Holiday Harper

Just over a year back i wrote a post glue-ing together video-music clips from four ages of Joni Mitchell. There is a strange feeling of resolution tracing the history of creative artists – musicians, actors, writers – whose lives have paralleled your own, maybe ten years ahead. Because I can’t quite work out whether I am on holiday or not, I will start the morning with another hippy music arc-of-life trip. Here is another singer-songwriter who has intrigued, moved, and baffled me in almost equal measure over four decades : Roy Harper. Many will know him as that bloke what Zeppelin wrote a song for, or the geezer what sang on that Pink Floyd number. A smaller number of dedicated fans see him as one of the key hippy bards of the sixties. At that time I still preferred childish pursuits like cricket in the park. I turned onto him in the early seventies in my undergraduate days. My copy of Stormcock is worn paper thin.

Here is the brash young man, on a mystery recording that may or may not have in Sweden in 1969, singing Hells Angels. He looks scarily like I did in 1973 when I first heard him – long fair hair, scruffy beard, friendly but sarcastic. (Free speech ! One each !)

In 1971 Harper produced something quite unique on Stormcock – four extended and meandering pieces with striking but baffling lyrics. (I never know what time of day it is, on my battlefield of ideas.) At the same time he is still writing simpler but beautiful songs, soaked in memory and vibrations of lost opportunity. Here he is in 1974, a smooth and mature performer on the safe-as-milk Beeb Two show The Old Grey Whistle Test, singing Commune :

Through the later seventies and eighties Harper split into two halves, writing rock songs, but also even more songs awash with nostalgia and the passage of time, like When An Old Cricketer Leases The Crease. Meanwhile, he is still performing the extra-ordinary work from Stormcock. Here is the middle aged artist on an Australian TV show in 1986, performing One Man Rock and Roll Band on semi-electric guitar. It has evolved into something somehow fluid and phantasmagorical :

Finally here is Roy in his seventies, playing on Later with Jools Holland in 2011. I have chosen his performance of Another Day, a famous song from the the 1970 album Flat Baroque and Berserk. (Younger folk will know the cover version by This Mortal Coil). I think of this song as the hippy version of To His Coy Mistress. (Oh really my dear / I can’t see what we fear / Sat here with ourselves in between us.) It is very moving to hear an old man singing such a song from his youth. What was, and what could have been.

I am aware that all the songs I have chosen were written in a short window of time, given Roy’s five decade writing career. But they were the nicest video clips, and show the man evolving if not the songs.

Hats Off To Harper.

End of the University Part II/III : online education

Oh dear. Everybody knows you should never write Paper I unless you really are going to do Papers II, III etc. Posterity looks unkindly on failed pomposity. Back in November I wrote End of the University : Part I which was about the Browne report and a naive approach to “student choice”. I think perhaps I can count The Big REF Gamble as Part II – lots of us are investing for success, hiring new staff before the REF, but we can’t all win. These are both examples of market disruption, which may force a re-structuring. You may have various opinions on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

So what about good old disruptive technology? The music business got turned upside down by the internet and file sharing, and the book business is likewise in turmoil. The disruptive technology here is the ease of copying. The reaction of entrenched commercial interests was the development of digital restrictions management. Whatever you think of that, the market structures are re-forming, and we need to get used to the idea that we don’t own works of art, we rent them – or if you like, we pay for performances. Of course the logic that follows is that payment for performance should go straight to the artist – who needs the middleman?

So can the same thing happen to education? They key thing here is not ease of copying but economy of scale. Hundreds of years ago we invented lectures so we could teach 150 students at a time instead of 5. Now we can do thousands at a time. My own university has started its own experimentation with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). My colleague Charles Cockell ran a five week course in Astrobiology. Forty-one thousand students registered, and five thousand survived the whole course. I am toying with another course idea myself, along with the boundlessly energetic Dr H. Well this is very exciting of course, but you start to wonder why anybody would pay nine thousand sponduliks for a university degree from the University of West Somerset when they can sit on their sofa and take courses from Harvard…

One answer is assessment and another is feedback, and the whole business of giving credit. Marking exams has not gotten any more efficient, and likewise the provision of individual feedback. Multiple Choice Quizzes are good, but not enough. If somebody can solve this problem, things will really change. This recent Guardian article reports the debate in California about whether MOOCs will allow private providers to move into education.

Meanwhile, it could well be that content delivery and assessment will decouple. Oh what interesting times.

Pippa Plugging (and a bit of Chas)

Had a rather jolly evening last night. I went to a book launch. I’d never been to one before and didn’t quite know what to expect – lots of air kissing and long fingernails I guess. In fact it was full of nice normal looking peoples, who divided into three tribes – aspiring writers, civil servants, and astronomers. The common link you see is that they were all friends of Pippa Goldschmidt, who just published her first novel, The Falling Sky. Some of you will know that Pippa used to be an astronomer in Edinburgh and Imperial, then moved into government, and has now re-invented herself again as a writer. You can buy the book from Amazon, or, if you prefer to support the UK tax system, from Freight Books. The novel is about a young female astronomer who makes an unexpected discovery which at first is very exciting but which throws her career into confusion and hostility, at the same time as her personal life is unravelling. Thats enough given away. I just finished reading it, and its really v.good indeed. I hope a lot of astronomers will read it, and half of them will think they know who the characters are. Here is a picture of a happy Pippa at the launch, with her PhD supervisor Lance Miller. Who is DEFINITELY not The Deathstar.

The Internut is a wondrous thing, as we daily re-discover. I found myself thinking how intriguing it is to finally see someone portray the real life of a scientist so accurately. There are books and movies and plays about famous scientists like Galileo and so forth, and of course squilliards of entertainments featuring nutty or mad scientists, but how often do you see real ordinary scientists? So I Googled “Scientists in Fiction” and found that there is an entire web magazine devoted to this subject – the rather marvelous LabLit.com. It has a long list of books I now want to read. Thats me sorted for about thirty more birthdays. (He said optimistically).

Its been a good month for astronomically related authors. Old RGO chum Chas Parker has just published his fourth – no hang on – his fifth – book about motor racing. His Amazon page is here. Somewhere in deepest Sussex, Chas still has my beard in a tin, but I can’t explain why without breaching the Official Secrets Act.

Korean controversy posturing

Emerging from a spot of lurgi so maybe just a  postette.

I just watched the controversial Korean undercover documentary. Given the fuss, I was surprised to see there was no mention of students whatsoever. They just said they were on a tour. If the LSE hadn’t made a fuss, no-one would have had any idea that students were involved. Now … it may or not be that the film makers dealt fairly or safely with the students. Thats between the BBC and the students concerned. How has it got anything to do with the LSE? As far as I have been able to tell, it wasn’t an official LSE trip, an LSE-organised trip, or an LSE-branded trip. They just happened to be students from an LSE student society. The LSE do not own these students. They are adults. As said very nicely in this piece by Robin Lustig it just sounds like “nobody told us” harrumphing.

But depressingly, Universities UK and even the Royal Society are  taking a line supporting the LSE, saying that it threatens the ability of UK universities to be trusted abroad. Pardon my French, but absolute bollocks. Pompous posturing. And also quite shocking to be blustering about such a thing when the people of Korea are starving and its leaders may launch an international war.

Again, let me stress that I cannot tell whether the BBC was sensible in their dealings with students – I think they probably were, but the public evidence so far is contradictory. But it has nothing to do with UK Universities in a corporate sense or the Royal Society.

How depressing.

Cosmology Conundrum

Some colleagues have suggested that my posting on Planck Day was overly frivolous, given the huge importance of what Planck has achieved. (Nicely written up by Andrew Jaffe.) Other colleagues have suggested that Planck Day was bad press, as it was such a huge public non-event, with a big fuss about mild parameter adjustment. I find both these things true, leaving a weird sense of tension and excitement. I’d better explain myself.

First, lets be clear about the technical achievement. Planck is an absolute triumph of technology, engineering, management, and organisation. An amazing machine that has worked beautifully. It also represents a stunning scientific achievement. The lamda-CDM model, and its beautifully articulated engine of prediction, is a conceptual and analytic triumph. Of course this triumph belongs not just to the Planck team, but represents the accumulated achievement of many scientists all over the world over a number of years.

Lets just look at that power spectrum fit. It is not just a question of the theoretical curve going vaguely up and down, in more or less the same way as the data. The detailed agreement is gob-smacking – multiple peaks, their positions, their sizes, their widths, their second and third order curvature. Any scientist will look at this and think “no way is this a fluke”. Don’t let doubters trot out that coffee-time stuff about being able to fit anything with enough parameters. Firstly, that old chestnut is largely nonsense, and secondly, the fit quality is way beyond that.

And yet – outside the world of the CMB, the CDM paradigm has problems, as we were reminded here at ROE the day after Planck Day, in a nice wee coffee talk by Jorge Penarrubia.The best known problems are that CDM predicts far too many dwarf galaxies, and galaxy profiles that are much cuspier than observed,  but there are other claims, such as the existence of a very unlikely polar structure of dwarfs surrounding the Milky Way,  and of suspicious uniformities in galaxy rotation curves. All these problems may still get patched up by astrophysical fixes to do with feedback, IMF games, etc… but we don’t know yet.

Its common to hear people say that Particle Physics and Cosmology are in a similar situation – a model rather than a theory – a perfect fit but with no explanation. Why do all those parameters have those particular values? It seems so arbitrary. And what are dark matter and dark energy anyway? In this view, even the boringly successful fit is tantalising because it tells us there must be a deeper theory in waiting that will explain the perfect fit.

That may describe particle physics, but it doesn’t describe cosmology. Rather, what we have is perfect but fishy. How can the model be so perfect in some places and so poor in others? Have we missed something simple? It may well be that the astrophysical fixes do the trick, and then cosmology does look indeed like particle physics – successful but unsatisfying. Or it could be that some conceptual change is needed, and a revolution is waiting.

I’d give the revolution 2:1 against. But thats good enough odds that your eyes are glued to the table… Mesdames et Messieurs, faites vos jeux.

George, God, and the Grapefruit : Ten Things I Learned

Been watching the ESA Planck live press junket George show thingy. Well, everybody and his hairdresser will be writing up their well considered Planck thoughts over the next hour and a half, so I thought I would just summarise some personal lessons. The follow-on press release is here. Apparently there will be more serious stuff about lunchtime, and here in Embra our very own Andrew Liddle will give a seminar this afternoon. Actual science papers on ArXiv tomorrow. Meanwhile, lets keep it light.

The title is ruthlessly stolen from a a Tweet by Professor R.Ivison.

(1) George’s taste in ties continues to improve.

(2) George would give his children away for the Planck map. According to their Mum, they didn’t hear this because they are in school.

(3) The Universe is a bit like a grapefruit. Roundish, mostly very smooth, but with tinnsy-winnsy dimples

(4) When a Twitter hashtag starts trending, it becomes cloggged up with porno-tweets. This is annoying. Well, unless thats what you are after of course. (Am I missing some kind of filter?)

(5) You can’t mention God, unless you mention that you are not mentioning Him. Her. It.

(6) The Universe is EVEN MORE BORING than WMAP told us. Perfect fit to simple inflation.

(7) EXCEPT … for (a) the ten degree dip, and (b) the preferred direction, aka the axis of evil

(8) The axis of evil lines up with the ecliptic plane. Woahh !  But as ex-Edinbuggerer Tom Kitching said to me, that sounds like zodiacal dust… so maybe when that correction is improved the UNIVERSE IS EVEN MORE BORING

(9) The Hubble constant is exactly what Michael Rowan-Robinson told us years ago (67) without the aid of extreme coolants

(10) Talking of which, ESA say they created the coldest place in space, at 0.1K. Now that is definitely quite cute.

Wild Northern Skies

Only connect, as Goethe said. Or was it E.MForster? Or did I already already use that gag in an earlier post? Anyhoo. Two or so weeks ago commenters on my own nuclear blog post made me eat humble pie , liberally sprinkled with Thorium. Last week I was in Thurso, in the far distant north of our fair land. “Thurso” ought to mean  to Thor’s town, but sadly it doesn’t, actually meaning “Bull’s River” or some such. However, it is just down the road from Dounreay, for many years the home of Britain’s development programme in fast breeder reactors. The last Dounreay reactor, the “Prototype Fast Reactor” was shut down in 1994, but the plant still employs large numbers of people, because of the extended decomissioning programme. The aim is to return to a brownfield site by 2036..  Nuclear power ain’t simple. Also, the MoD still run some experiments there. Its all quite nicely explained in this wikipedia page on Dounreay.

Anyway, for a such a remote area, with a population of a few tens of thousands, Caithness has a substantial sprinkling of high-tech and generally educated folk, who work for Dounreay and related activities, and an active and lively Astronomical Society – the Caithness Astronomy Group. These nice folk invited me up. Being in the distant north, it takes a whole day to get there even from Edinbrr, so I was there for several days, talking to multiple primary schools and doing a public talk as well as the usual astro-soc talk.

Caithness is a great place for amateur astronomy. Its as cloudy as most of Britain, but its DARK. When I asked the primary school kids who had seen a shooting star, 80% of the hands went up. I have never seen that in Edinburgh or London … and a large fraction of the populace have seen the Milky Way. You just walk out and there it is. The CAG chairbeing, Gordon Mackie, sent me the shot you can see to the left, taken at Loch More.

Caithness is also a great place for seeing the Northern Lights. Frustratingly, there was a massive CME arriving while I was there, but it was raining … Here is another Gordon Mackie shot to make up for it. Another ace astro-photographer is Stewart Watt. You can see his collection at “Under Highland Skies“.

But possibly the most exciting is Maciej Winiarczyk, who specialises in time-lapse astrophotography. He has lots of stuff on both YouTube and Vimeo. Take a look at this. But first pour a glass of Old Pulteney, sit back, and relax.

Oh, and its a nice place for a holiday.