarmist story because they got a quote. This actually just stated the obvious – well, we will have to consider every option, Brian – but coming from a senior STFC staff member, whose blushes I shall spare, it sounded like a secret policy had been uncovered.  Sooo…. I understand that as a result new guidelines are being issued. Staff can freely comment on uncontentious things – like their own exciting science – but should refrain from things that might sound like a policy statement. Unless, presumably, it really is a policy statement. Quite right too. If I was in charge of RCUK I would I do much the same thing.

I just hope the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater…

Just a coincidence

Stuart Lynn told some of us at lunchtime about a rather extra-odinary letter written recently by the California Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Its a letter to a Democratic Assemblyman written in oddly convoluted language. If you trace the initial letters of each line, you get the secret message : F – U – C – K – Y – O – U. Stuart gave us a web link.

You can read about this matter on the Huffington Post, where a spokesperson expresses surprise, because clearly it was a coincidence… There are about six million other postings on this story, but I see that this article at the SF weekly consults a Math Professor in order to quantify the unlikelihood. On the basis that the letters concerned are at the beginning of a word about 10% of the time, said Prof states that the probability of this combination of letters happening by chance is one in ten million. (Ten to the power seven).

So, members of the Statistics 101 class, discuss.

Google, Sex, and Me

Over the weekend I stumbled across a bijou factette. This morning I was about to make this the subject of a Monday Morning Quiz : who was King for twenty minutes ? But then I thought, whats the point of that ? Its just a test of who can fire up Google the fastest. Some days it feels like we have outsourced all our personal knowledge to the internet. I don’t even use bookmarks any more. I just re-Google. A while back I was hunting for a figure that I was sure I had seen somewhere… when I spotted it on Google Images I realised it was from a paper I had written myself several years ago. Jeez. Google knows more about me than I do.

Somewhere back in my youth I dimly remember reading a story by Roger Zelazny in which he said “Man is the sexual organ of the machine”. Curiously, Google has failed me here. I can’t find this quote. If Roger Zelazny didn’t say it, and I just dreamed it, then I hereby take credit. Anyhoo. The idea is that man is one machine’s way of making another machine. Sometimes I feel this is my relation to Google. Within the space of a few hours, I am reading web pages A and B, and writing new web page C. Ideas and knowledge I have picked up from A and B get processed through me and change what I deposit in C. I am just one of many millions of bees flitting around the vast meadow of the Web, picking up pollen as I go.

Explorers of South Kensington

If you nip along to the Royal Albert Hall (a tad tricky for my US readers I realise) you will find my mug adorning the walls, along with 43 other UK astronomers. We are all part of an exhibition called “Explorers of the Universe“, constructed by photographer Max Alexander. For a pleasant change, its not all the usual gaudy pictures and patronising astro-guff that we feed the Public, but instead a collection of rather quirky portraits of people who actually do this stuff. To those of us who are in it, it is clearly an enterprise of considerable taste and interest. Those of you who aren’t may of course feel free to point out what pompous twits we all now look.

If you don’t have the time to get to Kensington, you can see all the pictures at Max’s website. (Mine is in this section. Look for the skeleton hand. X-ray. Geddit ?). Some people look better than they do in real life, and some don’t. Steve Warren looks like he has just been shot by a 1967 vintage Dalek. Alan Watson did the lying-in-the-gutter thing and looks very cool, but probably needed to get his coat dry-cleaned. Carlos Frenk looks very mysterious, in a kind of 1970s album cover kind of way. Brian May looks like … Brian May.

Anyhoo. Now they know how many … oh do I have to finish that ?

Ground-based review : going, going ….

I guess you have all been poring over the draft report of the Ground Based Facilities Review, trying to decode its somewhat incomprehensible ranking scores, and either getting excited because your horse is in the lead, or fuming because they have obviously misunderstood why your favourite 4m telescope is crucial. You have until the 14th to get your feedback in … Its not perfect, but by and large they have done a pretty good job I think. In case you are too busy to read it, here is the short version :

• Top priority : Carry on with VLT, ALMA and VISTA please. Thou shalt not touch.
• ELT and SKA : fantabulous. Lets do …. both !!!!
• eMERLIN and LOFAR. Well, if SKA is so good, we just have to.
• Gemini : sorry, squire, down the toilet it is .
• WHT : look, it doesn’t cost much. Oh, ok then. Gone.
  
• UKIRT : maybe somebody else can pay ? Oh, ok then. Gone.
• LSST : come to think of it, this would be rather nice. I know ! ESO can pay !
• Liverpool Telescope : sorry, not your turn this time
• WASP and MROI : well, they are kinda fun.

Sounds like a plan. Trouble is of course SKA is fantasy land for years yet, ESO is bust, and we can’t afford to increase the subscription. System in chaos. Mega-projects implausible. Hmm. All change ! Bring back WHT and UKIRT !

They certainly bought the product from the SKA propaganda machine. Respect. Apparently Jodrell Bank invented wifi shortly after CERN invented the Web. Or something like that. Fantastic. I am much more interested in SKA than I was a year ago, cos I have been working on very faint radio sources, which are v.fascinating. (See this paper if you can be bothered.) Trouble is, its also made me worried that SKA will be completely buggered by source confusion. Help.

Distant Vision

Courtesy of Richard Massey (who just sent this link round by email), here is President Obama holding an Astronomy Night at the White House. The man is always a hypnotic orator – but hearing him tell a crowd of schoolkids how Galileo changed the world is just magical. Love it.

He looks through a telescope at a double double star that is one hundred sixty light years from Earth. (Epsilon Lyrae I think). Definitely a far-sighted politician.

Mind you, Gordon Brown’s February Oxford speech was pretty damn good too. (Here is my post on that). Maybe I am a sucker for the purple words, and should concentrate on the money ?

Don’t panic yet …

The advisory panels have done their thing and reported to PPAN. The report of the Far Universe Advisory Panel can be found at this link, and that of the Near Universe etc can be found here. Both panels are offering one last chance to comment – FUAP has a deadline of Oct 8th, and NUAP will be telling us soon.

The reports have some interesting differences. The FUAP report has a very long term feel to it, concentrating on Big Questions and the “Crown Jewels”, meaning JWST, ALMA, ELT, and SKA, with barely a mention of the role of existing facilities. The NUAP report is more nitty gritty, with a mapping of ongoing programmes onto current facilities, as well as big future ones. I was pleased to see that both reports include a reminder that an infrastructure for HPC, data processing, and data management, including “internet based solutions” is also very important.

So read those, and gird your loins for Friday, as we expect the first draft of the report by the Ground Based Facilities Review. But we can afford anything new ?

Yesterday I heard from my University admin that a letter had been sent by STFC to all VCs/Principals explaining that as a necessary caution all new grants would be announced with a closing date of October 2010. Gulp. Rumour has it that the new STFC chair, Michael Sterling has decided that the doors are locked until this mess is sorted out. STFC are already on the case. Committee attendees no longer get biscuits.

OK. Ready ? Panic …. now.

Unappealing offer

Just checked the spam folder. Some kind souls have offered me “free adult thumbnails”. Crikey. Is this teeny-weeny porn, or some kind of perionychial fetish ?

Astronomical Nightmares

This afternoon I bumped into Ross McLure in the corridor. I congratulated him on his heroic achievement (with Jim Dunlop and Michele Cirasuolo and other chums) getting out a paper based on the new WFCAM3 observations of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field in just a few days, including claims of several galaxies past redshift seven. Ross said it was indeed a tad exhausting, and was the most stressful thing he’d done since submitting his thesis.

This sent me into anecdote mode. Many moons ago for my thesis in Leicester, I had spent days on end staring at hundreds of “lines of position” plots for Ariel V X-ray sources. One night I dreamt I was an error box, and couldn’t find the X-ray source I was supposed to enclose. I woke up sweating.

Some while ago I told Jim Dunlop this story, and he immediately topped it with his own thesis-submission story. One has to bear in mind that Jim’s supervisor was John Peacock, who has a brain the size of six planets. This is a wondrous thing, but in those latter days, could only add to the stress. In Jim’s dream, he was printing out a copy of his thesis, when suddenly it stopped printing on paper and starting printing on fish. Jim says that his immediate thought was “oh no ! what will John think ???”

Any more ?

UKIRT and Star Wars

Todays lessons : (i) never understimate the public appeal of astronomy, and (ii) stop worrying and learn to love the bomb.

I am sitting in a fascinating but sentimental workshop : UKIRT at 30, a celebration of thirty years of ground-breaking infrared astronomy at the UK Infrared Telescope. It is pretty amazing how UKIRT got proposed as a very cheap and simple light bucket, but in fact has stayed ahead of the game in technical innovation and scientific impact at every step.

The classic era for some was the revolutionary application of infrared imaging arrays – the famous IRCAM. Ian MacLean’s description of the history had some interesting insights. He showed a blow-up of the first array in the lab at ROE, and there, etched along the bottom in tiny letters was the word “tankbreaker”. This is what you get when you inherit military technology …

Ian heard rumours of a group in a US university that had an IR arrray to play with and went to see them. They wouldn’t say who they got it from, but Ian convinced them to let who-ever-it-was know that ROE was interested in getting a working camera on a real working telescope. They did. This, we now know, was Al Hoffman at SBRC (now Raytheon). Al in fact convinced his management to start a new program of commercial array development specifically for astronomy. Apparently he skipped his boss and went straight to one of the VPs. Why ? Because he knew that guy was a keen amateur astronomer …

SBRC and UKIRT/ROE entered into a formal partnership. It is very unnusual for a US commercial corporation to enter such a partnership with a non-US non-commercial entity. This sounds like just the sort of Knowledge Transfer success that the powers-that-be are urging us to achieve today. But hang on – note which direction the Knowledge is Transferring…. Did we invent some great new technology, which industry gratefully devoured ? Don’t be silly. They were the dog, and we were the flea. Partnership is the word. As customers we helped them develop a new market.

Same story with Adapative Optics. Probably same story developing now with ginormous databases.