Dinner at the Drones

On Friday afternoon I gave a talk to the Royal Astronomical Society on big astronomical surveys and the sociological changes they are driving.. It pluggged UKIRT/UKIDSS, WFAU and CASU, and AstroGrid. I am proud to report these are all STFC Band 4 projects !! Woo hee. Keep going guys. The talk involved a live demo of both the WFCAM Science Archive and AstroGrid and went really well. (Many thanks to Mike Read, Mark Holliman, and Nigel Hambly for last minute server kicking.)

During the day there was a specialist meeting on the 42m Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), with fine opening reviews by Jason Pyromaniac and Captain Hook. Of course this used to be the 100m Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL). I look forward to the day (2009 ?) when it gets descoped to 25m and renamed the FBT (Fairly Big Telescope). Some of the science cases are starting to look rather groovy. My favourite is the proposed CODEX instrument, which would take high resolution spectra of distant quasars. All been done before, you say ? Ah yes but they claim that over a period of twenty years, we should be able to see the Lyman-alpha forest move … i.e. we will actually directly detect the expansion of the Universe. Corr.

After my talk I got invited to the RAS Dining Club. Many years ago when I was a student I assumed the Dining Club was a sort of Astronomical Freemason thing - a secret club within the club where all the decisions got taken. Maybe that was true then, but it sure ain’t now, as about two thirds of the membership is retired anyway. It was like finding myself in a PG Wodehouse story. Dinner was at the Athenaeum, where somebody had to find me a tie. Luckily the Club keeps an emergency tie in a special wooden box. Conversation was deafening and at the end every guest had to tell a funny story. I felt sure that at any moment we would all start throwing bread rolls at Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright.

I didn’t tell the gorilla joke.

One Hundred and Fifteen and still counting

Oil is now $115 per barrel. We ‘re all going to hell in a handbasket. By the time STFC’s problems are sorted, Western Civilisation will have collapsed anyway. Sorry, got to go now, teaching my kids how to use a bow and arrow.

World saved by the Wii

Sorry folks. Another title tease. Patience.

When I wasn’t at the STFC Community Forum on Thursday, I was instead at a really good seminar about renewable energy, given by David Mackay from the Cavendish. He gave a hard headed look at UK requirements and what various renewable schemes can deliver. (David has a marvellous book called “Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air“). The main conclusion was that if you insist on European or US levels of consumption, then any successful renewable scheme has to be country sized - cover Wales with photocells etc - which isn’t practically or politically possible for the UK. This didn’t surprise me. Before STFC politics took over this blog, my most read post was about how extrapolated world energy requirements will get uncomfortably close to the solar input. However, David was more optimistic than I was there, suggesting that if we take an international approach, we really can solar-farm several Wales-areas in the North African desert and fuel Europe and Africa. So its possible in principle but still politically kinda tricky… Alternatively of course you can do it the Roger Angel way. Mirrors in Space.

That evening I had dinner with David, Alan Heavens, and Stephen Salter, a well known Edinburgh engineering genius. In the 1970s he invented the wave duck, and now he is having another go at saving the world - global cooling with albedo control. All we need is a fleet of two thousand automated ships, that drift around the oceans, hoover up sea water, and shoot a fine spray of particles up to the clouds. The idea seems to be that this (err somehow) changes the way cloud particles nucleate, and so changes their size distribution, making the clouds more reflective to incoming visible and UV, but without changing the reflectivity for IR on the way up. We make the clouds whiter folks. This takes very little energy cost. I haven’t read his paper, which is in press in Phil Trans, but there is a BBC news item on it.

Back to energy. Of course if we can just cut our consumption … David said that our energy consumption is about equal amounts transport, heating, and making stuff. Of course we can insulate our drafty Victorian Edinburgh homes better, but we can also turn down the thermostat. David said (I think… this was after a few glasses of wine..) that in the 1950s the average household temperature in the winter was 12C, compared to 20C now. Part of the problem is, we are all so sedentary… but things are changing !

When I were a lad we watched TV all day. My kids of course have spent years playing on the Playstation or checking Bebo. But since Christmas - things have changed ! We have a Wii and now the whole damn family leaps about playing imaginary tennis and so forth. Much less heating needed.

There. You knew I’d get there.

Emptied out

Twice each year I attend a sacred ritual from which I emerge spiritually refreshed and emotionally drained; an empty sack but a happier man. I refer of course to the School Concert. There are two such rituals. The first involves the teeny ones : the Primary School Christmas Show. Here, it really doesn’t matter what happens on stage; the point is only and simply craning your neck to see your own cute wee thing. Flashlight photons scatter off the the weird parental chemicals that diffuse through the air of the room, and you weep buckets.

The second type of event - the Senior School Variety Concert - is abolutely dire in most Schools, but not in the place my two big kids go to. The annual show, called DiverseCity, is absolutely stunning and quite overpowering. The school (James Gillespies High School) has a kind of genteel minor fame as the inspiration for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Things have changed since the Thirties … for one things there are boys; for another, its the opposite of genteel. None of this rubbish about School Uniforms at Gillespies. Their motto is “Diversity” and their belief is that all that encourages the Life Force is good, and all that discourages it is bad. The school breeds musicians of all types, and has the best break dancing team you can see outside New York. Every act is greeted by whooping and hollering of a most un-British type. Gillespies is twinned with a School in a South African Township (Zwelibanze). Some of their pupils had been brought over, and performed in the concert. The black-and-white combination was a rich and emotive brew. After close harmony singing, the Zwelibanze kids started that extra-ordinary South African boot-slapping foot stomping dance. Then hordes of pallid but muscular teenage Scots lads ran on and joined in… wonderful. This, followed quickly by Dark Island on the bagpipes, was just too much. I didn’t have to discreetly hide the tears, as everybody else was doing it too. I think they had the flood defence team on standby…

So anyway. I feel morally refreshed, ready for the last week of the STFC consultation period ..

Behave yourselves

I have just taken the difficult step of deleting a few comments. I am very happy for my blog to be a forum for people making quite strident comments - as long as others know these aren’t necessarily my opinions, hence the recent disclaimer box. (Some of them might be of course …) Also I do recognise that the option of being anonymous can make it easier to say things that you genuinely feel need saying. I am sure readers are able to calibrate appropriately.

When things get just slightly too personal however, its not healthy; and allegations of actual misconduct (rather than misjudgement) shouldn’t be made unless you have evidence, and are ready to disclose that through the proper channels. Otherwise its getting rather close to libel, innocent people get hurt, and it would be better for me, the respondent, and the accused parties not to go down that road.

I have also deleted some comments relating to the original inappropriate comment, even though these mostly stated that the comments shouldn’t have been made

Nuff said. I hope.

Hundred Dollar Oil

Hey, why are we worried about science budget cuts and all that stuff ? The economy is going to collapse soon anyway. Oil just hit a hundred dollars a barrel. Its waggling up and down, but the ton has been cracked. You can track it at www.oil-price.net, read more newsy stuff at CNN, or deeper insights at The Oil Drum. As I scribbled back in November, we is all living in fantasy land.

Tighten your belt and get used to it.

Dragons, Nuns, and the ATC

History can vanish in an instant. Does it matter ?

Walking to the Royal Observatory from my house I start along Lover’s Loan. Where it ends, there is a strange pillar topped by a winged dragon. At the weekend I read that this is not a dragon, or a gryphon, but a wyvern. The pillar is a tiny saved piece of the grand house that stood here for centuries before the ground was washed over by a sea of Victorian villas. I also read that its matching twin is further along Grange Loan, so on the walk home I diverted and found it. The house was scrubbed from the surface of the earth in 1936, apart from the wyvern pillars. The once powerful families that owned the house - the Dicks and the Lauders - still have a ghostly presence in the names of streets. Nothing beside remains.

So thats the Grange. Further north, where I live, is Sciennes, pronounced “Sheens”. I had long heard that this is a corruption of “St Catherine of Siena”, the name of a convent founded after the Battle of Flodden. Like Grange House, it is now utterly vanished apart from the muffled resonance of place names. My weekend reading however told me that the convent was commemorated at 16 St Catherine’s Place, so I took another arc to look for this. There was nothing on the street, nothing on the side of the house. Then, as I peered along the driveway, I saw it - an eighteen inch plaque on a rock in the middle of the garden. I didn’t feel bold enough to walk into somebody else’s garden, so I don’t know what it says.

After a brief stay at home, I walked in to Old College, where the Principal was hosting a reception for all the boys and girls who worked so hard on our submission to the Research Assessment Exercise. From there I kinda drifted to the Royal Oak, and finally, late at night and somewhat stoatered, found myself buying a bag of chips at Luciano’s, opposite the Dick Vet School. Until a few years ago, Luciano’s, in an astonishing five hundred year chain of unbroken memory from the Battle of Flodden to Blair’s Britain, was called the Siena Fish Bar. Then some random guy buys it up, thinks huh, dumb name, and crunch - history snapped.

Some days, working at the Royal Observatory on Blackford Hill I can feel the history oozing out of the stones. The nightmare scenario is that if the ATC reduces in half, it becomes unviable and closes anyway; then the University can’t afford to keep a medium sized astronomy research group on a large ancient site, and finally we all get shifted down to Kings Buildings. History snapped again.

By the way, it ain’t happening.

The Problem with Blogging at Light Speed

February 4th is Across The Universe Day ! But you probably knew this, so why am I bothering ? Saturday morning I finished my toast, went out and bought the Guardian, and found an amusing wee article about NASA beaming the Beatles song Across the Universe through its Deep Space Network in the direction of Polaris. This apparently celebrates the 50th anniversary of NASA and the 40th anniversary of the recording of Abbey Road. Cool, I thought. I can blog about that.

But as soon as I started digging, I found everybody in the blogosphere had beaten me to it - the Bad Astronomer and the Beeb and me ole chum Paul at Skymania News , and Fraser Cain at Universe Today; and its been Dugg of course . Here is the original NASA link. While Googling I found that Chris Lintott, Brian May, and Patrick Moore have a regular New York Times Blog which is also called Across the Universe. Hey, there’s even a movie called Across the Universe

Stuart at the Astronomy Blog must have been too busy doing some astronomy I guess.

Some blogs are “My Diary” by Ordinary Bloke. Some are “Hem. Hem. My Theory” by A.Nutter. Some - many of the astronomy ones - are basically on-line astronomy magazines. They feed off new results and press releases and explain them to a fascinated public. All the blogs I mentioned above do a great job of this. Why should I bother when they do this so well ? Answer : I shouldn’t. If you want to read about it, go read all those other guys ! They are better than me .. and obviously a lot quicker….

Instead I will comment on something that puzzled me, and nobody else seemed to pick up. All the versions of this I have read say that February 4th has been declared as Across the the Universe Day by “Beatles fans across the world”, who are urged to play their own recording of the song, etc etc. Err… says who ? I checked out various Beatles Fan Club websites (like here, here, and here) and can’t see a mention of anything like this. I assume this whole “Beatles Fans Across the World” thing was just made up by NASA and parotted uncritically by all the media outlets and blogs that picked up the press release.

So yeah, its a rock as Chris Lintott says. And this is a NASA stunt. Full stop.

How to pay for Astronomy

Keen readers may remember me uncovering the Great Armenian Star Naming Rip Off. Now Waterstones are at it too. Today in Princes Street, I was depressed to find them selling “name a star” gift sets for £20. You also can get this wondrous product direct from Gift Republic. Inside you find the co-ordinates of your star. You invent a name and register this, and periodically Gift Republic submit their information to the British Library. Coo. Well that sounds important.

Interestingly, the box I saw in Waterstones had some tiny small print which does not appear on the web site. This said, roughly “..this will not necessarily be recognised by any official scientific organisation… this is a novelty gift and should be taken as such.” This made me much more relaxed. If anybody is dumb enough to read that and still cough up twenty quid then its their own fault.

Why not start up our own, and covenant all the profits to the Gemini Observatory ? We could do a much better job. There could be a premium rate for special objects like cataclysmic variables. People could pay a monthly fee to get gamma ray burst alerts within 10 degrees of their star. There could be a discount rate for a thousand objects at a time. Or maybe we charge £5000 for a complete open cluster. We could guarantee annotations in the SuperCosmos Science Archive.

Does this count as Knowledge Exchange ?

Dinner at Hogwarts

Sometimes life converges, crosses, and then spreads, like peaking waves in a choppy sea.

Yesterday I went to Oxford. I had been invited to give a seminar about AstroGrid at the Oxford e-Research Centre. This felt weird. The software is in a good state, and will be released in April, but the staff on my project don’t know if they will get paid this month; our expected grant announcement is on hold because of all the STFC problems. That stream of thought continued as I crossed Keble Road to Astrophysics, to meet Roger Davies, who like myself is entangled in all the astro-politics. We asked each other if there was any news of the Select Committee hearings..

Roger had invited me to Dinner (capital D) at Christchuch College. This was extraordinary, in the painfully beautiful but privileged Oxford manner; ancient quadrangle, sonorous bell, flapping gowns, glass of sherry in wood panelled room. Then into the Great Hall to sit at top table next to the Dean, three feet above the massed ranks of Christchurch students, seventeenth century portraits staring down from every wall. “Wow” says I to Roger, “this is so Harry Potter”. “Yes of course” says Roger, “this is where it was filmed…”.

Back to sherry land, more Oxford banter. Roger and I trying to avoid talking about STFC politics, as we have done it to death. In comes a tall, bright, and cheerful young chap. “Have you met Chris Lintott ?” says Roger. “No” says I, “but I feel I should have done - we read each others blogs…”

My blog, my science, my politics, my children’s fantasy worlds collided in that moment. But then the clock struck nine and I had to leave before missing my train.