Physicists of the Caribbean

SOPA - don't fear the streamer

2012-02-29T03:38:00.000Z

Anyone who uses the internet - and since you're obviously reading this blog, that includes YOU - is by now aware of the ill-fated SOPA, the US's attempt to destroy the web. This rightly detested law would have given the US the power to shut down any website found to be violating copyright, which would have killed this blog just for the banner alone.

Why would anyone want to do such a thing ? Is it because the US government is deep in the thrall of those with money - i.e. the music and movie industry ? Yes. Is it because that industry is EVIL ? Well... partially. But mainly it seems to be that it's because that industry has had about 20 years to adapt to the reality of the interent and utterly failed.

Back in the Mesozic Era, cavemen would use cassette and VHS tapes to record all their favourite music and videos. This took a very long time, but that was OK because they had nothing else to do except hunt mammoths, which was even worse. It made sense to have a copyright law preventing cavemen from giving copies to their friends, because the level of copying was so low that no-one actually noticed.

With broadband internet, things are different. The ability to freely and instantly copy information with no errors is easily as big a game changer as the invention of recorded music, and should be treated as such. Naturally, people have become quite taken with this. You can't possibly expect people to carry on buying overpriced CDs or DVDs when the free alternative is much better.

Unfortunately the corporate thinking has completely missed the point, and is determined to stick with using copyright laws that haven't made sense for well over a decade. This is exemplified by the truly bizarre law that allows public domain works to have copyright reinstated. It's not -quite- as mad as it sounds. If something is public domain in one country but not in another, then this crazy law might work if going between the countries required a crew of a dozen stout men and a long sea voyage. But when information is freely and instantly shareable, it's just plain ludicrous. As I've previously stated, restricting information based on where people live is verging on racism.

"Arrr ! We'll bring ye back files the like of which ye have never seen !"

The most frightening case is surely that of the UK student threatened with extradition to the US for creating a website that can find "pirated"* content. This is legal in the UK but not in the US. Now if he was planning to burn down the White House and mutilate Barack Obama's dog, or vice versa, one could see the case for extradition. But he's not. He's helping people watch TV, for goodness sake. What kind of country sends its citizens to foreign prisons for helping people watch television ?!

* It's not piracy at all, of course, it's copying. If real pirates did this then they would have sailed the seven seas stealing treasure but also leaving an identical amount of treasure behind. Somebody should write to the Somalians and tell them this.

All that's needed is for the music and video industry to do no more than accept reality, and no less than change their business model to adapt to it. They've already tried the reverse approach and found it doesn't work. The idea that "piracy" is cauing lost profits must be absolutely rejected. In an age of free information, it's simply untenable. It's not only movies and music that are failing to adapt : a recent article suggests that mobile phone companies have somehow "lost profits" because of free alternatives.

This is nonsense. You might as well claim that people who grow their own food are causing farmers to lose profits and should be fined for farming rights violations, or that people who talk to each other face-to-face are causing losses to phone and internet companies. Profit loss is entirely the wrong mentality. Rather, increasing profits can only come from developing better ways to deal with this new reality, not fighting "pirates" - it works spectacularly well for Google and Facebook, which are both free yet worth billions.

It isn't even as though cinema has become unprofitable. Avatar made $2.7 billion, which should be more than enough for even the fattest investment banker. Low-budget movies like Paranormal Activity are equally capable of enormous profits. "Piracy" is no longer the case of boarding a boat and stealing all the treasure. In fact it's preventing the treasure from getting on the boat at all, thus saving the public from having to pay the extortionate shipping fees.

So these people copy things from the rich and then give those copies to poorer people... wait a minute...

Ah yes. I thought so.

(except they don't even steal what the rich people have anyway, making them just plain nice)

Finally, the music industry, which started all this nonsense by shutting down Napster, needs to stop telling people to stop sharing things. That's just bad parenting. Not so very long ago, musicians got by without record companies or even earning royalties. I can't help but wonder that if the music companies invested their lawyer's fees into developing an innovative new business model, we might all be better off.

The Struggle For Liberty

2012-02-24T00:05:00.000Z

In 480 B.C., the combined forces of Athens and Sparta defeated Xerxes's mighty Persian juggernaut. This ushered in the next 25 centuries of Western civilisation. In 1280 A.D., William Wallace fought bravely but ineffectively against the tyranny of the English. The result of which was rather less significant - all that Western civilisation has to show for it is a very unsubtle Mel Gibson flick and an irritating Jabba the Hut impersonator.

More recently, I face my own epic struggle AGAINST the forces of Liberty. I don't have to lead an army or endure horrible torture. Unlike other rebels I don't even have to call in NATO for assistance, although it's tempting. Instead, I struggle daily against the more devious and subtle forces of monstrous incompetence, a truly glacial yet Quixotic battle which only Liberty can ultimately win.

When I arrived back, I had no television, water, phone or internet. As I've mentioned, the first two were easily remedied. Not so the latter. Having tried every variation on the old "switch it off and then on again" routine to no avail, I called my ISP (Liberty - haha, see what I did there ? aren't I witty) from work. They promised to send a technician round a few days later.

All well and good. On day of said appointment, I skipped work and waited at home. Taking a day off work without the internet is at least as much fun as watching Steven Spielberg's A.I., but to get my 10Mbps connection back it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. But, having endured over an hour past the appointment time, I went into work and called Liberty again.

I have already related my shock on learning that the technician had tried to call my broken phone, failed and so decided not to come. I therefore carefully explained that next time the technician should phone my work number before he arrives, making the reasonable assumption that he might need directions to find the house, or even try to meet me somewhere less non-descript.

So, appointment day 2 arrived. Having waited patiently in my office all afternoon, I eventually decided to call them to check on things. They claimed that the technician had tried to call me hours earlier, which, if it was on the office line, was a straightforward lie. By now I'd determined that the fault lies with the modem (having borrowed my neighbour's and found that it worked first time). So I asked if they could simply send me a new modem, by post if possible. It was not to be.

This meant they had to book yet another appointment, now over two weeks since I'd first called them. This time the technician DID call me - at work no less ! The problem ? He only spoke Spanish. Not one word of English.

By now becoming physically sick of Liberty's 15 second repeating hold "music", I opted to book another appointment for the next day. By 11am I phoned to check what time the technician would arrive - they told me it was actually scheduled for tomorrow. So, on that tomorrow, I waited patiently in my office - again - all afternoon. I missed an interesting seminar waiting for the call. I skipped the usual afternoon tea/Dominion session. I phoned them several times -

11am : "Between 12 and 5"
...
3:30pm : "In about another hour"
...
4:40pm : "Another 20 minutes"
...
5:50pm : "He called by the house but no-one was there. He tried to phone the house...."

Gu...

Buh - ?

Nee...!

BLAAARGH !

Then it gets worse. Now having enough pent-up frustration to actually complain, I make it quite clear to the operator that I've been waiting nearly 3 weeks and there have already been many delays. I tell him in simple terms that I shall spend the next day waiting at my house for the technician. Which I do. It's as tedious as tedious can be.

This time my landlord was around, so I borrowed his phone twice to check on when the technician should arrive. "Between 1 and 5" is the initial response. Fine. That's just my morning wasted, then. At 4pm I phone again. "Yes, he will come today, but we don't know when." Grr. Does he show up ? Like hell.

At about 6pm I borrow my neighbour's phone and make another call. This time they tell me that the technician - wait for it - called my work number didn't get an answer, so decided not to bother.

Frak me SIDEWAYS these people are stupid !

What do they do next, I hear you ask ? Book yet another appointment for the very next day. A Saturday, so marginally less inconvenient. This time the phone monkey assures me that the technician will not try to call any numbers, he will just attempt to find the house. Of course, the phone loses signal partway through the call and cuts out. So I try again, and apparently succeed in making the appointment.

At about 11am the next day I see one of the most disheartening sights I think I've ever seen. A Liberty van drives straight passed. It's a bit like watching Littlefoot's mother die all over again.

Naturally I call Liberty again, borrowing my neighbour's mobile. After some time struggling with poor signal and operators who misdirect me to Spanish-speaking menu systems, I eventually get through. Now I'm told that a) the van that drove past wasn't the technician dispatched (err, yeah, right, because there are ever so many Liberty vans in the area) and b) the technician needs a contact number.

...

I KIEEEELLLL YOU !!!!!

Ahem. I didn't say that. What I did say, after momentarily pausing out of sheer exasperation, was that no, I explained this yesterday, it isn't possible. Mobile phones only work outside here. All of my neighbours have gone out for the day. He then states the directions they have on file - the previous phone monkey already confirmed these with me - which I'm only half-surprised to find are now somehow completely wrong. And then, with the tragic comic timing so perfect it smacks of a Gypsy curse, the phone cuts out.

I then try something new. It's obvious that the problems of short, phone-based conversations are just too overwhelming. Therefore, using my neighbour's wi-fi (which only works in my kitchen, and not terribly well) I send them an online service request :

Dear Liberty,
I have a technical appointment scheduled today to repair or replace my modem. Since this is broken it will not be possible to phone the house [it's a voice modem, my phone is connected to it]. Unfortunately, cell phone coverage in this area is very poor, so I cannot provide an alternative contact phone number. I attempted to phone you earlier, but the call was disconnected due to poor signal. I am sending this service request using my neighbour's internet.
I understand that it may be difficult to find the house, as your customer service department appeared to have incorrect directions. Here are the precise latitude and longitude you may use with a GPS system, or Google maps, in order to locate the property.
XX°XX'XX.XX"N
XX°XX'XX"W
Alternative directions :
Heading south along route X, you will see a Texaco gas station. Turn left and proceed along route X. Continue along this route. Proceed until you see a junction with a sign for the Arecibo Observatory - follow this sign (to the right) to continue south along route X. After approximately 10 minutes you will reach the house. It is X, the front part is painted orange. To the left is a large pink house, and my next-door neighbour's house is pale green. Ahead a sign is visible with a large yellow arrow pointing to the left. If you reach La Esperanza with its white cemetery, you are on the correct road but have gone too far south.
[I'm not blanking directions out of paranoia, oh no. It's a competition to see who can find my house on Google Maps.]
If you could send me (via email) even a very approximate time the technician will call, I will happily wait outside in order to ensure he can find the property.
Please help, as I have been waiting for 3 weeks to have my internet restored, and on 4 separate occasions the technician has failed to arrive.
Thank you,
Rhys Taylor

What happens ? Well, about an hour later the status of the service request is changed to "closed". That's. It.

At this point it seemed that my only options were to either cry at the operator or try and flirt with them like a mad thing. I'm no good at either. I'm even worse at getting angry at people who work in call centres. So I make one more effort at booking an appointment, which again fails to transpire.

Finally, based on me neighbour's suggestion (who had a similar though less epic battle with Liberty) I write an email to the managing director of Liberty. It's very polite, in the tone of the above service request. There was no direct response to this, so after a few days I again rang and booked yet another appointment (number 6, I believe). Once more I told them to phone my work number. This time they tell me the technician should phone at around 8-9am.

Although having as much confidence in this as I do in David Cameron's economic genius, I nonetheless duly went into work at 8am. Of course, they didn't call. This time I decided to go to the seminar, then lunch, and then phone them. They rang the technician, who promised to call me around 3, and I again gave my work number just to make sure.

What happened next ?

IT WORKED.

I CAN HAS INTERNETS ?!?!?!

Extraordinarily, the technician rang my work number (at 2pm), spoke good English, and arranged to meet me in a convenient location. 10 minutes later we were at my house. 20 minutes after that... everything was done. Exactly as I knew would happen, all he had to do was to replace the modem. There is, of course, one and only one possible response to this.

And that's it. I may not have overthrown a tyrant or secured Scottish independence, but I damn well got Liberty and justice for me.

Back To Reality

2012-02-06T20:09:00.000Z

I've at last returned to Puerto Rico, after an all-too-brief 6 week stint in the UK. Having searched fruitlessly for several days trying to find a decent flight, I finally found that the only direct flight here - which was the one I wanted to begin with - is actually perfect.

Why does this come as a surprise ? Mainly because I initially searched, naturally enough, for a one-way trip. The price : £1390, rather on the steep side, but perhaps not all that astonishing given that it's B.A. This is considerably more than I'm willing to pay, having already lost one flight back and half-cancelling my flight to Austin for the AAS*.

*I can use the money again, but only on another flight with American Airlines from San Juan.

However, out of morbid curiosity I decided to search for a return flight. Now the direct BA flight is a highly competitive £550. That's right : for taking me twice the distance, they're prepared to charge less than half as much. My conclusion from this ?

ECONOMICS IS BROKEN !!!

Further proof of this is rendered by the fact that getting a premium economy return costs the same as a regular economy one-way.

What.
The.
Frak.

I arrive back to discover that everything else is broken too. No water, phone, internet, or television. Electricity does work, by some miracle, although without internet or television it has limited uses. And for some reason the electricity company are trying to charge me $72 despite the fact I've been away for 6 weeks and turned everything off before I left. Then the fanbelt in my car decided to pack it in, along with the air conditioning (in my car that is, not in my house or I'd be dead from grief by now).

Some things are easily fixed. The water was off because my landlord turned it off, as the hot water tank keeps leaking. And because he's perhaps the nicest landlord in the world, he took me to buy a new fanbelt and got his brother-in-law to fit it for me. No-one knows why the television was off, but a phone call in work soon fixed that.

So I have the essentials - I can make tea, shower, make tea, watch Jon Stewart, make tea, drive back and forth to work, make tea... but not make any phone calls or use the internet. But I can make tea. I can't play with my shiny new tablet though, but mostly that's because I stupidly forgot to pack the charging plug. Good job I can make some tea. I like tea.

Liberty were supposed to send a technician around to investigate the internet/phone problem yesterday, but they never showed up. A phone call (from work) revealed that the guy had tried to call me to find my house so he could come and fix my phone.

...

!

!!

!!!

Aaaaaargh !

Rhys brain melt now !

The Curse of Christmas

2012-02-04T09:40:00.000Z

About half of all missions launched to the planet Mars have failed. The most recent is the tragic, much-delayed Phobos Grunt, which crashed... on Earth. Currently the only plausible explanation is the Great Galactic Ghoul, a great big space monster which eats approaching Mars probes.

A similar fate has befallen my Christmas's of late. Two years ago my nephew was born on Christmas Eve. Hurrah ! if you love nephews, that is. I've already articulated my thoughts on the superabundance of Peppa Pig, though this ghastly creature is but a trival distraction compared to the sheer Kubrick-esque mentality that is Baby TV. This is to say nothing of the horrors of changing a nappy or, worst of all, the total inability to check my emails for A WHOLE HOUR AT A TIME !!!

But I digress. Last year, my mum decided it would be jolly good fun to trip in the snow and break her ankle. Oh, joy. That was about a week after my dad got out of hospital having had a very sudden onset of septicaemia, just to make things that bit more fun.

This year we dodged a hospital visit at Christmas but instead got to enjoy New Years in the delightful surroundings of the cardiac ward, with my dad having exhausted the possibilities of septicaemia (having had a second bout earlier in the year) and instead gone in for nothing less than a quadruple heart bypass. Well, may as well take things to the extreme, I suppose. On the plus side, I got to enjoy this temperate island paradise a while longer, because going to the Austin for the AAS and giving a talk while that was happening was just not going to happen.

Oh well. Perhaps next year we'll get to stay home. You never know. Or, as has been suggested, we could hold a surprise Christmas in, say, June, just to catch the Carnivorous Christmas Cactus - for that is the most logical explanation for all the Christmas disasters - off-guard.

Karma

2011-12-08T23:59:00.001Z

I was all set to write a nice inane little post about Christmas time in the Caribbean, when my plans were brutally scuppered by the unstoppable forces of karmic retribution. Yesterday I received a lovely email offering me money for CGI I've already done, which is always nice (this the second time this has happened). Coupled with my imminent return to the UK for Christmas, this gave me a warm glowing fuzzy feeling inside.

In this case the forces of karmic retribution took the form of a small oncoming car, which collided with the side of mine as I was leaving my house. The driveway from my house is steep, so it's very difficult to see anything to the right. So I've developed a paranoid habit of emerging just enough to see if anything is coming, then rolling back down if there is anything, and repeating the procedure until there isn't.

Most of the time, if anyone sees me they stop and let me out. So this morning, when I spotted an apparently distant, slow-moving car, I carried on emerging - an act of colossal stupidity. Because the car wasn't slow or distant at all. And my car's ability to make sharp turns has all the grace and elegance of a constipated sumo wrestler - so I ended up on... ahem... the wrong side of the road.

In my defence, if the car had been doing the speed limit there would have been no problem at all. Alas, it wasn't. The driver tried to screech to a halt - literally burning rubber - but by this point disaster was inevitable. And so kerblamo ensued.

Fortunately my car also shares the sumo wrestler's remarkable ability to withstand large heavy objects colliding with it. It has a rather nasty dent in one side, and one headlight isn't working (the main beam, is, bizarrely, fine). The plastic light casing is intact, and the wheel is fine. Compared to the other car, this is nothing short of astonishing. For that much smaller car has a crumpled bonnet, a shattered windscreen, and generally looks like a wreck.

In some ways, there's no better place to collide with someone than Puerto Rico. For the locals are used to accidents and - by and large - surely among the finest in the world at dealing with people in distress. While I was fretting like a wet hen (do hen's fret when damp ? what about roosters ?) the driver was nothing but a model of jovial politeness. Long story short - I spent the entire day filing police and insurance reports.

What happens next in this particular saga, I've no idea (although I was assured many times that I wouldn't have to pay any money). One thing is certain : next time I'm moving to somewhere with public transport. Until then... home time !

More Hispanic Oddities

2011-12-02T12:46:00.001Z

Somewhat of a dearth of posts of late, owing to Skyrim, which I think is a perfectly reasonable excuse. And why not ? My character, Bill, is a fire-breathing orc werewolf with a magic sword that can make zombies explode. Whereas all I do every day is write code and look at static. Even if I did have a magical flaming sword, I'd probably have to sell it on eBay. As for turning into a wolf, unless wolves have some hitherto unknown talent for IDL coding then that wouldn't help either.

"I told you to comment your code and I MEANT IT !"

About the most exciting thing I've done lately was to replace my expired marbete. This is the most basic level of car insurance, which everyone is required to have (it costs $200 and lasts a year). So I'm finally a legal driver again. Not that I was ever an illegal one through any fault of my own. I bought the car in an excessively Puerto Rican fashion, paying cash firmly in hand (which is entirely normal here), and then handing over copies of my various documents to some guy in a pub* to have the ownership transferred.

* It was actually a colmado but you get the idea.

This isn't as crazy as it sounds, although it's difficult to explain fully without becoming tedious. Anyway this guy decided to wait a full two weeks before telling me that he'd lost the documents I gave him so I had to give him new ones. And then another two weeks before the much-vaunted ownership details made an appearance, bringing my brief flirtation with the seedy criminal underworld to an annoyingly belated conclusion.

Rather more interesting was the drive to replace said marbete. Along the way I encountered one of the more insane examples of metal theft. Now I've heard lots of stories about people stealing copper cable, in some cases pretty extreme examples of thieves stealing hundreds of metres of phone lines. What I wasn't prepared for was the idea that people would steal the frickin' manhole covers.

"No-one will ever notice ! It's the perfect crime !!"

I should mention that there is no equivalent to vehicle or road tax here. So potholes aren't isolated, inch-deep depressions - they're present everywhere and are often more than 6 inches deep. It's better to think of them as mines - either they exploding kind or the digging kind, it's all good. Ironically, being used to random depressions in the road made me decide to completely avoid the apparently innocuous circular pit looming in front of, which didn't look that intimidating from the low angle of the driving seat until the very last second.

At the very last second was a different matter. Then I realised that it wasn't a shallow pit at all. It was a metal-lined tunnel with a depth measured in feet, not inches. There were two more examples slightly further on, but in these cases some helpful soul had decided to wedge in a large plastic bollard, like buoys of the road.

Which does beg the question of what anyone wants with a manhole cover and how they go about selling it. Anyone with the facilities to melt them down is certainly too rich to benefit much from manhole cover theft, so presumably they're sold in the same state they were stolen in. I can only imagine conversations that must go something like this :
- "Is this a manhole cover ?"
- "No."
- "Oh. Well, OK then."

Or maybe these thieves are more enterprising. Perhaps they're co-ordinating their efforts, and stealing from multiple districts at once. That way manhole covers aren't lost, they're just... exchanged. The thieves get money, the roads get manhole covers, everybody wins ! Except the taxpayers. And any unfortunate motorists who are caught unawares.

An Open Letter To amazon.wherever

2011-11-15T08:55:00.000Z

Dear Amazon,

As you well know, I have purchased a host of wonderful items from your online store over many, many years. It would be fair to say that your chronic lack of shipping charges, coupled with your competitive pricing, occasional spectacular offers and excellent pre-order service, have not only made my life a good deal easier, but also prevented me parting needlessly with a most numerous number of shiny pound coins. Certainly while I was in the UK I would not have dared describing you with anything other than the most gushing of terminologies.

Alas, I am woe to report that this honeymoon period of so many happy years is now well and truly over. In these last few months I have found myself wrestling time and again with your shipping policies, and this is not the naked mud-wrestling with Jeri Ryan I would incalculably prefer to have in mind. Instead it's more the case of wrestling with a enraged bear that's just been given an enema made entirely out of bees.

Why yes, actually, I would like to see Jeri Ryan wrestle a bear. Is there some reason I shouldn't ?

It is true that you cannot be held responsible for the nonsensical "region encoding" which afflicts DVDs and blu-rays. Although this repressive policy of restricting what information one has access to depending on where one lives is nothing short of censorship by another name, it's not your fault. It's also true that you ship region 2 DVD's from the UK to Puerto Rico at considerably lower prices than you ship region 1's from the United States (despite Puerto Rico being a US territory, and therefore subject to the same domestic shipping prices as the States themselves).

Screw statehood. It's obvious that Puerto Rico should join the U.K.

For this you should be both praised and scolded. It is right and proper that I can effectively bypass the insanity of region encoding in an entirely legal way for minimum cost (the only penalty being that it apparently takes two weeks for the aircraft to cost the Atlantic - I suggest you might want to upgrade your Zeppelin to one of these new-fangled aeroplanes). Kudos for that. But this doesn't make it any the less baffling that it is cheaper to ship an American show from Britain than from the United States.

They also cope well with volcanic ash

Such weirdness is a forgiveable part of a complex automated world-spanning business empire. What is less so are your policies on what can be shipped to where. While you don't have any problems with wrapping up a DVD and whisking it - very slowly - across the Atlantic, apparently video game discs are allergic to airship travel. I expect it brings them out in a nasty rash. Fortunately it seems your .com division has some means of protection, but can charge 3x the shipping price compared to the U.K. for the privilege.

Of course, shipping anything electronic at all to Puerto Rico would be unthinkable. I'm sure you wouldn't want the natives getting ideas above their station. After all, who needs electricity in the tropics ? Everyone knows we spend all our time drinking rum out of coconuts with little umbrellas in. So of course I couldn't possibly need a pair of extremely small, lightweight and easy to pack headphones. Didn't stop you shipping me a rather hefty laptop cooling pad for some reason though.

Electricity ? No, it's powered by rice and beans.

The most bizarre aspect of all this concerns your flagship product, the Kindle. Given that you must inevitably bow to publisher's wishes, it is just about comprehendable that you cannot release electronic versions of books to a worldwide audience at the same time. Understandable yes, forgiveable no. This is taking all of the benefits of internet globalisation and feeding them to the Rancor. Which in my view is totally mammoth. You will pay the price for your lack of vision (although Emperor Palpatine probably wasn't thinking about lost revenue from book sales when he said this).

Admittedly, no-one with a pet Rancor will care much about shipping policies

But, as I said, this is at least understandable. What isn't is the fact that this applies not only to modern books but also to classics which are available for free in other countries. They say that you should never attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to stupidity, and this is surely a classic example. There is no motive, rhyme or reason to restrict a free product, and simultaneously point out in big clear freakin' letters that you can easily find this content for free elsewhere.

So, thank you amazon. For the largest internet retailer your shipping policies are remarkably anti-globalisation, and it certainly nice to see someone leading the charge to ensure everyone is treated differently based on wherever they happen to live. For the life of me I just can't think how that isn't an example of racism and bigotry, but of course that is illegal so I must be wrong. Good luck with that one.

Lots of love from

Me

XXX

P.S. Not that this will stop me buying stuff from you. Except in those cases where you refuse to take my money, as you often do.

P.P.S. Given my years and years of customer loyalty, it'd be nice if you'd approved my amazon store card. How exactly did you come to the conclusion that I have no credit history ?

P.P.P.S. I'm going to think about Jeri Ryan now, and possibly a bear. Maybe some bees too. Bzzzz !

The Ambassador and the Apocalypse

2011-11-12T12:24:00.001Z

The usual response to whenever I complain about living on a small, desolate island thousands of miles from home is to retort "Yes, but at least you're living on a tropical island paradise." To which my mental response has always been, "Oh REALLY. Is THAT what you think ?". Well, finally I've captured photographic proof that this simply isn't true ! Not unless your idea of "tropical island paradise" includes a sky which, every afternoon, appears to be about to vent the very wrath of heaven upon the world, probably accompanied by something suitably eighties.

ZOOL !

In only slightly less dramatic news, my office has now acquired this rather fine reptilian resident. I suspect he's after the ants, from which there seems to be no escape. I'm currently waging a war against them at home anyway (the current score is several thousand to me, a few nasty bites to them). They've taken it upon themselves to form trails entirely at random in ranks hundreds strong. I tried blocking their trails with masking tape, I tried brutally slaughtering them with ant killer, hell I even tried flaming them with a gas lighter - nothing works.

Which makes it all the more worrying that now, not content to vainly try and steal my food, they also appear to be trying to steal my research, the bastards. It's not as if I even eat in my office or anything. I can't block their trails with masking tape, because they don't have any. They just turned up one morning on my desk, randomly milling about. I certainly can't spray them all with ant killer, because that would soak all my papers. And I definitely can't burn them, because that would also burn down the office and would be silly.

Get away from my food you BITCH !

In yet more dramatic news, my earlier proclamations against Goldenye may have been a tad... premature. I mentioned that even if we wanted to, we couldn't afford the electric bills to flood the dish. In a bizarre twist, this has become supremely ironic. Owing to the apocalyptic storm shown above, the area underneath the dish is now a lake that's probably about 2 metres deep. Ordinarily we'd just turn on a pump and wave bye-bye to mosquito heaven, but the transfer from Cornell has thrown up an unexpected bureaucratic wrangle. Apparently, someone needs to stay by the pump overnight when this happens... but we can't pay them overtime anymore. Whoops.

Last but not least, this week saw the visit of His Excellency Sir Nigel Elton Sheinwald of Harrow, British Ambassador to the United States of America. No, seriously, that's his full title (although he probably leaves out the "of Harrow" bit). Apparently he was accompanied by his wife and a protocol officer. Unfortunately I didn't get to ask if she's fluent in over 6 million forms of communications because they turned up while I was at lunch, and went galavanting up to the platform without me. Nor did anyone take up my suggestion that we find a small boat and sail them around underneath the dish. I can't imagine why. Because the line "I once went sailing with the British Ambassador underneath the world's largest radio telescope" is one hell of a conversation starter.

The Distribution Of Drivers As A Function Of Speed

2011-11-07T13:11:00.001Z

It is surely impossible to have enough posts about the driving behaviour of Puerto Ricans, so here is another one. The graph below shows how many drivers spend most of their time at a particular speed, with zero being whatever the speed limit happens to be.

The green area on the left covers about 50% of all Puerto Ricans, who insist on driving very slowly but, as if to compensate for the automatic safety benefit this could bestow, not at all carefully. In classic Puerto Rican fashion, these people place no value on their time or the time of anyone else unlucky enough to be caught behind them.

On the motorway this manifests itself as the Puerto Rican roadblock, a common occurrence where two cars drive alongside each other at exactly the same speed, regardless of the number of people behind them or how fast everyone else is going. Lane discipline might as well be the Loch Ness Monster over here.

The green area on the right also covers about 50% of all Puerto Ricans, who, in classic Puerto Rican fashion, just like driving really really fast, everywhere. And they don't compensate by driving more carefully, because if you're ahead of them they tailgate with extreme prejudice . The idea that something unexpected might happen apparently being a wholly novel concept.

Puerto Rico : A Hispanic Oddity

2011-10-28T23:08:00.001+01:00

Puerto Rico can be justly praised for a great many things. Having a solid educational system, efficient public institutions and a carefully thought-out public transport network are but a few of the many, many virtues it doesn't have.

My particular favourite of the island's various enchanting nuances is its corrupt milk industry. Milk is produced locally, presumably to avoid the expense of having to ship it in. Except that tropical grass is extremely poor in nutrients, so grain must be shipped in to feed the cows instead. Which, naturally, requires government subsidies to make it profitable... although it seems what the subsidies actually pay for are the palatial houses of the dairy farmers. I should also add that milk is about 5 times more expensive than root beer.

There's just something wonderfully endearing about a country with a corrupt milk industry.

Then, as I've mentioned previously, there's the water authority. 4 miles from here, you'd be lucky to get water 3 days a week. Apparently this is not so bad provided you have a large cistern that can fill up whenever the water is working. The ironic thing is that my neighbourhood currently has more water pressure than you'd ever want to see outside of an episode of Mythbusters.

Water pressure is not to be trifled with

This is not normally the case - in fact I often don't get much more than a trickle myself. So it came as a great surprise one morning to turn on the tap and have water spray across the kitchen and see the tap physically jerk upwards. Something inside it even went BANG. Whatever it was hasn't gone BANG since, so is presumably broken, but never mind.

The other bizarre feature of the water industry is that if you dig your own well, legally you don't own the water that comes out of it. So, if you play by the rules, the water industry will charge you for the water you took out of the ground at your own expense. However, you can at least collect rainwater for free - unlike in Colorado.

The electrical authority has quirks of its own. Fortunately, they're not known for the crazy amount of service interruptions that plague their dihydrogen monoxide counterparts. Sure, there are more power cuts here than in most developed countries, but not enough to really worry about. No, the issue here is that the electrical bills are slightly higher than they need to be, so that churches actually get it for free. Thievin' bastards. Why I've half a mind to write a letter to Richard Dawkins.

Thou Shalt Covet Thy Neighbour's Electricity. Covet it good I say !

One other thing I learned recently deserves to be reported, though it isn't the kind of thing I would normally write about because it's genuinely sick. A few years ago, the authorities embarked on a campaign to reduce the number of stray dogs. I'm not a fan of culling animals, but in this case it might be justifiable. Their numbers are high and most of them are clearly disease-ridden and starving. To try to domesticate them would be an exercise in futility, and take money and resources the island simply doesn't have.

Unfortunately, many pet dogs that happened to be on the street at the time were rounded up during this program. They were not humanely euthanised. No. They were thrown off a bridge.

Al Gore Can Go Screw Himself

2011-10-24T14:07:00.000+01:00

Well, he can. Literally. In the most physical sense of the word. With whatever perverted product he prefers, if necessary. Even if his job really is to help Stephen Hawking protect the space-time continuum, for all I care he can go and take a running jump into a pool of his own faecal matter.

This tyrannical Vice President famously won a shiny trophy (OK, it was a Nobel Prize) for a moderately inaccurate power-point presentation about some tap-dancing penguins... no wait, that was Elijah Wood... or maybe it was Morgan Freeman... but I digress. My point his that he can take said trophy - I'm assuming the Nobel to take the form of a little statue of Alfred Nobel himself, possibly holding a stick of dynamite and grinning happily - and use it as a suppository.

Actually, I wouldn't much dispute the basic message of An Inaccurate Truth. Indeed, some of the most noted skeptics have now been forced to conclude that the Earth really is warming. That's skeptics, people, not deniers - those are entirely different beasts. Deniers are the kind of people who should be put on a small smelly island somewhere, along with the Moon landing conspiracy theorists and Six Day Creationists. Skeptics, in contrast, can be safely taken to the pub for a drink.

You see, now that all reasonable people accept that warming is occurring, the cause of it is irrelevant. If we had infinite quantities of coal, or there was no other way to generate electricity, then it might make some difference if our C02 emissions were dangerous or not. But we don't, and there are. So there are really only two options.

1) Carry on burning fossil fuels. Which is fine* if in fact this doesn't cause global warming. Until we run out, and then we are truly up faecal matter creek without a canoe. And if it does cause global warming, then we'll just reach said creek quite a lot sooner.
* Except for all the other nasty associated environmental damage, like oil spills and open-cast mining and the truly awful effects of fracking.**
** This seriously needs a less hilarious name.

No fossil fuels = no Port Talbot = WIN

2) Stop burning fossil fuels. If warming is real and caused by humans, then at the very least this limits just how far up the proverbial creek we get. And if it's not caused by humans, then we've still prevented all the other downsides to fossil fuels and switched to energy sources that will last forever (and this includes nuclear fission by the way - breeder reactors are more than capable of producing enough fuel to last us billions of years), and will likely become a hell of a lot cheaper over time.

So, if the remaining skeptics are right, and humans are not causing global warming, then we still have to stop burning fossil fuels eventually - and the sooner the better. If they're wrong, then we have to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. Either way... well, you get the idea.

Which might make you wonder why I started this post with a vitriolic attack on Al Gore, the patron Saint of Lowering C02 Emissions. Well... I don't actually want the poor bugger to engage in self-copulation, or do something unfortunate with his Nobel prize. Heck, his alarmist movie is probably the only way to convey to the more thick-headed people that there really is a problem, and we should jolly well do something about it. In fact, well done that man !

Unless he tells me to save energy by not using my shiny new air conditioner. Because if the survival of a few waddling tuxedo-wearing movie stars (i.e. penguins) depends upon me living in a constant 35 degree heat and therefore having to collect my own sweat in buckets, then so help me God I'll go to Antarctica and finish off the feathery bastards myself. They'd do the same to me if they could.

How Lord of the Rings Can Help Solve China's Population Crisis

2011-10-22T14:45:00.001+01:00

It's a simple question so I'll get right to it. Elves are immortal and apparently reproduce in the same way that humans do, so why aren't they crammed into Middle Earth like sardines ? Clearly they all get along with each other without reproducing much, so I reckon that if we figure out how they do it we'll be well on the way to finding a solution for China's population problem. Plus, we'll be able to stop worrying about what will happen when someone invents a cure for ageing.

You might wonder why elves have been singled out here. What about Middle Earth's other long-lived races ?

Ents. Live for thousands of years, but lost the Entwives (seriously ? Entwives ? Well that's what you get from a Professor of English at Oxford University), hence, no more Entings. Problem solved. That's probably not a good solution for China though.

"Perhaps they're all hiding in here. Well, you never know."

Dwarves. No idea how long these angry little dudes live. All we know is that the women have beards, and - if we allow Pratchett to interject at this point - most dwarf courtship consists of trying to determine the other's gender, which takes a very long time. Giving everyone a great big bushy beard might work for China, but the whole world ? That would be an odd place to spend eternity.

It is indeed the dwarves that go swimming with little hairy women. Good luck with that.

Wizards. There are only 5 of them, at least one of them is gay and the rest are probably male amyway. Reducing China's population to 5 old men is a move probably even more radical than they would be prepared to accept.

"I told you NO means NO !"

Orcs. A seriously misunderstood race. It's no-wonder they're so angry given that they're obviously overloaded with testosterone, given training that makes even the Libyan rebels look competent, only fed "maggotty bread" and - just to make them really enraged - they're all male. Again this is not a solution that will help China much.

Dunedain. Long-lived, but got their proverbial and literal asses' kicked long ago, so not many left. Though you would think that would be motivation enough to repopulate the species (or sub-species, or race, or whatever). Anyway. as far as I can tell, they lived so long because of really good breeding, and seem reluctant to corrupt their bloodlines. Eugenics, anyone ?

Yes, I'm going to recycle that picture wherever possible. Because I can.

Spiders. It's not clear why, but Shelob is apparently the last of the giant spiders, even though spider broods are hundreds strong. Answering this one would require reading the Silmarilion, which I've just not prepared to do.

Which means that the options for the survival of a long-lived species boil down to massacring an entire gender, ludicrous facial hair, killing all but 5 of the populace, or becoming Nazis. Well, let's put those on the "maybe" pile, and hope the Elves have a better solution. They must have come up with something... right ?

Perhaps the most obvious explanation is that the elf birth rate exactly matches the elf death rate. Now elven medicine is a tad mysterious but apparently very effective, so we can safely assume very low infant mortality. Which means that each elf couple will produce at least 1 child per year. That means that 1 in 2 elves must die each year to balance it out. Clearly this is preposterous, especially since elves can live to be over 3,000 years old. But at that death rate, any one elf only has a 1 in 1x10^903 chance of living that long, so their initial population must have been many orders of magnitude larger than the number of atoms in the Universe.

On the other hand, maybe they've all just got... bored. They've had at least 3,000 years to practise things so wantonly perverted they would make the Internet itself blush, and have run out of ideas. And since they seem to have pretty good memories, it's not like they can forget what they did and re-learn it years later. Moreover, it takes like 17 pints for an elf to get even slightly drunk, making elven orgies perhaps a trifle dull, by the general standards of orgies.

"Wait, I feel something. I slight tingling in my -"

However, this explanation lacks credibility, because none of the elves seem remotely interesting enough to ever have had a hidden life as a sex fiend. Maybe, instead, they have some incredibly effective method of contraception, and only procreate when their population diminishes. But that doesn't seem to likely either, because Liv Tyler (unaware of Aragorn's fascist tenancies) seemed pretty eager to get on with making babies.

Which means we're left with a long-lived population of more or less stable, well-adjusted (if extremely ponsey) people who want to have children, but don't. Only one explanation remains - Elves are reverse tribbles. Instead of being born pregnant, they're almost all born sterile. No wonder Liv Tyler was so keen to turn in her sword for innumerable evening's spent watching Ben and Holly (which in Middle Earth is probably considered a documentary).

Does this help China ? Umm.... no. It doesn't. So the title of this post is, in fact, a lie. Oh well.

On the Purchase of a Horseless Carriage

2011-10-05T13:08:00.001+01:00

I have several lifelong ambitions. These include, but are not necessarily limited to :

Retire on the Moon
Charter a boat to reach an astronomical conference
Legitimately use the phrase, "I wish to buy your entire stock !"
Legitimately use the phrase, "Saddle my elephant. I ride at dawn."

Unfortunately my other plan, namely to emulate the great Sir David Attenborough - who never passed his driving test and consequently doesn't own a car - is about to fail. It might theoretically be possible for me to continue car pooling for another year, but it would be considerably more difficult than, say, getting a horse.

This idea is not without merit. For one thing, it would mean having to set up the world's first Observatory stables - add that one to the list. It would also mean an 8-mile ride every day, or 20 miles on weekends (the Observatory doesn't have a supermarket), and horses don't come with air conditioning or a roof. I suppose I could attach a carriage and ride in that, but then I'd have to get a driver so I could sit in the shady, rain-proof interior (and presumably shout things like, "To the Observatory, James*, and don't spare the whip !").

* The attentive reader will see the difficulty at once. Puerto Ricans aren't called James.

Some horses do come with speakers, however

An alternative scheme, which would do away for the need for a separate carriage and kill two birds with one stone - would be to ride atop an elephant. Unlike horses, elephants are large enough to be fitted with a small roof and probably a little a.c. unit, although I'm not aware if anyone has tried. Plus they can knock stuff over. But they also poop a lot and probably need to be fed and stuff.

So that's that plan scuppered. With characteristic cowardly capitulation I've caved in and contrived to contribute capital to acquire a car (today's blog is brought to you by the letter C !). Now my first choice would have been the smallest vehicle possible, like a Smart car (yes, minis are way cooler, but they're now as big as every other car which somewhat defeats their purpose). This is counterbalanced by my other need to do as little work as possible - i.e. buy the first thing on offer provided it doesn't spontaneously combust in the presence of trees.

WANT.

At this point I can now only suppose that reverse karmic retribution is in effect, because the first thing on offer is a large, shiny golden thing with electrically-adjustable seats. It has driven 73,000 miles, or about 3 times around the Earth, since its creation in 2003, and has 4 doors (on this terminology I am in full agreement with the Americans - cars have either 2 or 4 doors, not 3 or 5, that's just silly). And a CD player. Umm. Knowledge of and interest in cars failing at this point. It can go forwards and backwards, but not up or down or back in time. Look ! Here it is...

May I Live Here In Interesting TImes ?

2011-09-30T23:56:00.000+01:00

Well, here I am again, back in this oh-so-tropical island "paradise" of sorts. It seems pointless to blog about Cardiff, partly because nothing very unusual happened and partly because 99.999% of the people who are actually reading this are from Cardiff anyway, and don't need to know what unusual things didn't happen.

Fortunately - or, as will become apparent, very unfortunately, I've arrived back at an interesting time. The kind, I suspect, that the Chinese had in mind when they invented that famous curse. For the official changeover of the management of the Observatory is imminent - Saturday, to be precise. While I was away I missed the farewell to Cornell party, but they saved me some nice gifts. Such as this fine clock, which is clearly modelled on the telescope in combination with the wormhole machine from Contact.

About 4 days before I returned I received an email telling me that travelling outside the USA while my visa is being transferred between institutions is quite a bad idea, and that I should try very hard not to do this. So, as my plane tickets were non-refundable, the visa transfer was cancelled so that all my current documentation is perfectly valid and above-board. That let me back into the country without the slightest hassle. The other options being to just go ahead and hope everything would work (to which, one institution said "that will be fine" and the other said, "OH GOD NO !") or effectively lose $650 in order to buy another flight back at a later date.

So far, so good. Except now of course the Cornell flag has been lowered, literally, and soon a whole host of new ones will be raised at what rumour has it was great expense. As my visa is associated with a specific employer, it will no longer be valid. Which I guess makes me a rogue astronomer (although not an illegal alien until October 30th, when I have to leave the country if this isn't sorted out). Naturally this idea has a certain appeal, although the idea of being an unpaid rogue astronomer is rather less intriguing. Watch this space.

This is the Puerto Rican flag, but you get the idea

Let's Recap

2011-09-04T15:32:00.000+01:00

As my first return flight home draws inexorably closer, like a... really inexorable thing... it's surely time to reflect on the year's events. Which if you want to be cynical about it, and I do, means that it's time for the blog equivalent of a clip show. So what exactly have I learned in the last year ?

DRIVING

Don't do this. It's not at all worth it, certainly not in Europe. You'll have to spend hundreds and hundreds of currency units failing tests because of trivial errors that put you through the stress equivalent of a meat grinder when you could be, oh, say, hopping on a bus. Or a train. Or taking a taxi. What in God's name Puerto Rico is doing without any of these basic features only He knows, and as usual, He's not telling, the big bastard.

Incidentally, I'd like to take this opportunity to invite all my driving examiners out here to see the reality of Puerto Rican driving and then tell me there was a good reason to fail me. Because I promise you that nothing I ever did remotely compares to doing a U-turn on the motorway, double-parking to talk to friends at a junction or signalling in the wrong direction (or more often, never signalling - or equally, always signalling).

POLITICS

One thing we can all be sure of is that David Cameron is a frakkin' moron, but almost unbelievably he's been trumped by the one-time darling of British politics, his sycophantic sidekick Nick "Closet Tory" Clegg. You sure had me fooled for a minute there, Cleggy. I thought you might actually be able to make an unelected coalition Government work. Nope. Sigh... why does no-one listen to my ideas ? Damnit people we need to be able to decide who we want in government !

Sadly, we've also learned the bitter reality that Great Britain is Great only at phone hacking, political corruption, idolising archaic traditions and - to everyone's lasting surprise - rioting. Still, we don't match up to Puerto Rico, where the murder rate is about 20x higher and corruption is rife at virtually all levels (including the milk industry, of all things). They don't riot so much though, because it's too hot. They may not have a Royal family to idolise, so instead they're sticking firmly with wanton animal abuse (i.e. cockfighting, discarding unwanted animals freely, appalling malnourishment of horses, etc.) - presumably because they're all insane.

If we are to redeem ourselves in the eyes of the world then I suggest we attempt to combine our hitherto unexpected national talents. What we need to do is have the Queen hack Barack Obama's phone to dig up some juicy gossip on the latest exploits of the Guantanamo Bay Torture Squad (they have one of those, right ?) and then have her stage a riot.

TRAVEL

It broadens the mind. It's certainly character building, and therefore best avoided. Sorry, Caribbean, but you're not for me. Your humidity is just too dang high, the lack of proper seasons is disconcerting, and the bright sunshine just makes me sunburned to the point of blistering. I was entirely right to dread the Caribbean climate, because I don't see how sweating profusely every time I even move for the suncream is at all fun. This is all, however, nearly compensated for by the presence of sea turtles, which I like to think of as pangolins of the sea.

Left : A land turtle. Right : A sea pangolin.

As for the States, well, I largely approve of what I've seen. Provided you don't mention...

The Southern Ocean
Soldering
Trousers
Chips (no goddamnit ! I don't want "French Fries !")
Crisps (they're not chips !!! Aaaaargh !)
Swimming costumes
Biscuits (from the country that brought you spray-on cheese : biscuits in gravy !)
Tea (they would not know proper tea if it raped their pets and stole their women)

... then you're probably fine.

SCIENCE

Oh, right, that thing I do every day what pays my bills... Well, I've learned that space is quite big and contains quite a lot of stuff. So much stuff, in fact, that it's worth writing computer programs to do all the hard stuff for you. That way you can leave the code running to do the work while doing something useful, like drinking tea or teaching people unbelievably bad Welsh. It also involves a lot more debauchery than is generally mentioned in school.

The result of all this is that you end up with a huge catalogue of galaxies, sort of like a Victoria's Secret catalogue, only not really. Did I mention that I've been drinking some damn fine rum while typing this ? It's cheap too. The rum I mean. $10 a bottle. Doesn't really help science much. Umm... yes ! Science. It's good stuff. Largely consists of looking at static hoping something shows up. Sometimes, it does. And then everyone shouts, "Hurrah !".

For some reason, Victoria's Secret Galaxy Catalogue hasn't caught on

Me, Miarrr! and Irene

2011-08-24T14:11:00.000+01:00

This weekend saw a trip to the remote island of Culebra, for no particular reason. Arriving on a Saturday evening, we proceeded to while away a few hours in some small random bar. Nothing happened. However, things became immediately interesting the following morning, with the villa manager telling us of the approach of Tropical Storm Irene.

The two options she presented were to either (1) leave on the midday ferry, essentially negating the entire trip, or (2) stay somewhere else. Option (1) did not seem much fun at all. Option (2) seemed pointless. So we opted for (3) - stay put. After all, we had a well-equipped villa with air conditioning.

The day proceeded rather well. It consisted mainly of swimming in the sea and getting hit by waves, which in the Caribbean is like getting hit by a wall of semi-molten marshmallow while inside a washing machine. Pretty soon we'd adopted two bona fide lolcats. First and foremost was a large ginger and white cat missing half an ear and having only one eye. This clearly marked him out as a pirate, and so he was quickly named "Miarrr !".

Miarrr proved a faithful furry feline, ever watchful of our little cabin. Possibly this was because almost everyone else had left and we were the only source of food. Soon we met Miarrr's friend and rival, a smaller, dark grey cat whose colour could only mean she was a ninja. Logically, therefore, we named her Mr Miaowgi.

To combat the effects of the tropical storm - by now forecast to reach hurricane strength - we wisely decided to drink ourselves into stupefaction. This proved a wonderful decision. After a bar and a restaurant, we moved on to our own supply back at the villa. Several bottles later, the power went out. Having no provisions for this of any kind, we resorted to the little screens on my camera and mp3 player for light, soon draining the batteries of both of them.

Then, somehow, we managed to start a fire in a small metal bowl. I wish very much I knew what was being burned, but half a bottle of Disaronno (amongst other things) has somewhat weakened my memory. All I remember is discovering that insect repellent is flammable. Anyway, we continued in this fashion to mock Irene throughout the night. Which was not difficult, because frankly the most it did was blow down a single tree. Miarrr treated the entire escapade with characteristic stoic disdain.

In the morning I instantly remembered that my Kindle cover has a very bright light that lasts for many hours. There was absolutely no need to burn anything at all. Whoops.

We soon discovered that leaving the island was now impossible, because all flights and ferries were cancelled. We still had no power, so the manager asked us in a very loud voice how many bags of ice we needed. No-one could think of anything we could use the ice for, except possibly to make sure our drinks were nicely chilled, which isn't a priority at 9am when you've stopped drinking at 3 that same morning.

Thus the day was largely spent faffing about, though we eventually opted for 1 bag of ice to keep food cold and procured some clean towels, though these were of limited use with no hot water. On the plus side, it gave extra time to explore the beach and discover the abandoned tanks.

Since we'd already done the getting wasted routine, and still being without power, there was nothing for it but to search for somewhere that did have power and hope there was something on TV. We managed this, finding that one of the empty cabins somehow had power and TV. Thus, before proceeding on to burn things for the sake of it, we watched Predators and ate nachos. Miarrr tagged along, either out of a sense of loyalty or possibly just because he had nothing better to do. In short this hurricane was not quite the life-threatening utter terror that Discovery Channel documentaries have led me to expect.

The following morning flights were still cancelled - although why is a mystery since the wind had largely died - but a ferry service was operating. Having been stuck on a remote tropical island without power or any clean clothes, this prevented a second natural disaster from striking the Caribbean - namely, smelly astronomers. At 10am we boarded a cargo ferry back to the big island, and it left instantly despite it being a full 30 minutes before the scheduled time. 2 hours later we were back in Puerto Rico proper. 4 hours after than - more than double the usual time, owing to inexplicable traffic jams - we were back in Arecibo.

So, the worst this hurricane did - as far as I can tell - was to knock over some trees, cause a bit of flooding, and generally irritate everyone. Hurricanes, it seems to be, are no problem if your buildings are all little concrete bunkers (you listening to this, Florida ? Stop with the wooden huts already !), you have a healthy supply of booze, flammable materials and lolcats.

He Tells Me To Burn Things

2011-08-14T15:07:00.000+01:00

Will someone PLEASE tell me why England burned down last week ? And, equally importantly, why didn't Scotland or Wales or even Northern Ireland ? While the media may be keen to repeatedly divulge that these were the worst riots since the 1980's, they're less keen to report that these riots are so perplexing they'll soon become a regular clue in the Daily Mail's Cryptic Crossword.

It's not quite that no explanations are being offered. It's just that all of the so-called causes stink to high heaven of people promoting their own personal pet hates. Come on, people. The moral breakdown of society has been blamed for everything from the fall of Rome to the sinking of the Titanic (probably). Good grief, if the moral breakdown of society had been continuing for as long as it's been claimed, by now we'd be little better than those awful zombie creatures in I Am Legend.

"Help ! I've caught the dreaded CGI virus !"

Even that normally quintessentially analytical paper, The Independent, is offering few explanations. Oh, it did try, once, but it used so many long words in such flowing and flowery language that I was sorely put upon to constrain the electrochemical process dwelling within my cerebral cortex toward the notional concept that the rioters might actually think that way. Heck, if an article attempting to explain why people burn things requires annotations, then I'm just not convinced.

"You've done grand. Now you now what you have to do... BURN 'EM ALL !"

Reactions to how to deal with the rioters seem as irrational as not bothering to examine the root causes. For starters, Our Glorious Headteacher (David Cameron) seems convinced that the entire thing was put about by naughty children and is desperately trying to deal with them as only a Tory would - i.e. with water cannon and plastic bullets. That's perfectly understandable. After all, he's a Tory, and therefore mad.

Maybe there was a large youth contingent involved, I don't know. But reading the newspaper reports it seems to me the rioters are dominated by Club 18-30. And given that one of the first convictions handed out was to a 31 year old teacher, I can't help but feel the political bandwagons have been set loose like fire-and-forget missiles, only someone forgot what the target was before even launching.

The phrase "knee-jerk" falls short of describing many of the reactions to the crisis. One man was jailed for stealing water worth the princely sum of £3.50. A 22 year old model ("of previous good character") was jailed for 6 months for stealing 10 packs of chewing gum. Eh ? Did I just wake up one morning and find myself transported back in time to 1851 ? Perhaps she should also be flogged and deported to Australia, just to be on the safe side ? God help us all if she decides to do it again. IS NO-ONE SAFE FROM THIS TERRIBLE GUM THIEF ?!?!

Mmm, minty fresh riot breath !

One can't help but imagine the future of that 22 year old. Years from now, she'll tell her grandchildren of the riots. She'll tell them of how whole shopping centres were burned to the ground, how people stole from the injured and attacked the police and even firefighters. And then she'll finish by telling them she was so out of control that she broke into Argos and stole some gum, and that no-one would ever again employ her because her "good character" was damaged irreparably.

One marginally more serious case concerns a looter who stole £50 from a charity box. OK, that's pretty bad, and certainly deserves a sharp slap on the wrist and a hefty fine. But is it really, "an act of breathtaking wickedness.... contemptible and despicable" as the judge called it ? Contemptible and despicable maybe, but "breathtaking wickedness" is the sort of term I feel should be reserved for Nazi Germany, Vlad the Impaler, and - on a bad day - Peppa Pig.

So what have we learned from this whole escapade ? Not a damned thing, apparently. Unfortunately, a magical pyromaniacal leprechaun remains the best explanation for the whole sorry business. He appears to be using his magical powers to lay low and avoid interviews, so we're not likely to find out any more details for quite some time.

Croeso Y Arecibo

2011-08-08T23:45:00.000+01:00

Hwyl fawr, myfywyr ! Before the REU students left I felt it my duty to give them a crash course in Welsh, should they ever find themselves stranded in Northern Patagonia or even the Welsh homeland itself. Consequently they are now engendered with such choice phrases as :

"Welcome to the Arecibo Observatory and Welsh Language Emporium"

"Goodbye summer students"

"The summer was awesome"

"I like Arecibo"

"Is this a camel ?"

"Where is Wales ?"

"Yes ! This is a camel !"

"Awesome sea turtle"

"My name is Carlos"

"They should have sent a poet !"

I suppose one could argue that a crash course in Spanish by a fluent Spanish speaker at the start of the summer would have been marginally more useful than, say, a crash course in Welsh by someone who hasn't spoken it since age 13 and actively dislikes the language at the end of the summer. Bah. I care not for such inconsequential details. In fact, maybe next year I'll schedule it as an official REU talk... it's only a mercy there are no other Welsh speakers able to lambast my sbwriel pronunciations.

All of which doesn't help solve my current conundrum one little bit, namely, why isn't Middle Earth overrun with elves ? Wait ! No, that was last night's problem, and probably a filler post for the next time I'm really bored. Which brings me nicely to my real problem, to wit, what to do with this blog. Pretty much all of my pictures are on Google+, so reproducing them here, while extremely easy, is also really boring.

On the other hand, Google+ doesn't have my cool pirate Einstein to keep an eye on things, or my highly witty banner picture of Johnny Depp calmly surveying the sea for rogue astronomers. So, without further ado, the US Virgin Islands* ! I went to St John last weekend and wish I'd stayed. You know a trip's going to be good when you charter a light aircraft and your pilot turns out to be a former theoretical cosmologist from MIT by the name of Carlos. And then when your villa has a pool with a sea view, things can't go far wrong.

* These statements are not unconnected. The VI's are much more touristy, proper Caribbean places than Puerto Rico, so pirate regalia can be found everywhere.

Yes, those photos are all of the same view. That's because it's an extremely good view. It's all the better for being slightly cooler and MUCH less humid than the relative hell-hole that is Puerto Rico. Once again a visit to a civilised part of the world has kindled a deep desire to return home, particularly as I saw the little-known US-UK border (it's in between the US and UK Virgin Islands). They also drive on the left in the USVI, since it used to be Danish. I can only assume the Danes abandoned it due to the lack of icebergs and polar bears. Such is my extensive knowledge of Denmark...

At this point I require an underwater camera, on account of the VI's best feature : sea turtles. Why, in some beaches you can hardly move for turtles. You can reach out and touch them, and they don't react. Well, probably they do if you jab them in the eye or tap them on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper, but fortunately they're surprisingly fast so those things are quite difficult to do.

Since I don't have an underwater camera, this is the best I can do

I could wax lyrical about the wonders of the USVI, but instead I'll just recommend that the entire world visit it at once, be nice to the turtles (or I will destroy you) and don't try to fit 8 people in a Jeep designed to hold 5, it's not much fun. And definitely don't try to do so in front of the owner.

I Miss Civilization

2011-07-25T19:42:00.000+01:00

Unfortunately, I'm not referring to the excellent game series by Sid Meiers, although that was very good. No, I'm referring to the little niceties that citizens of the First World are apt to take for granted, like reliable electricity, water, a sensible climate and a whole plethora of alcoholic beverages. Such is the downside of trips to the States, even if the place is weird in its own way.

I don't particularly care to detail most of my exploits in Green Bank to the world at large, save that they involved some very un-me like behaviour, a replica of Karl Jansky's radio telescope and a locked pool. Ahem. Anyway. Here's a picture of the Ewen and Purcell feed horn, the first instrument to ever detect HI emission. I certainly have absolutely no idea that at least 6 people can comfortably drink inside it.

The above is the actual feed horn. The Jansky is only a replica, but it comes fully equipped with the ability to rotate if a few astronomers get off and push, but I definitely don't know anything about that at all. The less said about this one the better for all concerned. At least in public. Snigger, snigger...

This particular observatory is, ironically, situated even further away from reality than most others. Normally, it's a 4 hour drive to Washington, and when the place is bombarded by 50+ students and staff astronomers the place is further still from anything approaching normality, especially given the presence of a seemingly bottomless drinks cabinet.

Not that this impeded scientific progress in any way whatsoever. No sir ! When there weren't lectures or drinking there were tours of the telescope. And though I shall be able to say "ours is bigger !" without fear of reprisal for the next 5 years at least, it's still impressive. After all, it's 100m wide and one of the largest steerable dishes in the world. It is also a good viewing platform.

Credit where credit is due - these guys have a way more impressive control room than us. They also don't feel the need to cool it to a sub-arctic climate, which is nice. On the other hand, no-one has ever made a movie in which Green Bank scientists try to take over the world or discover aliens, so we must be doing something right.

As a responsible post-doc, my main reason to attend was to supervise hands-on projects, a phrase I can no longer use with a straight face, so I won't. Ahem. I seem to be developing a nasty cough. Anywho, when I wasn't fetching my students beer, I was doing my patriotic duty and educating the world that Wales, contrary to popular belief, in fact owns both Green Bank and Arecibo. It's remarkable that this is so often overlooked by the media.

And finally, I genuinely have no idea what this thing is. No-one does. It appears to be a segment of a radio telescope, but how it got there is a mystery. Not a single staff scientist knew the answer. If it is signposted at all, it most certainly doesn't simply say, "DANGER DO NOT CLIMB", and I for one haven't got a clue what type of clothing enables the fastest sliding down this mysterious artefact.

What the Tourists Don't See (III) : The Platform

2011-07-08T03:39:00.000+01:00

At long last I found an excuse to get up to the platform, which means I can bring these little behind-the-scenes excursions to an end. Well, nearly anyway. There may or may not be a trip to the lidar lab in the near future, but I don't know if that will involve pretty pictures or not, and that's what we've all come to see, right ?

Anywho, the platform. A 900 tonne construction suspended 120 metres above the dish, this is the business end of the telescope. James Bond decided to access it via the catwalk, but if he was less pushed for time he could have taken the cable car instead. Not much scope for dramatic chase scenes there though, especially as there's only one car.

On this occasion however I did take the catwalk, and while no epic battles ensued there was dancing involved. All with be revealed, but not today. Like the cable car, the floor is a metal mesh consisting mainly of holes, and unlike the cable car the side walls are unnervingly flexible. However, this is surely an improvement from an earlier incarnation of the catwalk, which I'm told was a proper Indiana Jones affair with a wooden floor.

Both car and walkway lead to the very top of the platform which, weirdly, is absolutely rock solid. It has to be, otherwise the thing wouldn't work. Running between two support structures is a large metal cable which when struck makes a sound that's pretty near identical to any science fiction laser blast you've ever heard.

She hasn't gone mad. She's just listening to the cable, as you do.

I don't remember what the platform in Goldeneye looks like but I think most of it was filmed there so it should by rights be pretty similar, unlike the control room. However, I once again spotted no evil villains bent on global destruction, just some astronomers with a real talent for pulling peculiar expressions the instant a camera is trained on them. It's uncanny. Perhaps I just kept interrupting their evil scheming, but if these guy's are the biggest threat to international security then we can all rest easy.

Stairs from the uppermost level lead down into the very centre of the structure. To reach the lower levels you have to climb backwards down some very narrow stairs, which are built around the central axis about which the whole thing rotates. It's exactly like descending into the web of some ferociously over-complicated bio-mechanical spider that's developed a curious interest in radio astronomy.

Telephones can be found just about everywhere, including this one which looks like it's older than time itself. It's about one step up from a carrier pigeon, I reckon. Of course, all the electronics are chosen so they don't generate RFI, but surely this is pushing it.

Next comes a trip along the hugely complicated azimuth arm, which supports the instruments. This has the same centre of curvature as the dish and the instruments can move back and forth along it to change their angle of elevation. It's all extremely primitive-looking, covered in cables and maintenance workers for whom galavanting around a hundred metres in the air is just a day job.

The main difference between the platform today and when they filmed the Bond movie is the addition of the giant Gregorian Dome. This is where all the really cool receivers hang out. The line feed - the thing what Sean Bean fell off - is still there, but nowadays all the neat stuff is inside. Two more mirrors focus the signal from the main dish to a point. One of these is 25 metres across and is just too big to photograph properly, so here's a short video clip. Note the resemblance to the Death Star.

And so we come to the receiver room itself, featuring the one and only ALFA instrument that's kept me in employment for the best part of 5 years, a truly scary thought.

Not many people know that ALFA is controlled by a small fluffy kangaroo without whom the entire telescope would surely collapse into a great heap of rubble. This is because it isn't true, but there is a small fluffy kangaroo securely fastened to the instrument with a cable tie. His name is Hep. Or Hap. Or maybe it was Pap ? Or Pep ? I couldn't tell, on account of the very noisy air conditioning units.

Which I suppose brings me to the end of this final tour, since going down is remarkably similar to going up but in reverse. I'll return next week with a report on the comings and goings of the NRAO Green Bank observatory, which features the world's largest fully steerable dish. Be there or be a rectangular thing !

Happy Loss of the Petty Colonies We Never Really Wanted Day !

2011-07-05T01:46:00.000+01:00

It's 4th July, and to my delight, Astronomy Picture of the Day has declared the existence of the Southern Ocean. Huzzah ! Congratulations, America, all is forgiven. I think I'll celebrate with a nice cup of tea and an episode of Sharpe on blu-ray. That's a very American thing to do, right ?

Independence Day must be very confusing for Puerto Ricans. After all, it was captured from Spain by the Americans in 1898. Not until 1947 were Puerto Ricans given the right to elect their own governor. How then, does this tiny island react on such an occasion ? As far as I can tell, by having a damn good clean. That's what my street appears to be doing anyway. The only other difference is a tenfold increase in the number of extremely obnoxious quad bikes.

On an unrelated note, it's well-known that Americans can't spell, preferring as they do to more often than not omit the "u" from most words, thereby making the spelling more logical, intuitive and wholly wrong. For some reason metallurgy offers particularly strange examples. First, they insist on "aluminum" but at least they have the decency to spell it the way they mispronounce it.

Secondly, and much more bizarrely, Americans can't do soldering. Oh, sure, they spell solder, but pronounce it sodder, which is just baffling. I've never heard of a soddering iron before, but it sounds damn dodgy to me. Good thing I'm not an engineer or I could be in real trouble. Being paid for soddering is surely illegal and likely to get you stoned to death in certain less inclusive countries.

I'll never look at this in the same way again...

CG project : viewing FITS files in Blender

2011-07-03T15:03:00.000+01:00

Warning : this post may contain or allude to content of a scientific nature.

Any technology that is sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, and any technology that is indistinguishable from magic is sufficiently advanced. However, there's another, lesser-known part of this maxim, which is that any technology capable of viewing FITS files is also sufficiently advanced and therefore magical.

What the hell am I blathering about ? Well I have this crazy notion that if data is 3-dimensional, then it should be viewed in 3-dimensions. Neutral hydrogen - HI to its friends - data is a good example, because the data records both position on the sky and recessional velocity (which is a half-decent proxy for distance away from us). Such data is recorded in a Flexible Image Transport System files. What does not currently exist - as far as I'm aware - is a good way of looking at such files in 3D in realtime. Instead, we're reduced to panning through data cubes one slice at a time.

I'm not convinced that this needs to be the case. To that end, I've written a series of IDL and Python programs to import FITS files into Blender. Actually viewing the files in Blender is the easy part. The difficult bit is cleaning the files enough so that Blender can handle them. This is probably more a software than a hardware issue - Blender isn't optimised to handle thousands of different objects and materials, let alone the tens of millions that make up most data files. So for now, this specialised project is only of use in even more specialised cases where most of the data is noise and can be rejected.

However, for those cases where it does work, it works extremely well. Here is the famous "dark galaxy" VIRGOHI21 rendered in Blender, in realtime. It probably could use a minimalist new-age soundtrack, but never mind.

Oh no !

2011-07-01T13:23:00.000+01:00

DAMN YOU GOOGLE !!!

A hex upon thee ! May you die screaming from the Ebola virus and your children be thrown into the Pit of Sarlacc ! I'm gonna break your house, burn your legs down, rape your pets and kill your women and not necessarily in that order !

...

Ahem.

...

The astute reader may note that Google has started their umpteenth attempt at a rival service to that dark Satanic rumour-mill that is Facebook. Except that this time it appears that they really mean it, and when Google puts effort into something it usually wins. OK, so Buzz wasn't anything more sophisticated than having an extra email folder, but that's just an example of Google doing something out of boredom. Of Wave I have no knowledge, save that it existed for a little while and didn't do anything.

The problem is that I'd sooner devour the kittens of the previous post than sign up for Facebook. But the problem with Google is that sooner or later this "plus" thingy will be given to every Gmail user whether they want it or not, as is the way of Google's well-intentioned tyranny. So I've gone and joined it anyway, although whether I stay on it is currently a decision resting on the edge of a knife. It certainly is an easy and convenient way to share stuff with select people...

Aaargh ! Don't do this to me Google ! Why must you implement the very thing I despise most ? Can't we all just go back to writing letters ? Or carrier pigeons, how about them ? Couldn't have the social horrors of status updates and Farmville in a network run by pigeons...

And now I've no choice but to upload some more photos and then drink myself into a stupor to ease the pain.

Look at the widdl' kittens wid their widdl' wegs !!

2011-06-22T13:02:00.000+01:00

Aaargh ! What to do what to do what to do.... the kittens are getting bigger every day, and they're gonna need housing somehow... somewhere. Unless they remain unofficial astro-kitties relying on the generosity of passing astronomers to survive and continue living in squalor.

Now if I owned my own house and planned to be here for 10 years or more I'd take them on without pausing for breath. But I don't, and I don't. Would my landlord let me have pets ? Probably. Would it be a good idea ? Not so sure. It would be cruel to keep them inside all day because my house is helping to hasten to Heat Death of the Universe by somehow generating vast quantities of heat throughout the day. Nor can them stay outside while I'm away, because of the superabundance of dogs.

But... they're so little ! With their little legs and their little tails and their little noses ! But what if I leave in a year or 3 ? They'd have to spend 6 months in quarantine in the US at least, and getting them to Europe sounds nigh-on impossible. And then I'd feel like a schmuck.

Physicists in the Caribbean

2011-06-19T02:18:00.000+01:00

To begin with stating the bleedin' obvious, I've already mentioned physicists many times. What I have not mentioned is the Caribbean, except in the implicit way that it's a big blue watery thing surrounding the island. I think I may have set some kind of terrible, ultra-geeky record by being here 16 weeks and not, until now, having visited the beach. This fact has been rightly greeted with universal disapproval, except by the locals, who rarely bother to go at all.

I've nothing against beaches. But UK beaches offer a choice of sitting on the sand, or sitting on the rocks. You can, of course, paddle, but swimming is for about 10 months of the year something you should only do if you're totally delusional or have lost all feeling on account of a nasty case of leprosy. Consequently, the prospect of a visit to the beach instinctively instills in me a sort of apathetic dread.

However, the Caribbean offers the prospect not only of swimming, but also having something to look at while swimming. The cold green dark murk that is the north Atlantic is replaced with a strange, warm transparent substance, the kind that can only be found in Britain in expensive tropical fish tanks. Creatures - some call them "fish", I think - that would otherwise require a setup that ordinarily only a James Bond villain could afford can be found swimming around as though they own the place. Which, in fact, they do, because the locals rarely visit the beach so miles of deserted sand are the norm.

OK, not deserted. I lied about that bit, but I couldn't think of a good word for "having the population density of Alaska". But put it this way - unlike any British beach, you won't have a problem finding a space. Ever. Good frakin' grief, should a Puerto Rican ever visit a British beach, they'd probably die of sheer anger. The idea you might have to pay in a car park for a few square metres of sand with something approaching ice to swim in would probably cause them to shoot a whole a lot of people, judging by the murder rate here.

In the course of this expedition I learned two valuable lessons :
1) I am the world's worst snorkeler, able to consume the equivalent of the Caspian sea no matter how well-fitting the gear, along with enough salt to... umm.... do really salty things.... yes... that'll do
2) "Enough suncream" is not even an oxymoron. It is a purely abstract concept, a Platonic ideal if you will, it certainly cannot actually be achieved in reality. Hence I now resemble a sort of lobster-human hybrid, except without the protective armour and longevity of the lobster. Or its underwater breathing capability. Basically I've been given all the negative aspects of lobserity, namely, being quite red. But not in the photographs, mercifully.

If it were up to me we'd hold group meetings here

This guy is not a physicist. You can tell by the way he's being really awesome.

OK, there's also a lesson 3) I've really wasted my weekends. I'm not making that mistake again...

The Ocean is Gone

2011-06-13T13:32:00.000+01:00

America is a very great nation. It has given us root beer, the ice cream sandwich and The Simpsons. It may even have helped us out in a couple of world wars, if only to turn up late and complain about the weather. However, we must forgive our colonial brethren their late entries. It isn't their fault that their knowledge of geography is so bad they can't locate the ocean on the map, so I expect they just got a little lost along the way.

Alas, I'm not going on a random anti-American rant. Unfortunately, the above statement is literally true, albeit exaggerated (but only very slightly) for comic effect. For Americans - and Canadians too - have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the Southern Ocean. Even if it's printed in great big letters on the map (as it happens to be in the world map I recently bought from Amazon), they vigorously deny its existence, preferring to claim that the map-maker must've been drunk and/or incompetent.

Such strange ignorance is not some unfortunate oversight on the part of an individual, although that would be bad enough. No, every single non-U.K. citizen is completely unaware of one of the great geographical features of the world.

Reactions to seeing it displayed on a map have been wide-ranging but entirely negative, as though they've just been told the Atlantic is a myth. The most thoughtful retorts have included, "Oceans are between continents, not around them", and, "but where would you set the boundary ?", as if the rest of the ocean is divided by border fences or something.

The majority, however, are more scornful :

"The Southern Ocean ? Where is that, Morrowind ?"

"You need to be able to differentiate between fantasy and reality."
"Where's your Northern Ocean ?"
"He believes in the Southern Ocean, BURN HIM !!!"

OK, I may have slightly made that last one up. Still... crazy people. Apparently the Southern Ocean has a long, chequered and not terribly interesting history of being recognised by whoever it is that recognises these things. So take great care when talking to the Americans. Not only do they habitually use the word "fanny" in completely the wrong way, they also have really weird ideas about the geography of the planet. Maybe there's a causal relation between these two facts, but I prefer not to speculate.

The Bard is Back

2011-06-08T13:42:00.000+01:00

... in a new film by Roland Emmerich, of all things. Yes, the man who graced the silver screen with the immortal line, "Let's nuke the bastards" has now taken it upon himself to direct a film about one of the greatest playwrights of all time. This can only end well. If Michael Bay is the producer, so much the better. Based on his previous works, I imagine it will go something like this :

Bill (last name presently unknown), struggling playwright, is an alcoholic whoremonger who's drunken shenanigans have estranged him from his only legitimate and very irritating son, who has gone to... umm.... Edinburgh, why not, to take part in a Latin spelling quiz with his highly attractive girlfriend. Casting ? Well, Ian McShane as Shakespeare, can't go far wrong there, let's say Shia LaBeouf as his son with just about anyone other than Megan Fox as his girlfriend. Kristanna Loken, perhaps, for no particular reason. And no, I'm not about to sully this blog with sordid pictures of LaBeouf.

It's entirely possible that Kirstanna would be suited to Elizabethan attire, but I prefer not to take that chance.

Bill's antics mean he quickly falls foul of the Church and falls in with sinister astrologer John Dee, played by Christopher Walken. Bill quickly sobers up when Dee, in a power-point presentation masterpiece, tells him that the neutrinos from the Sun are mutating into tachyons and mutters something about the end of the world. Then there are lots of special effects shots where London is blasted by tachyons and the hands on Big Ben (Roland probably does not know when this was built) start spinning wildly. Suddenly Bill himself is hit by a bolt of expensive CGI.

Bill awakens in a frozen landscape. Oh noes ! Our hero has been transported back about 10,000 years when Britain was still covered in ice and sabre-tooth tigers. Now Bill's mission is to trek north across the frozen waste, hoping that somehow he can find his son and find out if he won the spelling quiz or not.

This takes surprisingly little time. Bill impresses the primitive locals with his acting skills and, in a short montage, travels from village to village performing plays in exchange for food and weapons. He makes short work of the sabre-tooth tigers, apparently having a hitherto unknown talent for spear-throwing, about which the locals make some truly awful pun.

Alas, when Bill reaches the site of Edinburgh things take a shocking turn for the worst. His son is trapped in a cave by a giant fire-breathing reptile, which has a curious habit of changing size in each shot. Things are looking grim for our hero, but he is saved at the last minute when a gigantic spaceship descends, shoots the monster, and then promptly leaves without further incident.

Bill is re-united with this son, who turns out to have discovered a mysterious stone ring inside the cave covered in strange Latin symbols (Roland is probably not aware of the differences between Latin and Egyptian). Fortunately, he has been able to decipher them with the help of his highly attractive girlfriend. The ring turns out to be a portal through time, which Bill uses to return to Elizabethan England. His son, however, decides to remain behind, although no-one is quite sure why.

He is wearing a suit on account of being Ian McShane

The movie ends with a shot of the Complete Works of Shake-spear just in case the audience didn't get it, and then everything explodes for no reason.

Physicists (?) of the Caribbean (?)

2011-06-06T13:44:00.001+01:00

I must apologise for the extremely bloggy posts of late. I was much happier writing about the similarities between Xena and Caprica 6 and UK politics as a function of Star Wars, but unfortunately the smaller matter of the real world has made its presence felt in a rather unavoidable way, like... umm.... well, like a very unpleasant thing. Pirates of the Caribbean 3, maybe.

I recently posted that I have little idea as to where I am. In accordance with the Uncertainty Principle, this should mean that I know exactly where I'm going, or what I'm doing, or something. Alas reality declares that I know nothing at all about these things. So much for physics. Fear not, dear reader. all will become clear if you have but a small amount of patience to continue reading.

I also recently wrote that Cornell have lost the right to run the telescope from October onwards, for at least the next 5 years. Details of how our new masters will run things are beginning to trickle down, and the news is only slightly more confusing than trying to watch Inception backwards. So although physicists will still exist in 5 years, and the Caribbean also seems quite likely to still be here, exactly how many physicists will be in the Caribbean is anyone's guess.

The source of this confusion is the announcement that salaries will change from their current simple salary model to 50% salary, 50% soft money. Which means, effectively, that only 50% of everyone's salary is guaranteed - the rest people are expected to come up with by themselves, i.e. by applying for grants. In US universities, apparently this isn't so uncommon, although 25% soft money is more normal. In observatories, it's not normal practise.

Such a shocking announcement has not been widely received with much enthusiasm. This much I can say without fear of reprisal, because it should be blatantly obvious to anyone concerned. Although there is not really much concern - I think - as to job security, people are confused about what their job will entail in the future. Will absolutely everyone be expected to apply for grants, or only some ? Will there be enough time left after proposal-writing to get any science done, or will we run out of cake ?

Now of course, I've only been here 3 months, and I've never even heard of the soft-money approach until a few weeks ago. So there's no point me venturing or even forming an opinion as to whether it's a good idea or not. Nor do I care to reveal who thinks what about which particular aspect of The Plan* or whether it seems better or worse than the Battlestar Galactica spin-off. On face value, the transition plan is probably a mite better than the Cylon Plan, which was to kill all the humans.

* In any case, everyone's opinion is still in flux as we await further information.

It hasn't helped matters that since returning from Boston I've had very low water pressure at home (i.e. no shower), owing to a boring problem with the account. With a wonderfully ironic twist, my office in work is flooding, despite being on the 4th floor, as my shiny new air conditioning unit has sprung a leak. Although most of these problems are being remedied, it can't give a very good first impression to my summer student, who arrived to find the place full of angry astronomers and having to share a flooded office with a smelly Briton and no computer.

Sean Bean wouldn't have tolerated this. On the other hand, as Director his policies of regularly flooding the telescope (and using it to control an EMP satellite to cause the global financial crisis) aren't remembered very fondly here. Under his brutal leadership there was barely any astronomy done at all, and so hated is he that his photograph doesn't even appear alongside those of the other Directors.

I think I've just reached my normally unreachable cynicism tolerance limit for the week (and yes it's only Monday), so to avoid lasting brain damage here is a picture of some kittens a bunch of us have adopted.

EDIT - Addendum : the angry phase is, apparently, fast-fading. Further meetings revealed little or no new information, but certainly managed to ease tensions. Which is good. I could not attend the latest session, preferring instead to attempt to restore the water supply to my house.

Where am I ?

2011-06-04T16:58:00.000+01:00

Just where is it I live, exactly ? Not a difficult question, you might think. That's why we have things like street names and house numbers. Except that such things seem beyond the dreams of most rural Puerto Ricans. Like rural Britain, the place is chock-full of small villages you drive through in under half a minute, all containing a few dozen houses, a pub, a church and/or school. But no dinosaurs, despite appearances.

But that's where the similarities screech to a halt. In Britain the current village you're entering is clearly and reliably signposted. In Puerto Rico this is not so, so you have to pay careful attention to where the signs say the road goes. and then more or less guess when you think you've arrived. Of course, all the locals know which place is which, but they don't seem to grasp the concept of "visitors".

Then there are the places themselves. Naturally the architecture is completely different, the pubs are actually bars, and I have no knowledge of the churches and don't intend to. The schools, then. Each one comes with a speed limit zone (15mph, strictly enforced - if the police are actually around, no speed cameras) clearly marked by solid yellow lines across the road. Fair enough, except that these low speed zones occur in the most unlikely and implausible of places (i.e. on 40mph highways with concrete crash barriers on either side), and in such numbers that the locals must be, shall we say, prolific.

But what if you're not looking for a school ? What if you want to visit a particular house ? Well, you can't, unless you already know precisely where it is. There are no house numbers because there are no street names, because there are no streets. Alright, there might be roads with houses on, but in most villages there's only a single road (and innumerable side-roads, which, I assume, lead to the dinosaur pens) so no-one has seen fit to bother naming them. This is almost as true in Arecibo itself as the rural environs. Although it claims to be one of the larger cities in Puerto Rico, it's actually even less of a proper city than Milton Keynes. What is actually is is a collection of buildings that are in the same place only in the sense that they're all in Puerto Rico.

Things are, in fact, more clearly marked along the motorway, as there are distance markers every 100m. That's every hundred meters. Along a road where exits may occur every 10 miles or so. This is so pointless I can't even see anyone saying, "It seemed like a good idea at the time", because it quite clearly wasn't. Oddly, no-one pointed out that it would have been infinitely more useful to devote the time and energy wasted making these thousands of markers to making street name signs and house numbers instead.

Why would I ever need to know my position so precisely ? I don't understand...

Which leads me back to the original question. In short, I have no idea where I am. I know the village name only because people have told me. I could get a mailbox, but that's a) very difficult and b) costs money. My mailing address is - like everyone else - my work address, for simplicity's sake. Now the really strange part is that my residential addresses for water, electricity and cable are all different. Thank Gods I didn't have to sort that stuff out from scratch, because I'm buggered if I know how to do that.

Find me on Google Earth ! Yeah, right

Don't Call Me Ishmael

2011-05-30T05:00:00.000+01:00

Well, here I am again, back from an unsuccessful whaling expedition out of Boston. Didn't see a single thing, thus missing out on any number of inappropriate Moby Dick quotes. Some people might be a bit mad at spending $50 on a boat trip across the freezing wastes of the Atlantic with a constant gale-force wind and nothing to show for it. Well, I'm not mad, I'm madness maddened. There ! Obligatory Melville quote achieved.

The aquarium did give everyone a replacement ticket, but it's only valid until October (when the whaling season ends). Which means, I suppose, that I'll have to go back to Boston in the next few months. Oh deary deary me, what a terrible shame that is, having to visit a city so civilized that they cut bagels by means of a conveyor belt and a circular saw. They even sell Magners, which gives them at least 10 million brownie points.

Boston is much like any other European city, except that it's a good deal taller and newer. Unlike the Arizona town of Flagstaff (featured on my previous visit to the States), whose "historic" district was built in the laughably recent 1900, Boston has some claim to history, dating back to the 1600's. Lots of stuff happened here relating to the Skirmish for Independence, apparently, and the local colonists have even built an obelisk to remind themselves of the British troops beating them into submission at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

For some reason these trifles of history haven't stopped the Bostonians from having a peculiar penchant for "British" brands. There's even a shop called "Fabulously British" which as far as I could tell sold a lot of outfits in Union Jack design but with flashy colours (except that they'd spell it without a u, thereby proving themselves to remain merely ignorant colonists). Other places seem to venerate British cultural sophistication, leading me to strongly suspect that few of these people have ever visited Cardiff on a Saturday night.

Another bizarre aspect of Boston is that they have an affinity for weird names, some of which are ironic, others just plain odd. There's the 20-storey Little Building, the chain restaurant of Legal Sea Foods (its Illegal counterpart doesn't exist as far as I know), and my favourite, the ABCD University. Apparently this is a school for over-age and/or under-achieving students, but no-one thought this name would be cruel. Strange people.

Despite these oddities Boston appears to me to be about twenty million times more culturally sophisticated than Puerto Rico. It has public transportation. It has parks. It has concert-halls and theaters are abundant. It has cafes which sell tea, although it isn't very good. Maybe they're still dredging it up from the harbour after that little tea-party fiasco.

It's also rich. Really stinking rich. So rich that the AAS opening and closing reception were held in a ballroom, the kind where you'd expect someone to shout "Oh, Mr Darcy !" rather than discuss the funding situation for the James Webb Space Telescope. The rest of the city is also hopelessly trendy and full of hip young people who seem to have walked straight out of an American teen movie. This kind of happy, can-do attitude to life annoys me intensely, but I'll forgive the Bostonians because they've created such a nice place to live.

Well this isn't a science blog and God willing it never will be, so I'm not going to mention the conference at all. My re-introduction to Puerto Rican life began at the airport, when the plane was delayed by an hour because the cleaners hadn't shown up. Back at the San Juan airport, the scheduled taxi driver didn't show up either. Perhaps he was eloping with the cleaners.

In other news, this blog has seen a weird surge in views while I was away. Partly this is due to the WHY ?! post, written at a low ebb while struggling with driving tests. Suddenly its page views have shot up from nearly 0 to 35 at the last count. This, I suspect, is not due to 35 random people suddenly caring about the motivations of an astronomer, but probably because it uses an image from a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and a new one's just come out. Though quite why the total views for this month (something approaching 500) are about double last month's, I've no idea. Still, if ever there was call for an image of Ian McShane, this is it !

Ian McShane through the ages

Ode to the Passing of the Cornell Administration

2011-05-20T14:30:00.000+01:00

One of the dangerous properties of an e-book reader is the superabundance of books available for free, and the staggeringly obscene levels of books at prices so minute they're practically quantum (some sort of Planck Price, it seems). Of course, many of these are by new, struggling and therefore hopeless authors and I'm sure I don't need to read any of them to know that for a fact. But, on the plus side, there's a vast assemblage of expired copyright material, e.g., all of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, etc. Which brings us to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I downloaded the complete works of the said author on a whim, having previously taken a shine to Kubla Khan and The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner. Little did I suspect that this 18th century poet was actually a blogger, and worse, a tweeter. This guy wrote his every waking thought, apparently convinced that there was no subject too petty, boring or utterly unsuitable for a short yet enormously dramatic poem. I was under the impression that writing one's most fleeting and inconsequential thoughts to the world in general was a modern abuse of technology. Oh how very wrong I was.

For instance, for one Coleridge's early works is about none other than his nose. His nose ! For goodness sake, what in the world would make anyone write nasal poetry ? I mean, how poetic can a nose be ? Well, in the hands of Coleridge it becomes an 8 stanza weapon of words with which to beat his readers into confused submission - the first two stanzas will suffice :

Ye souls unus’d to lofty verse
Who sweep the earth with lowly wing,

Like sand before the blast disperse —

A Nose! a mighty Nose I sing!

As erst Prometheus stole from heaven the fire

To animate the wonder of his hand;

Thus with unhallow’d hands, O Muse, aspire,

And from my subject snatch a burning brand!

So like the Nose I sing — my verse shall glow —

Like Phlegethon my verse in waves of fire shall flow!

Which seems to translate roughly as, "You poetry-hating dingbats, I shall blast you all away with my mighty flaming nose !"

Cryptic stuff. Of course, he also wrote about more proper poetic subjects, like the Moon and trees and happy little bunny rabbits and terrible tragedies. All well and good, but he then he also wrote about stuff like universities, protests in the House of Lords, a short climbing trip, the poor quality of suspension on horse-drawn carriages, mathematical problems, and my personal favourite so far - his kettle. All of which are so dramatic they're the 18th century poetical equivalent of Bonnie Tyler on LSD. This is Coleridge on breaking his kettle :

Your cheerful songs, ye unseen crickets, cease!
Let songs of grief your alter'd minds engage!
For he who sang responsive to your lay,
What time the joyous bubbles 'gan to play,
The sooty swain has felt the fire's fierce rage;--
Yes, he is gone, and all my woes increase;
I heard the water issuing from the wound--
No more the Tea shall pour its fragrant steams around!

I guess that's opium for you. Anyway, in the spirit of reporting news items in ultra-dramatic poetic form, Cornell University will cease to operate Arecibo from October. So, here goes...

O Muse who sangest late Cornell's pain

To griefs domestic turn thy coal-black steed !

With much-delayed steps thy administrative transfer must go,

Then over-prompt announcements much confusion sow,

When scatter'd round each dark and deadly malicious news feed,

Thus shalt the hapless rumour mill complain.

While astronomers shall shriek and aeronomers shall howling run !

The telescope is spoilt and Cornell is undone !*

Stanford, thy longful songs, ye unseen crickets, cease !

Let songs of victory your alter'd minds engage !
For they who sang unresponsive to your complete and utter lack of official info,
Shall in time to hear thy will and make it so.

O what whilst thine benefits package dare contain ?
And what retirement options shalt it constrain ?
Not all employees shall e'er again recieve,
A paycheque by a uniform source's leave !
And still, as erst, let favour'd NAIC exist,
Largest ever of the large and oft-shrouded in mist !

* Disclaimer : not necessarily. In fact probably not. All hail out new benevolent masters !

I never claimed it would be any good, but I don't care because now I'm running away to Boston to go whaling. Or maybe it was whale-watching. Probably should check that.

Slacking

2011-05-14T16:16:00.001+01:00

Some considerable time has passed since my previous post, and now we live in a Brave New World where we don't have to worry about electoral reform at all. Phew, I'm glad that one's out of the way with. For a minute there I thought Britain was about to do something sensible. Oh well, better luck next generation. At least Nick Clegg is looking very silly, which is at least slightly comforting.

That's right ! I'm recycling pictures from my own blog out of sheer laziness !

In other news, Jabba the Hut has won immense popularity in Scotland*, seemingly - as far as I can tell - by telling ridiculous lies to the electorate about how great Scotland is. Which is a pity because there are quite a lot of truths he could tell about how great Scotland is, but never mind. In yet more dramatic developments, Osama bin Laden has been shot dead and buried at sea (but not necessarily in that order given how much the official story keeps changing).

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAxuustoxVI

The most promising conspiracy theory so far is that he was probably distracted by watching two extremely rich people get married, which seemed to turn even the most cynical journalists' minds into some sort of rose-tinted glue. I don't quite get why watching two strangers with more money than taste take vows to keep on shagging each other (lest some almighty being smite them with thunderbolts) has this effect on people. Why is it that the only thing we as a nation can rally behind is a bunch of inbred accidents-of-birth putting on a cheesy Disney-esque show ?

I digress, but only slightly. For, having received my social security number, I proceeded with all haste to acquire not one but two bank accounts and buy at once a television, amongst other things. Television ! Sweet nourishing T.V. ! Full of HBO and BBC America (a.k.a. "the wedding channel" but I'll forgive them for also showing Top Gear and Dr Who). Among the other things was also something of the highest order of magnificence, the exalted name of which I barely dare venture to contemplate, lest the precious thing should fade like morning mist back unto the ethereal Amazonian vapours from whence it came.... a kettle. It's been over 7 weeks since I last gazed upon such a noble visage. Finally a semblence of civilisation hath struck itself fast unto my blessed abode !*

* That's what you get for reading Coleridge, but we'll get to that.

It's a Proctor Silex. Not sure what the name means, but I'll bet it involves an evil villain bent on gaining control of the Romulan Senate.

Acquiring the social security number was the easy part. Getting a bank account involved more of a culture clash. For instance, names. The Spanish naming convention is... odd. Something about their surname being their second to last name and having their mother's maiden name in there somewhere. All I know is that it took a rather long time to convince the bank lady that my middle names are only middle names, not my last name. Then I had to persuade her that when I said I wanted to cash a cheque, I did not mean I wanted it converted into cash on the spot (which is illegal).

As I mentioned I eventually ended up with two bank accounts. One of these is a checking account. It does not come with a cheque book and never will. The other is a savings account. It is instant access and has an interest rate of 0.3% per year, so how that helps anyone save money is beyond me. Just to add to the weirdness, the savings account comes with two cards - one I can use in ATM machines and at the store, the other is a Visa debit for buying stuff online, which is why I needed the second account. Buying stuff online is what the 21st century's all about... that and terrorism anyway.

Which, in the final assessment, meant I was at last able to cas... I mean, deposit... my accumulating pay cheques, watch Battlestar Galactica on blu-ray and have a nice cup of tea. And read The Independent on my Kindle. Although if I were in a normal, stable (we'll get to that too) job I'd infinitely prefer enough books to cause a massive disturbance in L-space, this is hardly practical here. Bookshops are few and remote, and the last book I bought on Amazon took 3 weeks to arrive by air mail. Presumably Amazon are now shipping via Zeppelin, or, possibly, carrier pigeon. Whereas on a Kindle books are delivered at relativistic speeds (in fact the proper arrival time is zero) whilst still being on a printed page (it literally is electronic ink).

No wonder it took so long - there are no roads across the Atlantic.

As the diligent reader will have ascertained, there is much other news. Watch this space.

What the tourists don't see (II)

2011-04-27T23:24:00.001+01:00

As promised here is my second exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the NAIC. Previously I ventured into the control room and revealed that is NOT a supervillain's underground lair, much to everyone's disappointment. I also almost completely ignored the enormous dish that defines the whole place, so it's time to rectify that and also, unfortunately, end some more Bond myths.

However, I'm going to start on a much happier note by saying that Bond actually got something right ! Well, near enough anyway. OK, it isn't used to control an orbiting satellite that can electrify entire cities. But it is a bona fide death ray. Umm.... well, only if you're standing in just the right spot, which is about 30cm across and inside the dome, which is 120m up in the air, and only when the radar is working (which is not often) but that's not the point !

The sign is for show. Mostly.

Anyway, that's as close as the Goldeneye came to reality, which is not saying very much but never mind. Having finally had the time, inclination and most importantly camera about my person, it's time to share what's beyond the "no unauthorised personnel" signs once again. Unlike last time, there aren't even any lockless gates to open, because hurting a 300m diameter telescope is quite a difficult thing to do*.

* Although the anchor points from the towers are very well protect by with gates, barbed wire, security cameras and really steep hills.

First up is the overspill fence. There's probably an official term for it but I can't remember that. What it actually is is a 15m high fence filled with a fine wire mesh (that doesn't photograph well) running around the full 1km circumference of the dish. The purpose of this circumfence is to make sure the instruments on the platform are never aimed at the ground itself, because trying to observe the ground won't work, otherwise no-one would have bothered building the dish. Having a giant fence means that even at their greatest elevation, the instruments are always pointed at nice shiny metal.

There's nothing very interesting around the dish but numerous side-roads lead to all kinds of crazy places, like the deprecated helipad and the three support towers. From a distance these can look thin and spindly, but that's only because they're extremely tall. They're actually bloomin' massive.

I thought I'd long since explored all of the funny side-roads but it turns out I was wrong. I'd missed the one with the best view of all, from which nothing is visible except endless jungle with a river in it. Unfortunately no-one was around to sing the Jurassic Park theme with, which made the trek up in the baking heat a colossal waste of time.

Then of course there's today's main feature : underneath the dish, which is about as surreal and unique a place as it's possible to find anywhere. It's even less like the Bond movie than the control room. For starters, the telescope does not hide from passing spy satellites by submerging, which would be very difficult to do because it's not made of concrete and we couldn't afford the electric bills anyway. Nor are the three support towers retractable, which makes them less dramatic but slightly more practical. All the telescope does is sit there, like a big fact lemon. Occasionally, the platform rotates very slowly. And no, I haven't seen anyone from the British government come in all guns blazing in a desperate bid to shut us down (but probably they're all at the wedding anyway).

In fact the dish is made of many thousands of aluminium (no, NOT "aluminum", damn yanks) panels and weighs about 300 tonnes. These are a lot like the panels in a microwave oven - perforated by lots of little holes that are too small to let any important radiation through. So, although it looks perfectly solid from above, from below it's quite transparent.

Surprisingly, not only does the dish not double as a small water-sports center, but they don't even let you slide down it. I imagine that this is because there's nothing to stop you falling through the hole in the bottom, unlike in the Bond movie where there was a handy concrete lip that stopped our plucky protagonists from falling into an uncertain death. Certainly it cannot relate to such activities interfering with observations.

The underside of the dish is indeed an unworldly place. The structure of the dish is clearly visible thanks to the girders between each of the panels which trace neat, continuous arcs overhead. The dish is held under tension (it helps beat thermal expansion) by thousands of cables. It's also stained reddish-brown, so the whole place has a weird sense of industrial grace.

The cables are attached to large concrete cylinders. Surrounding the central flat area, which contains a few small engineering huts for maintenance, is a large drainage ditch into which run many artificial channels. There are also a few abandoned line feeds which used to hang up on the telescope. The place just screams Half-Life 2 mod.

Which brings me to the end of this second venture into the Forbidden Zones. The last picture shows the very center of the dish, which does indeed have a great big hole as in the Bond film, but this is only to allow stuff to be hoisted up to the platform. Sadly there is no great drain that would explain where the water could go if the telescope could submerge, and don't think I haven't looked. Goldeneye was simply not the insightful, intelligent documentary it claimed to be.

An Open Letter to the BBC

2011-04-25T01:58:00.002+01:00

Dear Auntie,

Hi, how's it going ? I recently got myself a big ol' TV, and imagine my delight to find I can watch quite a lot of BBC programs on it despite being 4,000 miles from Britain. Since you have so helpfully blocked BBC iPlayer based on IP address, I'm not in any danger of accidentally downloading an episode of Strictly Come Antiques Roadshow on Ice, which might completely bring down the entire corporation due to copyright laws. No, everything I do hear is nice and legal, as far as I know.

I'm talking about, of course, about BBC America - and also programs you co-produce / sell to other networks, but be patient and we'll get to that in a minute. Firstly, I'd like to thank you for BBC World News, with its global weather forecasts done in 2 minutes or less. I'm not certain who these are aimed at, but I find them thoroughly entertaining, so thank you. However, I'd like to point out that this service was much easier to find via Google search than the Beeb's own website, so I thought you might want to look into that.

I would also like to mention that BBC America is a misnomer, since many of the shows are not made by the BBC at all. Primeval certainly wasn't (it was made by ITV), a fact that does your institution credit, and you should not sully your good name by featuring it on your channel. Nor was Battlestar Galactica, but I'll let that one go because it was good and makes up for Primeval. Unfortunately, Outcasts was a genuine BBC show, and it saddens me that the reputation of Great Britain will suffer as a result of showcasing this televisual excrement to the rest of the unfortunate world.

But I digress. For there is one area in which the global supremacy of the BBC reigns uncontested. While you may from time to time accidentally produce a quality drama, in terms of natural history documentaries good old Auntie can truly look down upon all other networks, confident in her God-given prowess that is nothing short of magisterial. Except, that is, outside of the British Isles themselves.

For it seems that dark and baffling forces are at work whenever you decide to export a show. To my everlasting horror did I learn that the American "version", if I might condescend to call it that, of Planet Earth was originally narrated not by one of the greatest living Britons, but by Sigourney Weaver. Now, this good lady may be a fine actress and even a capable narrator, with a rich and distinctive voice, but to suggest that she could possibly compete with a Knight of the Realm who has been presenting to the good British people for over 50 years truly beggars belief. I am afraid that "Get away from that whale you BITCH !" is simply not going to work, unless perhaps Greenpeace are involved.

However, I have learned of even worse atrocities so horrific that they would make Hitler quake in his boots if he was ever a fan of wildlife documentaries, which he probably wasn't. It seems that the equally well-made successor series, Life, was narrated not by Sir David but none other than Oprah Winfrey. This is so utterly shocking to me that I cannot quite comprehend it. I think my brain has a natural self-defence mechanism that prevents acts of supreme stupidity from registering correctly. All I can think is that you just couldn't afford Jerry Springer.

Unfortunately there is yet another disaster which my brain is forcing me to confront as I witnessed it myself this very evening. In the once excellent series Human Planet, you have chosen to replace none other than John Hurt with some utterly bland American. This I cannot tolerate. I'm going to make this very clear : IT'S JOHN HURT. A man famous for his distinctive voice that lends itself as naturally to narration as is humanly possible.

You have not shot yourselves in the foot on this one - you have had both feet carefully and surgically amputated and had them replaced with facsimiles made of soft rubbery cheese. For my part I cannot see how anyone can be capable of deciding to replace John Hurt, a phrase which should be an oxymoron on a par with replace David Attenborough but never mind, and yet still have sufficient mental capacity as to allow, for instance, breathing.

I am thinking whether I should submit this letter to Points of View, where someone might actually read it - even Graham Norton would do - but I'm hoping it is possible to nominate you instead for an Ig Nobel prize for communications.

Yours in a distant land,

Me.

America - it's a funny old place

2011-04-18T14:10:00.000+01:00

Especially in Puerto Rico. A place where in the space of an hour I've seen people driving go-carts along the main road (while being followed very slowly by a police car), a man galloping down the highway on a horse, and even a person stopping and turning around on the motorway. Not to mention a horse being driven at high speed on the back of a truck - it looked a lot like this :

Such weirdness is but one facet of the underlying oddness of America, a place where even the relatively sane believe that owning a gun is a right. Though in contrast to everywhere else in America, it's much easier to get a permit for a concealed firearm here than an unconcealed one. The rest of America apparently thinks that it's safer for everyone else if they know you have a gun; Puerto Ricans feel that if you're life is in danger it's safer for you to conceal the weapon about your person. Like most firearm regulations, the logic behind this one eludes me. Perhaps they're hoping that in the event of an assault, you can surprise your assailant by suddenly brandishing a gun, probably while saying something dramatic.

By some strange quirk - I can't for the life of me think why - the number of murders here per year is the same as the U.K. No, not per capita. Total numbers are the same - despite the massive population difference. It may be true that if you outlaw guns then only the outlaws have guns. It's also true that if less people have guns then less people get shot. That's called counting. But I digress.

Not that I'm sure what it is that Puerto Ricans have to get so very angry about. After all, you can buy root beer at 89c for 2 litres. That works out to the equivalent of.... drumroll please... 9p per can. That's insane. Not only is it cheaper than milk, it's cheaper than water. But perhaps that's why they're so angry - if you're one of the 50% of the population who cannot abide this sweet, sweet nectar, you're probably quite ticked off about that. Whole wars were fought over opium, so root beer murders seem quite a plausible explanation to me.

There are other food-related oddities. I may have already mentioned the lack of multipack crisps, but I'm going to mention it again because the lack of crisps is beginning to bite. Listen, you bloody colonists*, crisps are supposed to come in small, snack-sized packages, d'ya hear ? Not great bags by the kilo. If I wanted to gorge myself to death on fatty potato I'd be in McDonalds with the rest of you fatsos**. And another thing, they're called crisps, not chips. Get it right.

* Umm, I suppose this doesn't really work for Puerto Rico, which was a Spanish posession, never British. But my comment most certainly holds for the States as well.
** Disclaimer - in fact, I can't in all honesty say I've seen much sign of the infamous American obesity problem over here. However, were I to encounter a McDonalds - which I have not - I'd no doubt find it full of blubbery customers engrossed in being sterotypical.

They also don't have banana-flavour Nesquick - only strawberry and chocolate. I've been addicted to this stuff since I was ten. Giving it up is much worse than relinquishing alcohol (which I'm none too happy about either, but never mind) - it's more like being forced to give up tea, which is unthinkable. Seriously, I'm going to have to buy some online pretty soon.

Pricing of things is also weird, and probably deserves an entire post at some point. For now, with the exception of soft drinks, food is about the same as in the U.K. Amazon's online prices seem to be very nearly the same, allowing for their frequent massive discounts that appear not to apply to all places at the same time. However, the shipping prices have got me bewildered.

For instance, in order to buy True Blood from the U.S.A. it would have cost me about $40 total, or about £25. Thanks to a heavy U.K. discount, I was buy it from Britain for a grand total of £10. So apparently, it's cheaper to produce a show in the States, export it to the U.K., and then ship it back again.

Nor is this an isolated example owing to a freak discount. I bought the expansion to Oblivion from the U.K., simply because I objected on principle to having to pay more to get it shipped from the U.S. The total saving came to about 50%. Okay, since this is dirt cheap anyway this only means I save £5 and it will probably take longer to get here. But that's not the point ! The point is that it can't possibly cost less to ship something from Britain, which is 4,000 miles away, than from the continental U.S., which is only 900 miles away.

Hellooooo ? America...? Remember that counting thing we talked about ?

"VUN thousand miles, ah ah ah...."

Lucky for me though, because I discovered (thanks to an Apollo 13 DVD that was lying around the place) that region 1 DVDs won't play on my Sony laptop, who have with skilfull cunning prevented any workarounds like AnyDVD or Remote Selector from having any effect whatsoever, nor are there any firmware updates available for my drive. Now I don't intend to spend $100 on a second blu-ray player because that would vindicate the evil fat-cat corporate overlords who decided that discs should have regions in the first place. Good grief, this is the 21st century. The idea that what you can watch should in any way depend upon where you are is frankly offensive.

Therefore out of sheer spite I shall continue investing my American dollars straight into the British economy. Except I won't, because I still don't have an American bank account, so I have to spend my existing British money to watch British DVDs of American shows on my British DVD player. Hmm.

I've Got Me A House

2011-04-11T14:25:00.001+01:00

At last I have escaped the clutches of my small wooden hut. Instead, I now live in a small concrete bunker. It's orange. That's the usual style of building over here - build concrete cubes and paint them in bright colours. I don't have a front door key yet, so I have to scramble up the narrow back steps and squeeze in through the back door (naturally, it opens outwards and it just slightly wider than the steps).

OK, it's only a little bit orange. And it's not even that small, just compact. It has all the rooms you'd need (bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, spare room) just stuck together without any unnecessary corridors to get in the way. The rooms themselves are not that much smaller than those back home, if at all.

I chose this one for many reasons, mainly because it's fully furnished - the previous incumbent having had to unexpectedly depart for personal reasons and left all their stuff behind. It's also extremely conveniently situated about 10 minutes drive from work (and 15 minutes from shops) in a small village heavily populated with astronomers, easily availing me of car pooling.

Thus I begin living in Puerto Rico proper, as opposed to the Observatory which is (almost) an entirely different place. For starters, astronomers do not generally get up at 6am. It seems that the only reason the locals do this is because it's vitally important that they ensure their dogs bark as loudly as possible, in order to wake up the chickens so that the roosters will crow on time. Otherwise, how would anyone else know it's time to get up ?

At least I've escaped the night-time screeching of the coquis, for the most part. I planned to offset the early morning noise by staying up late and playing loud classical music to annoy the neighbours, but this probably won't work. This morning I was greeted by the strains of Pie Jesu on one side and some unknown opera on the other. So I suppose that if I want to annoy my neighbours I'll have to either get up even earlier than them - which would defeat the purpose - or play loud rock music, which would also defeat the purpose. Dang.

The environs. Mine's the one on the right. One day I'll be a big shot and have my own plastic chairs.*

* Is it wise to post pictures of my house on the internet ? Yes. It's not as if I can post my address even if I wanted to, not because I don't know it but because there isn't one. In complete contrast with the U.K., a street address is a privilege here, not a right that's assigned to every building automatically. It would be possible to get one, but hardly worth the effort. Even people who've lived here 20 years get all their stuff delivered to work.

Certainly, though, I've escaped the increasingly annoying squeaky floorboards. From here on in it's good solid tiles for me. Since everything is painted white, I've also escaped the gloom of the visitor's hut. Indeed, the abundance of daylight is currently a problem as I am awoken each morning by a combination of noise and blinding light. Noise can be mitigated by a fan to replace the other noises with a relatively pleasant droning sound. But currently, the only thing reducing the light is a paper-thin white curtain.

I can slowly begin to accept the previous resident's lack of air conditioning. The lack of a blackout curtain - which I have already remedied via Amazon - is perhaps understandable given the presence of a small child, who might wake up early anyway. But the lack of some other stuff is just bewildering. For instance, how can you live anywhere for 6 months without a bathroom mirror ? Or oven trays ? I had to cook chips in a cake tin because that's all there is. Or a towel rack ? There's hundreds of towels, but nowhere to hang them. I don't get it.

Particularly odd is the lack of a cutlery draw. When I arrived, everything was in storage, so I've no idea how they managed. I make do by leaving everything in the draining rack - it's this or put it all loose in a draw. There are also no teaspoons, only sporks. They're very nice sporks, but still, they're not teaspoons.

I can haz internet but not spoonz

Oh well. Sunday saw a procession of people leave this little complex in a slow but stately march off to church, or at least I assume it was church. I don't know of any other force powerful enough to compel people to wear the whole shirt/tie/trousers thing in this heat, and then walk around in it. They even wore hats ! Hats ! In 30 degree heat ! Was the 11th commandment, "Thou shalt dress smartly even if it is hot, lest I should smite thee with rabies" ? Crazy people.

That's it for my house-related shennanigans. Next up : finally getting a social security number. And then a bank account.... then many, many, extremely shiny things, like a car.

Fly, my pretties !

2011-04-07T14:38:00.000+01:00

Locals here believe in all seriousness that a monkey is loose in the local village of Esperanza, an otherwise entirely forgettable place. Not just any monkey though. A white one. With wings. I wish that last bit was a comic exaggeration, but this is the same place where people believe the Observatory is using its LIDAR beams to give orders to passing flying saucers. They believe this so much that a few years ago there was even an effort to construct a UFO landing site. I don't know if it succeeded or not.

As you can tell from the pointless monkey counter, I personally still haven't seen any monkeys whatsoever, flying, white, or otherwise. What they do have here are bioluminescent bugs. Before I moved out, I found one at the Observatory, crawling through the undergrowth with green glowing "eyes" as bright as LEDs. Then yesterday I found a firefly flying around my kitchen.

However, the flying/crawling varieties of bioluminesence pale into the utmost insignificance compared to the water-dwelling planktonic variety, Pyrodinium bahamense. Monday saw a samll group of us give a send-off to a visiting student by means of a trip to the bioluminescent lagoon of Fajardo. Frankly, I'm amazed that no-one has previously said to me (to paraphrase the great Bill Bryson), "You've never seen the bioluminescent bay !? You must go at once ! Take my car." Because this, like the Grand Canyon, is something to do before you die.

It started with an hour-long and mostly pointless but obviously mandatory safety talk and kayaking instructions. Then you get in a kayak and start to paddle out to sea. Of course, at this point (9pm) it's entirely dark, so all you have for light are the lights of the small nearby town, which reflect off the sea and clouds, and the navigation lights affixed to each kayak.

So you paddle through the bay, past all the expensive-looking yachts in the harbour, then swing around back toward the coast and enter a wide channel (it's a 4 mile trip, in total, and lasts about 2 hours). On either side there are trees, which is most places overhang so much that the sky above is nigh-on invisible. It's pretty much pitch dark. At this point you start to notice that the water is becoming a little unusual. The wake from the paddles doesn't quite look right. Let some water drain down your arm and you see little sparks trickling down it. It's like something straight out of Star Trek.

This isn't the beginning. Nor is it the introduction or the preface, but probably only the copyright page. Entering the lagoon proper, the concentration of the plankton increases dramatically. Every paddle-stroke unleashes a deep glowing cloud that persists for many seconds. Get some speed up and the v-shaped wave from the kayak becomes a glowing green thread. Throw some water and the surface of the lake erupts into pale green fire.

There are pictures of this on the net. I won't reproduce them here, because they're as far removed from reality as Harry Potter is to Gandalf. In terms of colour, most of them are simply wrong. In terms of brightness, this is probably impossible to properly capture technologically, because the human eye processes light in a very different way to any camera. What it really looks like, in terms of colour and brightness, is the luminous paint used in those stick-on glowing stars.

An unexpected bonus is provided by the abundance of wildlife. Anything disturbing the water activates the plankton, so fish are clearly seen as glowing silouhettes. They look eerily like Goa'uld. In places shrimp are found in shoals by the thousand, so hit your kayak with your paddle and see something like the flash from an underwater nuke, from which stream away many hundreds of glowing shrimp.

Another unexpected bonus is the wind and rain. The wind causes waves, each crest of which glows. Likewise the rain causes thousands of glowing splashes. This is one of those things that isn't like anything except itself, unless you have to hand a really large quantity of luminous paint.

"When the stars threw down their spears,

And water'd heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see ?

Did I just dare quote poerty ?"

Well, yes I did. I've no idea if William Blake every witnessed a bioluminescent lagoon, but I suspect that if he did he would have died of sheer melodrama. So, in a nutshell, get thyself to Puerto Rico at once and visit the lagoon. It's quite good.

Lessons for Those Planning a Physics Conference

2011-03-29T04:10:00.000+01:00

Last Sunday-Tuesday saw a pulsar conference in honour of 5 famous pulsar astronomers. The trouble is that, like all astronomers, they're only famous to other astronomers. In fact the level of specialisation is much higher than that : pulsar astronomers are only famous to other pulsar astronomers, and you can substitute practically anything for 'pulsar' and it will still hold true. Some whiz produced a HR diagram for astronomers, and it deserves to be reproduced everywhere, so here it is :

Of course, measuring fame in Google hits is a tricky thing. Consquently these fab five were all completely unbeknownst to me, despite having made breakthroughs in pulsar research for longer than I've been alive. Which just goes to show that fame is a fantastically fickle thing. From the diagram we may infer that there are several ways to achieve fame through astronomy (but the majority of us never bother).

Strategems include :

Being really charismatic and writing a movie which stars Jodie Foster (Carl Sagan)
Getting ludicrously angry when someone tells you Pluto is a planet (Neil deGrasse Tyson)
Have a computer talk for you (Stephen Hawking)
Commenting on absolutely everything (Michio Kaku)
Lookin' weird (Brian Cox)
Being a really, god-awful dull radio DJ (Myleene Klass)

None of our fab five have adopted any of these approaches, which is probably a good thing. That does not, however, detract from their fame within their own fields. And as such, that means they deserve their own conference. Wooo ! Conference !

Now the last conference I went to was in the far-distant land of Hertfordshire. It was noteable for several things. Firstly, it was in Hertfordshire, which is little more than a glorified motorway service station, where instead of tacking on a Premier Inn someone decided to add a university instead. In other words, it's really dull.

Choose your conference venue

Then there was ESA bigwig David Southwood, who gave a speech noteable for its bigoted, racist slanders against... well, everyone really. That was educational. By the end of it I was feeling racist towards the British for allowing this man to go anywhere near Europe. However, it was utterly trumped by another ESA bigwig whose name escapes me but who had a thick Austrian accent. "Haartfodshaer" never sounded so good. Thanks, Arnie, you've saved the conference.

And yes I'm aware that the last statement could be constituted as casual racism, but don't talk to me about that until you've heard a lecture by Southwood.

Anyway, this conference had none of that. What it did have was, for starters, a much better venue. Arecibo does not aspire to be anything other than a radio telescope. Consquently what you get is a radio telescope with a visitor center attached. Although the sources of entertainment here may be even more limited than Hertfordshire (a place which has stalls that sell cups of corn - not popcorn, just corn), they're far, far better at exploiting those resources that they do have.

For starters they are very liberal with their free food, which always helps. Especially when that extends to ice cream sandwiches and root beer. Sensibly, there were tea-making facilities provided within the auditorium itself. Which also has a door that opens onto one of the best views of the dish it's possible to see - something which never gets old and certainly trumps anything Hertfordshire has to offer. Not even the shopping center can compete with that.

The highlight was definately the evening's entertainment, which consisted of a free bar (and more food) by the pool. In tragic defiance of probability, no-one fell in. This was followed by an observing session. Never before have I seen 50-odd drunken astronomers and students crowding the control room (along with with two guitarists and a quatro player) listening to and watching a dead star make a speaker vibrate.

So that's how you hold a physics conference. Forget the media stars, pick some people everyone's genuinely impressed by instead. Then make them gorge themselves with food, ply them with alcohol, get them all vaguely trying to do some science, and if possible push at least one of them in a pool. You won't get famous but you won't be unpopular either.

After the Storm

2011-03-28T03:06:00.000+01:00

In the last few days the temperature has risen from a pleasant 23 C to a stinky 30 C. Worse, the humidity has soared, so now I have to breathe soup (and the office air conditioning is still broken, so there's not much relief). This leads to wholly unremarkable thunderstorms. But it turns out that these bring compensation, though not the after-thunderstorm freshness you might expect. No, what you get here is fog. It doesn't do a damn thing to the temperature, but it does look like the kind of ground-hugging swirling mist a horror director would kill for. Such a sight is this fog that I even forgot to be cynical for several minutes.

What the Tourists Don't See (I)

2011-03-22T12:38:00.000Z

Or, "The Welshman Who Walked Up a Hill and Then Walked Back Down the Exact Same Hill."

In most tourist attractions that are also in some way workplaces, there are inevitably places you can't go. Even most castles will have various places that are off-limits, in case some imbecile should trip and stub their toe. And of course everyone knows that the off-limit places are where they keep the really good stuff that's just too awesome for the public to see, right ?

Well in the case of Arecibo this is really true, apart from the warehouse which is just like any other warehouse, anywhere. However, there are lots of other cool places. There's the receiver lab, where unearthly creatures (some call them "engineers") practise the dark arts of actually building things, the helipad (so far as I know it was used only once, when the governor of Puerto Rico came to visit) which has an impressive view, and of course the "I am inveenceebahl !" control room.

Alas this is exactly what it does not look like. There's no big electronic world map, no crazy Russians (well there was one Russian once, but he worked here and wasn't crazy, or at least no more so than anyone else) or armed guards, and amazingly it's all on one level. It's also rather smaller, about 20x5m I should say. Nor does it have any tanks full of explosive fuel or even liquid nitrogen.

It's got a stove though. And a CD player, with a stack of CD's no-one ever listens to. Oh, and a drinking fountain.

Someone's made this rather nice panorama, which gives a more accurate feel for the place than (dare I say it) the Bond movie. It's rather old now though, because all the monitors are black and are flatscreen affairs. For some reason all the computers here are Dell, which possibly explains why the radar keeps breaking.

http://www.qedata.se/bilder/panoramor/arecibo-kontrollrum.jpg

Anywho, there are many other interesting off-limit places to explore. Today I shall examine the latest addition to the facility, the 12m dish. If it were up to me I'd call it the Severnaya telescope. Hmm, perhaps I'll suggest this at the next staff meeting. Or maybe not.

Some people may be wondering what on earth benefit a 12m telescope can bring to a facility which already has a 305m dish. Does Puerto Rico have an obsession with radio telescopes ? Perhaps they're trying to get one of every size.

This rather adorable little dish lives on top of a tremendously steep hill, which is accessed through not one but two intimidating gates with DO NOT ENTER SIGNS. It's almost a disappointment to find that neither of them are locked. Indeed this is impossible, because neither of them have locks. Weirdly, off to the left of this photo is a small path which as far as I can tell just goes into the jungle, but is obviously used regularly by someone*.

* Or something. El Chupacabra, probably.

Beyond this gate there is a great deal of up.

Then there is some more up until the telescope, which is difficult to photograph properly because it sits on a rather small platform perhaps 30m across.

This rather exhausting little trek is rewarded not so much by the telescope itself - which sadly is not a miniature version of Arecibo, missed opportunity there - as by the spectacular views. It's the first telescope I've seen which has a sea view, which after all is only 10 miles away.

So after this I went back down again. At which point I began to feel that maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. Ironically, walking up a ~30 degree slope is far easier than walking down it. The problem is that one slip and the world would be quickly find itself short of one short radio astronomer.

Which was the end of this particular little excursion. Not perhaps, the most exciting in history. All I did was walk up a hill and walk back down again. But now you know what lies beyond the intimidating signs. In the coming weeks I'll show more of these top secret locations (I should be on Wikileaks) including underneath the dish (that's right, it's not made of concrete - Bond lied yet again !) and with any luck on top of the platform (the thing what where Sean Bean fell off).

You don't know what I'm not missing

2011-03-17T12:47:00.001Z

But I do. It would be easy to write a list of the things I am missing, but it would also be quite depressing so I won't do that - yet. Better to concentate on the things I've escaped from, like Emperor Cameron and Darth Clegg. And Jeremy Kile. Oooh, and David Dickinson ! Never again shall his wrinkly orange head soil my innocent eyes.

But first and foremost - laundry. I spend the last few months doing laundry even single damn day. It's tedious.... to the extreeeme ! But not any more. Now I only have to do this once a week or less ! And I only have to do my own laundry, not 5 other people's, so no more odd socks for me - ever. In theory.

Now I was intending to put here a picture from the net of some huge, record-breaking mound of laundry (lol laundry ?), possibly one collapsing under its own gravitational field. However, a Google image search for "epic laundry" does not, as I anticipated, result in images of said laundry piles. No, what you actually get is the following :

Which I suppose could be called epic but in very much the wrong way for my purposes here. I certainly wouldn't be complaining about laundry if for some unknown reason it involved a naked Shakira. Perhaps this lolcat will put things right :

So then, onto pugs. This creature is a squat, insane brick that runs around at impossible speeds bumping into things while emitting sounds no other earthly creature could make except while having an angry nauseous cat rammed down its throat while on fire. It's just possible, I suppose, to like one of the things. Not four. Certainly not all at the same time. Now if I find any piles of poop on the floor, I won't have anyone else to blame.

Manual cars. I've said it before and I'll say it again, they all suck.

Roundabouts. They suck so hard that Dyson is jealous.
I cannot find a funny of James Dyson. The man's always so damned happy. Perhaps that's the key to lasting emotional fulfilment, inventing a machine that gives a good suck ?

Driving lessons/tests. No more of them for me ! Ahahahahah. No longer do I have to check my friggin' blind spot when moving off in a perfectly empty street. Or have someone ask me daft questions about where the handbrake is or how to check the lights are working. Or pay people money not to give me a license.... yeah, that was fun.

Overheating. Ironic but true. People kept insisting on having the heating on all the time, for no other reason than to annoy Greenpeace/polar bears as far as I can tell. In a weird twist of fate, heating here is patently unnecessary while it's relatively simple to remain cool.

Mess. I may live in a small wooden hut on stilts 10 feet high (no, I don't know why it's on stilts, especially as it's on the top of a hill) but at least it's clean and tidy. On a related note, it tends not to poop its own pants or make me watch fascist cartoons about magical happy pigs every evening.

A Trip to the Shops

2011-03-12T19:51:00.000Z

Compelled by hunger and enticed with the offer of accompaniment, I finally decided that I could no longer live on cafeteria sandwiches in the evenings. There's only so much turkey the human body can handle before it gives up. Now since the observatory is several miles from anywhere and even further from actual civilization*, there are few options besides driving. Which is, after all, what I've spent the last uncounted months doing in order to get this blasted job anyway.

* Definition : place that sells things which are useful but unnecessary, like coaster holders.

While I've previously speculated that driving a car with all its controls mirror-flipped and on the wrong side might not be such a good idea for a nervous driver such as myself, I'm happy to report that I was wrong. Firstly, having everything mirror flipped doesn't really alter anything. You're still looking in the same mirrors; the only real difference is that the blind spot is on the opposite side. And this doesn't really matter anyway, except when changing lanes. In fact, the mirror-flipping and wrong side of the road more or less cancel each other out.

There are at least two other factors :

1) NO ROUNDABOUTS
Good God we Europeans are retarded, thinking that having everyone drive around in multi-lane circles without markings, traffic lights and directed by massively complex signs is a good idea. To say nothing of double roundabouts, which are so preposterous as to beggar belief. WHY ?!?! What in holy hell possessed road designers to think them up ? The most likely explanation - it seems to me - is that there was a rogue eugenicist at the planning office, trying to kill off everyone not clever enough to navigate them.

2) AUTOMATIC CARS
Wow. These things are awesome. What in God's name did I waste my time with manuals for ? They're rubbish. I've heard people complain that automatics aren't fun, but these are probably the same people who think that sorting socks makes for a lively Saturday night's entertainment. In an automatic you don't have to worry about stalling - ever. Going up steep hills (of which there are very many indeed around here) this makes life approximately 6 billion times easier, and safer too. Gone is the need for clutch control - because there's not clutch - which makes moving off far simpler, and selecting reverse gear is no longer like trying to open a Chinese puzzle box.

If you still think automatics are not fun, then please explain how - exactly - a car that never stalls is not fun.

Not that this makes the driving process a cakewalk (nearly so, but not quite). For we have once again the Puerto Rican factor to contend with, which means that the other drivers are all mad. They seem to think that speed limits are more like guidelines (actually, near the observatory this isn't a problem because the limits are too low anyway but it's more of an issue on major roads). Changing lanes is done as fast as possible and without warning, and they probably think the two-second gap rule is something you're supposed to avoid. And the last time I was here some random drivers decided to smile, wave, and film us repeatedly with a camcorder stuck out of the window.

I'd like to take a Puerto Rican driver, put them in a manual and send them round a double roundabout. That'd teach them, but possibly not for very long.

This really is a story that doesn't go anywhere, because then I went shopping. What shall I tell you ?* I bought some food. Much of it incredibly similar to UK food, although ready meals and processed food are less in evidence. Most of the labels are thankfully in English and Spanish, so it'd be quite difficult to accidentally end up eating rat poison. So I managed to get food and not kill anyone - bonus.
* To use a Marco Polo phrase.

The Curse of the SS

2011-03-09T12:37:00.000Z

I've now commenced the process of actually living in the US, as opposed to temporarily inhabiting a hut that happens to be in the US. The first part of this process was getting a visa. The second part is getting a social security number, which has to be done here in person. This magical number, as far as I can tell, is a bit like National Insurance but way more important. For starters you need it for a bank account, which would be nice because then they'll pay me some money and I could move out of my little jungle hut.

I guess I could withdraw money from my UK account and move out sooner, but there's not much point. You probably need a social security number (if I call it an SS number would that be offensive ?) to buy a car, because you need it for health insurance, life insurance, and pretty much everything really. And the first month on site here is free, so may as well take advantage of that.

Unlike a visa the process of getting an SS number is fairly painless (so far, anyways). You only have to fill in a single one-page form, answer a few simple questions ("Have you ever [done such-and-such] in the US ?" - answer always no) and show them a load of documents (passport, birth certificate, visa, etc.). Moreover the Americans have devised a system that's fiendishly clever that just would never have occurred to anyone British : if you have an appointment you don't have to queue*.

* However, there is also the Puerto Rican factor to contend with, which means that to get an appointment you can try ringing them but this won't work, so you have to actually turn up to book an appointment. Fortunately the HR people here - like everyone else - are so lovely they did this for me.

Alas it transpires you can't actually apply for an SS number until you've been in the US for 10 days. This is another one of those weird post-9/11 security measures. Consequently I won't get this magical much-vaunted number until the end of the month. However, to offset the bureaucracy slightly, next time I can just turn up and they promise not to ask me any more questions. But they still have to do a background check, which takes more time (so what was the point of the visa then ?).

But the best part of the process was the lady processing my application. Having a Welsh name causes a certain amount of confusion among foreigners who can't even point to Wales on a map and have only seen the word written down. I mean this literally. For example, on the way in the taxi driver asked me where I was from. Naturally I said, "Wales".
Blank look.
"Err... Britain."
Nope, still nothing,
"Ummm.... the U.K. ?"
"ohh...." he said quietly, in way that very obviously meant, 'I've no idea where that is but I think I may have heard of it, once, and I'd better feign knowledge in case I seem terribly ignorant.' To my lasting amazement, the guy had no real clue where the U.K. is, a country 20 times more populous than Puerto Rico and just a teensy weensy bit more influential on the world stage.

Some people. We went to all that trouble conquering everyone and now they don't even know where we are.

Which meant there was only one option left. Feeling as though I'd soiled myself, I said, "Oh alright, England then." - "Aaaahh !" Realisation dawned at last. A little part of me had died, but at least he had some - albeit incorrect - inkling of where I'm from.

So you can imagine the confusion an actual Welsh name causes given the extent of the local's geographical knowledge here. Back to the SS office. In this case the exchange went as follows :

"So you're first name is...

[pause, blank look]
...
[look that clearly says, "this is entirely unpronounceable"]
....
[no this can't be real]
...
[what the... 4 letters can't be this difficult, surely]
....
[quick he's waiting whatdoido whatdoido !]
..."

No way was I going to prompt anything. It's far more fun to see what people come up with on their own, and I wasn't disappointed. At this point most people finally decide to go for broke and say anything -popular options so far have included Rhiss, Russ, and even Rice. This woman, however, was completely stumped, and finally opted for basic spelling : "R, H, Y, S ?" The fact that she looked exactly like the old woman from Monsters Inc. only made things better.

I really wish I'd said "Yes, that's right, my name is R, H, Y, S, it's what all my friends call me. It's actually an acronym for Really Hot Young Stud." Or possibly Really Huge Yellow Submarine... or Reconstructing Historical Yeti Songs... so many missed opportunities. Oh well.

First Week

2011-03-07T12:18:00.000Z

So I've managed to survive my first week on this weird jungle island. And although not much has happened I'm going to write about it anyway.

Things are not so bad. For starters the funny little visitors huts may not be the most spacious or quiet places to live, but they do have decking, and because these are science huts the veranda comes equipped with power sockets and an ethernet connection. Finally a long-cherished dream can be realised : the ability to play Oblivion while being outside... I'm no longer stuck inside behind a screen all day ! Now I can be stuck outside behind a screen all day ! Wooo ! GO ME !

Decking + ethernet = awesome

Since this is a jungle it features an abundance of wildlife (besides the damnable coquis), mostly some rather drab-looking birds and cute little lizards. They do have hummingbirds, but these are rarer - I only saw one in my 7 weeks I spent here previously. There are also larger lizards (and big ugly frogs too) but I haven't managed to photograph any yet. And no, there are no monkeys. There's now a monkey counter in case this state of affairs should change. It won't.

Helpful hint : click to enlarge

Not that there's anything particularly remarkable about an abundance of wildlife. My garden had more. No, seriously, it did. We had squirrels, rabbits, hedgehogs and woodpeckers and ponds full of frogs and fish which meant there were herons, and then there were the cats, dogs, and (occasionally when the gate broke) horses. And not so very far away there were foxes and badgers. It was practially Disney out there, only with less anti-semitism.

The observatory itself is also quite nice. I doubt there are many others which have a basketball court and a swimming pool. Not that I've ever seen anyone using the basketball court and doubt I ever will. No-one ever heard of an all-scientist basketball team, and let's face it, "sports science" is a bit of an oxymoron as far as real scientists are concerned.

Sadly, the pool is not as inviting as it may appear. It's unheated and I managed to take this photograph during the 20 minutes of the day when it gets any sunlight. Consequently it's actually very cold - certainly colder than British heated swimming pools and much, much colder than the Caribbean sea. That's not me being cynical either*; most people here don't use the pool because it's too cold, so there.

*For once.

I suppose I'll be violating some sacred British custom if I don't report on the weather. Well, unlike the pool, it's warm. OK, very warm. But surprisingly, it's not always that warm. In fact some nights it gets rather cool, probably because this place is well inland and 240m above sea level. Annoyingly I don't have any thermometer to say just how cold it gets, but the coldest ever temperature in Puerto Rico was 4 C (in the town of Aibonito at 730m altitude). Provided you stay inside during the heat of the day, dress sensibly and don't move around much (or it's cloudy), the weather could even be described as quite nice*.

* However if you don't follow these guidelines then you will rapidly find the weather is not so much oppressive as it is crippling in a trying-to-breathe-steam way.

It also rains here, even though it's the dry season which is supposed to last through April. I've been here a week and it's rained 3 times, twice at an unremarkable level, once torrentially for several hours. "Torrential" hardly does it justice. Since all things can and must be compared to Jurrasic Park, remember that scene just before the T-Rex attack where Alan Grant fills his bottle by holding it outside the car ? Well, it's like that, only very much louder, since these little huts have thin metal roofs. It literally roars.

So that's Puerto Rico for you. A surprisingly cold, damp and hilly little island in the Atlantic where it rains a lot... hey, wait a minute....

First Day

2011-03-03T11:35:00.000Z

Well, here I am again, on this funny little island full of sunshine and frogs. After escaping from the plane I was whisked away by taxi straight here, arriving at about 1am. Naturally, after 24 hours of travelling and even more without sleep, I was far too tired to sleep. Isn't jet lag fun ?

Consequently the next day was something of a blur. Where to begin ? Well after arising from my lack of sleeping I headed to the much-feared canteen, a place I have often espoused as having as much to offer the culinary world as Colonel Gadaffi does to good government*. Astonishingly, thus far the place has not lived up to its previous standards, which is a very good thing indeed.

* Possibly if the Colonel was to swap places with the chefs for a week the world would be a happier place.

The bacon no longer splinters ! The rice has gone imperial (it's now served by the pound, not the kilo), the chefs have been alerted to the existence of animals other than chickens ! THEY SELL ROOT BEER. The King of Beers. At ridiculously low prices.

I then spent most of the day meeting and re-meeting people. Much time was spent in Human Resources, which es moi importante para mi por que it will eventually give me a nice shiny paycheck. Which involves getting a social security number and a bank account. They also gave me forms about health insurance (dirt cheap and simple), life insurance (here my brain melted) and investment opportunities for retirement plans (here the rest of my brain slithered away).

Umm... wow. Gosh. Umm.... I didn't plan to be here quite long enough to retire...

These things are slightly scary and probably only for proper grown-up people, so enough about them. Far more importantly, I got my own office. Wooo ! Of course, it's now my responsibility to fill it with toys, because that's what offices are for. The last one had a desktop trebuchet, which will be pretty tough to beat. I've got work to do...

At some point in the day I wandered back up to my little hut where I was able to get a good night's sleep, finally. This was partially because of the a.c., which is loud but very effective. Things were not helped, however, by my two other Puerto Rican hates which haven't changed at all.

The first is the frogs. One of the national animals of Puerto Rico is the coqui frog, so named for its distinctive "co-qui" croak. These 2cm long bastards are present by the million and each one is as loud as a person whistling. As far as I'm concerned they should all be squashed, electrocuted and gassed, but not necessarily in that order.

The second factor is the climate. I'm always amazed and disgusted with people who think a tropical climate is some sort of mythical magical paradise. What's wrong with the world ? It's horrible. Daytime temperatures here are over 25 C with humidity that you'd expect somewhere tropical. This isn't paradise. This is bearable. Still, night temperatures here are actually quite pleasant when the sun goes down - about 16 C - though the humidity remains annoying.

Well, that's about it for now. Unless you want to hear tales of my bravely re-drafting chapters of my thesis into publishable papers. Which is unlikely.

Flight of the Concourse

2011-03-02T12:00:00.000Z

Soo.... the banner's changed. Again. Which can only mean one thing - I've actually defied the odds and made it all the way to the Caribbean. Hurrah ! Now I can actually write a travel blog, which is what I intended to do 6 months ago...

First, the flights. US Airways baggage policies are weird and make no sense. From their website it seems a simple matter of paying an overweight baggage fee (since I plan to be here at least a year and can't be bothered shipping stuff, the need for going overweight is a no-brainer).

Alas the website has much in common with Nick Clegg, in that its promises bear little resemblance to fact. "It's 38 kgs !", said the attendant, "You're simply not allowed to travel with more than 35." Which then became a remarkably complicated series of instructions to buy another bag (£70), and get the weight in each down to 23 kgs. The net result of which is that I ended up buying a second case, spreading stuff into the two cases (but not taking anything away), and not having to pay a surcharge - even though I'd actually increased the net amount of stuff I took on the plane...

Spectacularly baffling. Unlike the Arctic, which is just spectacular. The photos do not do it justice, but here's one anyway. These are over land, somewhere. The sea ice is equally impressive, because it looks exactly like giant marble. Everyone should see the Arctic from a plane at least once.

Luggage aside, US Airways are actually very good. What they lack in in-flight entertainment (which is to say, everything) they make up for in food (beef that tastes like beef ? that's more than Virgin ever manage) and seat quality. Unlike Virgin, they've realised that passengers can make their own entertainment for 8 hours, but not their own seats. Bravo.

On landing in Philadelphia they proceeded to shoot themselves in the foot in my eyes by having my connecting flight at a completely different gate to the one on my ticket (which I hasten to point out they'd printed that very day). I'd already been delayed at customs by the world's slowest queue, so to reach the advertised gate I'd gone on quite a brisk 20 minute walk.

I then discovered a surprisingly few number of people waiting at the gate, and soon found that it was because the plane was not there at all but at a gate on the other side of the friggin' building. In a blind panic I caught sight of a clock which said 5:30. The flight left at 5:45. So, whilst wearing a jumper and jacket and carrying a hefty laptop bag too full to carry them, I achieved near-Rincewind velocities through the crowded airport terminal.

This was made more difficult because the gate numbering system was obviously designed by a mathematician - specifically, one who has a weird grudge against arithmetic sequences. One might naively expect the gates to go 1, 2, 3, 4.... they don't. Well actually they do go 1, 2, 3, 4, but that's just a decoy because then they go 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 7, 8.... where the hell's 12 ?? I NEED GATE 12 AND I NEED IT 40 SECONDS AGO !!!

Gate 12 turned out to be cunningly hidden somewhere behind gate 14, for no reason. By now drowning in my own stinking sweat I discovered that I'd completely misread the earlier clock. It was still only 5:20. Or equally possible is that I achieved FTL capability and arrived before I left...

I shall return to the subject of flights in due course.

Look at me...

2011-02-27T21:18:00.000Z

... still talking when there's science to do...

On Referendums

2011-02-24T19:17:00.003Z

Referendums are like buses. You don't get any for years, then two come along at once - and I'm gonna miss both of them, because I missed the deadline to nominate a proxy. Damn you, oceans !!

First up, more law-making powers for the Welsh Assembly. Hah ! I don't think so. I follow politics avidly*, and I can't even remember the first Minister's name. If he's that ineffectual then it's self-evident that more powers would be utterly wasted. Say what you like about David Cameron (this won't take long as he's entirely unlikeable), at least I can remember his name.

*I even watched the Assembly live, once. What can I say ? It's not nearly as thrilling as live chess.

Which is a shame, because Welsh independence is a nice idea in principle. But then so is eugenics*. The last time we had any real independence was more than 700 years ago and we wasted it with petty infighting. Alas little has changed, and our current politicians are not quite as competent as, say, a steaming pile of rat faeces.

*Trying to improve humanity is a laudable goal. Unfortunately, trying to do this through population controls is the worst idea since the Holo... oh....

It's not that they haven't done anything useful. It's just that what they have done has been of such little consequence that I'm chronically unable to care. They also inhabit a really odd looking building and the Assembly chamber has computers at every desk. Why ? Government should be about really loud, angry debates, not tweeting to your friends about reaching level 80 in World of Warcraft. Since they seem to have forgotten this, here's a helpful guide as to what's politics and what isn't.

So unlike the last Welsh rulers, I'll happily pay homage to our English overlords if it means being part of a greater whole. Better to reign* in Hell than serve in Heaven**. Long live our tyrannical English masters !

*Or at least have a small voice
**Though this analogy doesn't really hold, because even the most angry Welsh patriotic idiot wouldn't say the whole of England is a hellish place or think that Port Talbot really qualifies as even slightly divine. Still, John Milton was good at the whole "poetry" thing, wasn't he ?

The second referendum is about the alternative vote and is far more interesting. It'd give us a more proportional government, but lead to more coalitions - assuming the Lib Dems somehow manage to maintain anything like their current share of the vote. But that's OK, because I personally have already solved this problem so as long as people are paying attention then it will be fine.

But they're probably not, which gives me a headache. If I vote yes, we'll get a fairer voting system but no real control over who's in charge, because there'll be a coalition every time. Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose of democracy ? But if I vote no, we're stuck with our current system where there are gross differences between a party's share of the votes and its share of the seats, which can't possibly be fair.

Here's an idea - let's do both. We've got two - count 'em, TWO - houses after all. And if we were to have true proportional representation for the House of Lords, we wouldn't even need a separate vote, or anything as complex as ranking all the candidates - we could just use the share of the vote for the House of Lords. Seemples.

Some more words

2011-02-21T23:16:00.001Z

Perhaps the previous post require more exposition for random visitors. Perhaps it doesn't, but it's damned hell going to have some anyway.

I passed my driving test on the 5th go, which makes it considerably more difficult than a PhD viva (which I got on the 1st go). It's also vastly more expensive. Passing a viva costs £162 to print out 3 hardback copies of the thesis, but they've paid you £37k by that point anyway. Passing a driving test on the 5th go costs £515 plus ~£400 for lessons to take the bloomin' tests in the first place, and no-one has paid you anything. Booo.

The lesson from this is to never, ever learn to drive. Get a doctorate instead. It's much easier and comes with a salary.

Despite shaking so much you could use my legs to break through reinforced concrete I managed to get away with only 2 minor faults. The only nearly serious thing the examiner thought I did was be too close to the center of the road while waiting at a junction. My instructor disagreed, which goes to show the test is, as I've previously postulated*, not entirely subjective.

*That would be a good name for a band...

I spent most of the test convinced I'd failed. First my parallel park seemed to leave me about 16 miles away from the kerb, but in fact it didn't. Then I thought I found myself waiting for a life-age of the Earth at every junction and thought I would surely accumulate so many undue hesitation's that I'd rival Clement Freud on Just a Minute. But the bit where I gained deep and unyielding conviction that I'd failed occurred at a roundabout, where I had to go round twice because I missed an exit.

There ain't nothing wrong with this, except that the examiner flicked the indicator back up to make sure I had a right signal on. I was told that if they touch the wheel, that's it. It seems there's a handy loophole in this one : the indicator stick isn't actually part of the wheel.

Ironically, it didn't ever occur to me that the one nearly-serious thing I did would be any kind of fault whatsoever. Ordinarily this would leave me to become so bitter and twisted with annoyance that I'd compose a sonnet to the evils of over-zealous examiners. Something like :

There once was a driving examiner,

Who couldn't rhyme anything with examiner.

So he decided one day,

To give up poet-ray...

And that was the end of the examiner.

Ummm....

See. That's what would have happened if I'd failed. I'd destroy this blog with Vogon level poetry. Instead, I shall have to pronounce by examiner the Nicest Man in the World and award him some sort of shiny medal. Now I just have to worry about passing the test again in a foreign country...

Two words

2011-02-17T23:24:00.002Z

EPIC WIN.

Nick Junior Will Turn Your Kids Fascist

2011-02-15T10:37:00.000Z

Seriously. I've watched this channel enough to become convinced it's run by a master of subliminal messaging who's intent on indoctrinating children into a sinister neo-nazi cult. The ultimate goal of which is to turn humanity into homogeneous, peace-loving pansies where we'll all kept in check by dark - possibly alien - occult powers.

OK, I tend to only watch the Bedtime session, because the target audience is in nursery most of the day. But bedtime is when they're at the most vulnerable ! Surely we should expect good, wholesome family entertainment at a time like this. Stories about happy little animals who dance around and don't do anything. Not so.

The evening's brainwashing typically begins with a large dose of Peppa Pig. This tells
stories of the adventures of a family of pigs (who look more like large pink whistles). Their "adventures" are simple enough - sometimes no more than Peppa jumping in muddy puddles, or Daddy Pig losing his glasses. But while the plots may be innocent, the subtext is anything but.

For starters, the physics of the world is all wrong. Cars can drive up hills so steep that a mountain goat would balk at the prospect. Worse, it's just as easy on a bicycle. Is this merely artistic license, or evidence that the artist is actually from a low gravity planet and not familiar with Earth physics ?

The moral dimension of the show is where things get really bad. There's an overwhelmingly mammalian bias to everything, which is best exemplified by the line, "Don't be silly Mr Bull, goldfish can't talk." And why not ? What about the lizards and birds and snakes ? They don't even get a look in.

Such blatant racism is exacerbated by the segregation of all the different species. The pigs live in the pig house, the zebras in the zebra house. There's no intermarriage whatsoever. Where are the hybrid pig-goats and elephant-zebras ? Eh ? This world is a Nazi utopia and an anathema to multiculturalism. And since only the pigs are the stars of the show, we can infer that they represent the "Aryan" race, with the other animals representing "lesser" aspects of humanity. In fact, the whole "different houses" thing smacks of death camps to me.

Nor do the actions of any animals (at least pigs) have any negative consequences whatsoever. When Peppa supervises a baby's party, she makes them all cry but no-one cares. When she runs over Daddy Pig's prize pumpkin that he's spent patient months growing, he just says, "Never mind". I'd bet he wouldn't have said that if a zebra did it. He'd probably cart them off to the gas chamber instead.

After Peppa we get a long break full of commercialisation designed to make kids want things. Worse, at the moment we get touted with some royalist propaganda, where some girl pretends to be a Barbie-esque princess and we're all her "loyal subjects." Sod off, Barbie - I don't remember taking any such oath of allegiance. Such royalist claptrap can only be designed to give everyone an inferiority complex, reminding us to always obey our social betters - yet more Nazi indoctrination, dressed up in a cunning romantic mystique. Which is shame, because there are much better princesses available to emulate.

Do you want your children to aspire to a) Aryan supremacist who doesn't do anything except get married b) a noted peace activist who got landmines banned or c) angry woman who kills oppressive tyrants by using a sharpened frisbee ?

Then comes Ben and Holly's Little Kingdom. This delightful show is even worse than Peppa Pig, because now the protagonists are all basically human. And this time the racism is even more explicit - the elves and fairies actively avoiding each other, even to the point of holding separate Olympics. Even Hitler didn't go that far.

Moreover, the show is overtly anti-science. One of the main characters is the villainous fairy Nanny Plum, who uses her occult powers of sourcery to guide Ben Elf and fairy Princess Holly through their surreal adventurings*. It seems that all problems can be solved with magic. This leaves Wise Old Elf, who solves everything by thinking carefully and logically about each situation but always gets it wrong, looking a bit silly. Science is thus humiliated and primitive paganism venerated as the answer to the world's troubles.

* She also insults witches, which is somewhat inconsistent.

Nanny Plum and Wise Old Elf are always at odds, and it's almost always Nanny who wins. Fairies are quite explicitly the higher social order here, with the King also being a fairy (incidentally, he's also the only male fairy). The elves are very much the oppressed working classes who spent most of their time doing manual (i.e. "slave") labour, making toys for human children. Whereas Nanny teaches her fairy pupils that they must always look beautiful, and they never seem to do any actual work at all, which again smacks of Aryanism. She might as well dress up in a Klu Klux Klan outfit.

Here's where it gets really interesting. Nanny Plum and Miss Rabbit the teacher (in Peppa Pig) are voiced by the same person. Coincidence ? I think not. There can't possibly be such a shortage of voice actors. More likely the two shows are in league with each other, since they have such similar fascist views. Clearly they are trying to steal children's souls for indoctrination into a cult.

(One might think that if the two shows have the same message then their creator can't, by definition, be an alien as postulated earlier - how would fly to Earth if he's anti-science ? The implication, of course, is that he came to Earth in a spaceship powered only by magic, which does not bode well for anyone.)

Finally the evening ends with a song that's the audible equivalent of tripe. It's just too happy. I've never trusted anything so jolly it causes vomiting - look at Disney, he was a Nazi sympathiser, after all. Yet it's utterly mesmerising to its poor naive youthful audience, slowly convincing them to watch more and more Nick Junior until their souls are corrupted and their hearts wither and blacken with the dark fire of racial hatred.

For the Lolz

2011-02-14T10:15:00.000Z

(another post where I steal someone else's idea and don't give credit except to point people towards http://www.fleecebucket.com/ )

The Joy of Treks

2011-02-10T12:04:00.000Z

Star Treks, that is. I don't do a lot of trekking as it brings me out in a rash. Sorry people, but I'm a nerd, and that means periodic posts where I compose laments for one of the greatest TV shows of all time. It may not have ever had the best acting, script, plot, casting, cinematography, costumes*... well you get the idea. So why should non-trekkies give a damn about a show that was once Emmy-nominated for outstanding hairstyling ?

* Except one. See below.

Right now, there's a complete dearth of inspirational sci-fi shows, and inspiration was something Trek did better than any other show ever, bar none. As the 3 excellent documentaries Trekkies, Trekkies 2 and How William Shatner Changed the World make abundantly clear, this isn't wishful thinking on the part of some loser ultra-nerds. No, it's a very correct assessment by a group of really lovely ultra-nerds. Many of them have grown up to work for NASA and some fans have dedicated their lives to living by the ethics of Star Trek. A few are even married (but as far as I know none have become renowned hairdressers).

The thing is, if you're going to aspire to the ethos of show where humanity lives in a tolerant and mostly peaceful utopia, you're hardly likely to end up as a spite-filled brutish thug. Whereas if you follow Battlestar Galactica with the same level of devotion, you'll inevitably become a serial adulterer with lifelong crippling emotional problems, a confused obsession with religion, and an inexplicable burning hatred of all toasters.

Buy this on a T-shirt ! Be there and be square !

It could be worse though. A Farscape fanatic would grow up with a penchant for all things leather, wormholes and magic. Stargate would lead to a career in the army or archeology whereas aspiring to Babylon 5 or Andromeda would only lead to terrible acting skills. Firefly and Dr Who would at least instill an anti-authoritarian attitude, but both are borderline sci-fi at best. Caprica ? Alas I don't think anyone's going to plump for a career in cybernetics so they can create a killer-robot body for an emo teenage misfit genius.

Perhaps they thought there was an Emmy for the show with the most leather

Star Trek did two great things that few if any other shows have even bothered to imitate. Firstly, it was supremely tolerant of all colours and creeds at a time when such an attitude was needed most. Sure, the captain was a white all-American hero, though he had to wear a girdle for the safety of himself and those around him. But his crew were as ethnically diverse as the crowd at an Obama rally. A Russian navigator who was seemingly too young to be toilet trained, a Japanese sword-wielding pilot (who grew up to be George "I WILL have sex with you !" Takei), and a sexy fan-dancing black communications officer, to say nothing of the crazed Scotsman who lurked in the engine room - this was ground-breaking stuff at the time.

What's not to like ? Oh right, the girdles. But it's OK, it's Shatner.

Of course today no-one bats an eyelid at such things. Crazed Scotsmen can now be engineers without fear of shame or lynching, and the world is better for it. By the Next Generation, society was so tolerant that it could even allow a Frenchman in charge of a largely American crew. Black people were now so accepted that by Deep Space Nine, they could be captain and people were more apt to notice their blinding white teeth and terrifying stare than their skin colour. Indeed, only the presence of a female captain in Voyager elicited any reaction from anyone at all, and that was mostly because she had a voice that sounds like she'd been eating cigarettes and washing them down with a pint of whisky every day since she was 12.

But all this contemporary social justice would have been for naught without Trek's second clever thing : making technology cool. Everyone wants a warp drive. Everyone. Well, most people. But lots of people want a teleporter and I guarantee that everyone wants a holodeck. Sadly, the recent spate of 3D movies suggest we're better off without them, as the most successful movie of all time is about a bunch of 9-foot hippie smurfs who fly around on dragons protecting trees.

Now as I've said, no-one's going to be inspired by any of the contemporary sci-fi shows to go in for science or engineering. They're not lacking in interesting tech - Caprica had a cool take on cybernetics, but Star Trek did it better (of course, it took Trek a few goes before it stumbled upon the delectable Jeri Ryan and made everyone - ahem - happy*). The problem is that since Stargate Atlantis was cancelled, with only Caprica and the quite awful Stargate Universe left, it's nothing but bloody angst-in-space. Ain't no-one gonna work for NASA or get married (or even become a hairdresser) because of some show about teenagers moping around on a dark and dingy spaceship who spend their entire time whining that they can't get onto Facebook and that their iPhone's can't get a signal.

* Yes alright, Battlestar had Caprica 6, but she was a genocidal maniac. It'd be like doing Hitler, you sick freak.

Sure, there's a place for darker and more grown-up sci-fi. But can't we also have something where the future doesn't involve the Earth blowing up and everyone whinging about it ? Something where we venture into space and don't find 700 billion angry aliens trying to enslave us ? Or even something about a future in which humanity is not oppressed by armies of killer robots ? Call me crazy, but I think it's actually a lot easier to create a helpful robot monkey butler than it is to create an army of super-powerful robot killing machines possessed by the ghosts of teenage emo kids.

It doesn't even have to be Star Trek again. I just want a sci-fi show where the underlying message is not one of such complete doom that I feel like giving up and going to read the Daily Mail. That's not too much to ask, is it ?

What use is a baby ?

2011-02-08T11:53:00.000Z

Often when people are haggling for funding for blue-skies research, someone will employ the classic cliche : what use is a baby ? It's a good line. Everyone knows that babies are useless but eventually some of them become really useful people, like Michael Buerk and Scarlett Johansson. And eventually, so science tells us, we'll be able to have designer babies. Which begs the question : are babies really as useless as the old proverb would have it ? Or, to put it another way, if babies were a product you could buy from JML then what would the sales pitch be ?

I guess we must first start by trying to fit them into some sort of category. Clearly they belong in the house so must be some kind of household utility. What is it that they actually do ?

1) Eat
2) Sleep
3) Poop
4) Pee
5) Make noise
6) Increase entropy
7) Move about
8) Hit things
9) Change channel
10)Turn lights on and off

All of which could easily be used in a marketing campaign. They are in fact extremely useful. Observe :

Sometimes I wonder if I have too much time on my hands, contrary to all available evidence. Oh well.

Review : GTA IV part 2 - the expansions

2011-02-07T10:28:00.017Z

Following my recent completion of GTA IV, I thought I'd have a bash at what I guess you'd call GTA IV.V (strictly speaking that should be GTA IV S in Roman numerals) : The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. Rather irritatingly, they're not expansions but standalone games, eating up another 16 GB of hard disc space. That's not a big deal, but they appear to share the same savedgame directory as GTA IV. And so, with the unstoppable inevitability that only narrative causality can bestow, my "story complete" saved game from the original has now gone.

I can only assume this part of the code was written by Muppets - most likely, Animal. It doesn't matter how many "Are you sure ?" messages are present, if you have a 40hr saved game file in a directory where other save games can be written, it is absolutely and irrevocably destined to be overwritten. Good job there's no point playing when the main story is complete, I guess.

He also works part-time as a programmer for Rockstar

This aside, the Lost and Damned is a decent addition to the GTA canon. You play as Johnny, a walking cliche who's second in command of biker gang "The Lost", previously encountered in the original game. Happily, bike physics has undergone some kind of Newtonian/Einsteinian revolution, so now you can cruise around without fear of suddenly finding yourself 70 feet up in the air because you got too close to an especially pointy bit of tarmac.

That's far from the only niggle the game irons out, either. For starters, it's now much easier to evade cops at the 3 star level. Once you're about halfway to the edge of the circle, the cop spawning rate drops dramatically. This doesn't detract from the challenge of the game, because it's skillfully balanced by the increased difficulty of combat. Enemies are not only more aggressive, but there are far, far more of them. Hiding behind cover will only protect you for so long.

Another screenshot I stole off the Internet. Combat is actually mostly about shooting people, not blowing stuff up.

To help you combat these hordes of unruly foes - usually other gang members, but also cops - you're given a selection of handy new weapons. First up, the grenade launcher. What does this do ? Lob grenades. Hmm. I could do that before, actually. With my hands. Yet it's strangely fun, probably because it makes a satisfying "thwoonk" noise. Then there's the assault shotgun, which is surprisingly poor as an anti-personnel weapon but very useful against vehicles.

There are a few totally new features introduced, like riding in formation to replenish your health and armour. 's alright I guess, but a bit of a chore. I'd rather just pay $1 for a hot dog from one of those foul-mouthed street vendors. You also get gang members to come and assist you on your travels, and if they survive they gain experience and toughness. Meh, I find it very difficult to care about any of them. It's far more fun to think of them as extra targets.

The downside of the game is the story. Like GTA IV, it's trying to be gritty and edgy but even more so. It's even more difficult to empathise with your character than Niko, because this time you play an annoying, fully-developed bad guy who's really nothing more than that. There's precious little joy in any of the missions (with the occasional exception) and far too much angsty "Oh woe is me, for I live such a hard and terrible life as a drug-dealing loser making buckets of cash off other people's misery but I'm just too much of a douchebag to do anything about it." Can it, Johnny. I expect this sort of nonsense in The Wire, not video games.

"Dear Aunt Agony, today I killed 15 people with a shotgun and stole all their heroin. I only did it because I feel trapped in the overarching socio-political situation in which Liberty City resides. Does this make me a criminal ? Will I still be able to claim benefits ?"

Which all meant that I got a bit bored after a while and stopped playing. Fortunately, the Ballad of Gay Tony is almost the polar opposite of the Lost and Damned. Here you play the sex-crazed Luis Lopez, assistant to nightclub owner Tony Prince. While the writers can't quite seem to bring themselves to lose the angsty gibberish entirely, they have at least seen fit to introduce Omid Djalili, attack helicopters with rockets, base jumping, a decent checkpoint system*... and oh yes, a tank.

* It's on your phone. Possibly it was there all along. Umm....

Like LAD, combat is far more intense than the original game. This time you get some pretty cool new weapons, like sticky bombs, a minigun, and the overwhelmingly powerful explosive shotgun. You get to blow up a large yacht. Skydiving becomes an integral part of the game, with one mission requiring you to go skydiving to steal a tank for Omid. What's not to like ? In another, you stand on the back of a moving subway train and use your explosive shotgun to take down wave after wave of attack helicopters.

Screenshots do not do this game justice.

The story line is... umm... well, I assume there is one, somewhere, but I didn't notice. I was too busy making things explode, which is all I've ever wanted from the game anyway. There's a nice variety of side-jobs that make the "pick up some stuff for Jacob" of the original look like even more pointless than they actually were. In place of boring driving missions you now go skydiving, get in involved in powerboat chases to steal drugs, and play golf*. Luis even has a day job as a nightclub manager. Unfortunately this last consists of you walking slowly (very slowly) around the club looking for trouble, and has all the engaging gameplay qualities of rancid cheese. Oh well, can't get everything right.

* Luis Lopez would have an interesting CV. Other hobbies : Skydiving, private security, sha.. entertaining the ladies, golf.

Alas I could not complete this expansion, although I really wanted to. One particular mission crashes about halfway through every time, and nothing I can do prevents it. Ah well.

The Lost and Damned : 5.0/10.0. Overall, not bad, but too angsty and just doesn't compare with...
The Ballad of Gay Tony : 9.0/10.0. This is what I wanted from GTA IV in the first place. Buy it. Buy it now ! NOW !! WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR ?!?

Totally Dinosaur

2011-02-03T00:18:00.000Z

Karen Brady's description of two sexist overpaid yobbos as "totally dinosaur" is an unwitting compliment. Everyone knows that 1) dinosaur is not an adjective and 2) dinosaurs are awesome even though they're dead. Perhaps Karen has a personal ratings system for prehistoric animals, which would explain point 1 (point 2 is explained by her being too busy making money to appreciate dinosaurs). I should very much like to know the details of this unusual adjective system she's developed but I'm too scared to write and ask her. I guess it would look something like this, putting dinosaurs in their proper place, of course.

This isn't my idea. I stole it off someone else, but he doesn't have a blog so can't tell the world about it. He does have a website though - go there now and buy some T-shirts at low low prices !

http://fleecebucket.spreadshirt.co.uk/

Why can't coalitions be democratic ?

2011-01-30T14:58:00.001Z

EDIT : Apparently, I'm a few months too late writing this. I don't see how. This is as much a response to the Lib Dem's failure to honour election promises as it is to the election itself. As for not being taken seriously - eh ? No me comprehende. This isn't Question Time. It's just a random blog with a silly banner, what on earth would suggest a serious political discussion would lie within ?

Yes, it's another post about politics - but this time with no analogies to film franchises, I promise. No, this one actually has a point besides mockery to it, but will likely contain more lolcats and cleavage than most political articles.

No-one voted for our current government. It is true that Labour lost, but it is equally true that the Tories didn't win, and the Liberal Democrats... well, they turned up. And it's also true that Labour couldn't have formed any kind of government without a bizarre and wholly unworkable "rainbow coalition", a term that conjours images of Zippy, George and Bungle fighting for Greenpeace.

Yet this does not change the simple fact that we have a government we didn't vote for. It's possible that's exactly what the people of Britain wanted, but since there was no option for it on the ballot paper, we'll never know, will we ? Now if you have no control over who's in government, I submit this is not democracy at all. It is laughable. It's even more absurd than the time Jordan decided to run for MP, with the single policy of "free cosmetic surgery for all" (err, yeah, because that one worked out so well).

"I'm sure I left my manifesto down here somewhere..."

However, my point is that at least in this case voters (read as "morons") knew what they were getting. Boobs. Really, really big boobs. Completely ineffective at politics, but the point remains. This government has taken a far more creative approach - you can vote for parties with time-honoured, cherished principles, and they won't implement them at all (or even do the exact opposite, presumably just to confuse us all for the next election* - like voting for Jordan but getting Keira Knightley). Thus, a rational observer must conclude that a vote for Jordan would have been a more democratic and honest vote than a vote for many of the members of our current government. This is a fact so preposterous that it demands rectification at any cost. Even to the point of blogging about it.

* Very recently Clegg accused voters of re-writing history on the subject of his pledge not to raise tuition fees. A witty retort to this is too easy, so I'll settle for telling him to shut his stupid fat ugly pie-hole before his brain escapes.

This is exactly the same situation as the increase in tuition fees

To their credit the Lib Dems have championed voting reformed since ages past and are trying to implement this as best they can. But everyone appears to be missing a fundamental point : no-one votes for coalitions. My question is simply : why the hell not ? If no party can form a majority government, should not the electorate have the right to choose who sides with whom to win power ?

Of course, politics is a very complicated thing and replacing our voting system with the alternative vote or single transferable vote isn't going to make things any simpler. Nor will it change the basic problem of what to do if no party wins outright, and indeed most analysts think that AV or STV would make such an outcome more likely. Given that not only are current government policies as hugely retarded as Russel Grant, and even less popular, but also that we as a country just can't cope with the concept of coalitions, how this possibly improve matters in the future ?

Cavalry charging the electorate... this does not bode well...

It can't. But there is one very simple way that we can at least give a coalition government a mandate to govern : have an option to choose which coalition we want in power. Bugger the debate about proportional representation - all I really want is to decide which government we get. The results of the last election really only allowed one possible coalition, but it's perfectly possible to have a situation where this is not so.

In this case, politicians should be compelled to join forces according to whichever coalition received the most votes (they might not like it, but there's nothing wrong with making politicians suffer). This need only entail a single extra box on the ballot paper for the voter to choose which party should be the partner with their main choice in the event of a hung parliament. It does however open up a whole new can of worms : what if people really want, say, a Labour-Lib Dem coalition but only a Tory-Lib Dem coalition is feasible ? This could happen if the Labour was everyone's coalition choice but not their main vote.

In this case it's tough on us. You can't have your cake and eat it : if you want a coalition between 2 parties, then by jingo you'd better vote for those parties. Furthermore, we've seen the ridiculous prospect of a rainbow coalition against the largest party in the Welsh Assembly, something which is just confusing and weird, like that bit in Jurassic Park 2 where everyone on the boat has been eaten but the only dinosaurs on board are safely locked away.

T Rex does not approve of rainbow coalitions

No, the larger parties must get priority. Coalitions should only be allowed between two parties, otherwise things get daft and we might as well go back to voting for tits again (or Zippy, George and Bungle if you prefer, I'm not judging). And this will only work at all provided politicians agree to answer perfectly valid questions about what they'd do in a coalition, unlike last time. I envisage the results of an election being something like this :

Tories : 35% of seats
Labour : 30%
Lib Dems : 20% :
Monster Raving Loony Party : 15%

Britain does not have philosopher kings but it did once have a political cat. Suck it, Plato.

If all the Tory and Labour voters chose Lib Dems as coalition partners, then we'd have a Tory-Lib Dem government because the Tories are larger, no matter what the Labour voters want. But, if the Tory voters were divided on a choice of ally, then a Labour-Lib Dem coalition could form a majority government.

It might seem that the results of the last election couldn't have been prevented : even if no-one wanted the coalition, it's the only combination that produces a viable majority. However, if people had voted
a) knowing there could be a coalition and that
b) they could choose which one and
c) having been told what each possible coalition would do*
then perhaps they wouldn't have voted in quite the same way. And though no voting system is perfect, surely we at least have the right to decide who's in charge of running the country.

* Sure, politicians often say they'll do one thing and then do another. But at the last election then went several steps further. They refused to even answer questions about what they'd do in "hypothetical situations", then subsequently used this to justify u-turns so laughable it's not even funny.

Of course, one can imagine more elaborate voting procedures where we could somehow vote for a coalition directly. Personally I wanted a Labour-Lib Dem coalition rather than a majority Labour government. This would be lovely, but I fear a voting procedure so convoluted that the only people who'd have the time to work it all out would be old people. And they'd all vote Tory anyway, the rotters. For as the old saying goes :

What is it I actually do all day ?

2011-01-26T23:48:00.002Z

Many people have asked me this. Not very many, but a few. OK, about 5. After all, I'm still stuck here, devoid of license and income, and I can't spent every minute learning to drive, or even viewing pornography. Letting either activity consumes one's entire day tends to cause unpleasant consequences for all concerned. Still, you might think that now would be the ideal time to complete all those things I never have time for : a host of CGI projects, learning Spanish, writing papers, playing computer games until blue in the face, etc.

Not so. Well, not quite anyway. For this house contains not one but two terrors of apocalyptic proportions, which each day must be tamed lest they should escape to bring about Ragnarok : the End of Days. The first such monster is familiar to many - a 1 year old baby. This malevolent creature is best thought of as a hybrid basilisk-banshee, capable of turning its enemies to stone by screaming at them. Or, in fairness, more often by laughing at them : so now we have a hybrid basilisk-banshee-hyena.

And that's where babies come from

It is also known as a creature of great destructive potential, a reputation well earned. Each day it wreaks its path of tornado-like destruction, and no-one on Earth is capable of stopping it because the damn thing is laughing and looking adorable. Perhaps if Stalin had done that, communism would have lasted longer. We'll never know.

And thus each day requires me to re-adjust the entropy of the living room to manageable levels, because there are injured parents hobbling around the place who might step on things. This has at least taught me the Ultimate Fate of the Universe : the heat death will be caused by babies. Infants truly are the living embodiment of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Logically this means that if we combine a basilisk, a banshee and a hyena we will also get a dramatic increase in entropy. This is self-evidently true. I rest my case.

However, the second little Horseman of the Apocalypse is a far more sinister and bewildering character familiar to far fewer people, except perhaps readers of the excellent Sheldon webcomic. I speak of pugs. PUGS ! An animal whose very name should inspire terror in the hearts of millions, but doesn't. To non pug-owners, a pug is just a small, very ugly lapdog, the kind you wouldn't like to see first thing in the morning with a hangover. The reality is not as pleasant.

Like Tamerlane, they are best described as the Scourge of God and the Terror of the World, leaving a bloody trail of enemies in their wake and towers of skulls atop fields of barely planted over the ruined cities of their enemies. You think I'm exaggerating, but if Tamerlane had had a squad of attack pugs he'd have conquered the planet. Fortunately, training even a single pug is by definition impossible.

Now I am become Pug, destroyer of worlds

Therein lies their greatest strength as an adversary : their truly heroic level of stupidity. The pug is a denizen of this mortal coil with zero memory and less intelligence, and as such exists in a constant state of mad surprise. They are the only known creature in the Universe to have developed a limited - but powerful - form of mind control by virtue their sheer lack of brain power.

Here's how it works. A normal dog understands basic concepts like its own existence, size, and the fact that it is an independent entity acting under its own volition. A pug's brain is made of cheese so cannot comprehend any of this. So whereas a normal dog will run around happily avoiding obstacles like fallen logs, other dogs and large buildings, a pug won't. If faced with the choice to go under or over a log, a pug's brain literally melts with effort and the wretched creature attempts to employ quantum mechanics by running at high speed to try and phase through the log instead. This invariably fails.

Pugs exist in 3 states : 1) Static 2) Running at 900 mph 3) Running in circles (clockwise only)

Real dogs have some level of trial-and-error intelligence. Not so the diminutive pug; the animal will insist on trying the same thing over and over again, be it barking at a light breeze, running into logs, sporadically attacking people's feet, or humping everything in sight*. This is a level of stupidity so high that every other animal is soon baffled into confused submission, including other dogs like dobermans (I wish that was an exaggeration for comic effect, but it really isn't). The brains of higher animals like humans are similarly unable to accept the level of sheer idiocy displayed by pugs, and usually quickly give up and wish they'd got a cat instead.

* It's worse than it sounds. Female pugs will often hump their own mothers, so it would not be far wrong to describe a pug as an incestuous lesbian serial rapist. Just don't tell the Daily Mail, they'd have a field day.

The pug is also blessed with two further weapons which make life with four of them at best interesting. Firstly, they are the only known animal able to extract energy directly from the quantum vacuum. This makes them nearly unstoppable, which wouldn't be so bad if they actually had any clue what they wanted, where they were or the fact that walls are solid. Their second, messier weapon, which has a greater impact on my day, is their excessive poop. To the point where "excessive" means "violating the conservation of mass principle".

Having saved the world from the baby/pug apocalypse every day, this leaves some time for various other mundane chores which injured parents cannot cope with. Once these are done there may or may not be some driving involved. That gives me about 2 hours wherein nothing much happens. And then it's time to walk the other, more normal dog, and then the 1-year old returns from nursery and re-embarks on his endless quest to cause the Heat Death of the living room and the whole sorry cycle resumes again.

Star Wars Episode VII : A New Politics

2011-01-22T19:47:00.000Z

I recently described how contemporary British politics is quite a lot like the Batman movies. It's also strikingly similar to, if not quite identical, the Star Wars Saga. Behold...

A young, talented, but very annoying politician (Nick "Anakin" Clegg) is languishing on the political desert planet of Sheffield. He has few ambitions until his wise old mentor Menzies "Qui Gon" Campbell is struck down by the forces of Darth Resignation. Vowing to make politics more interesting, he embarks on an epic quest to become a politician in a land far, far away : Westminster.

Ask yourself this : who is more annoying ? Can you really tell ?

There he proceeds to rapidly annoy the ruling Labour Council, the well-meaning but corrupt and misguided guardians of peace... no... justice... not so much..., ok, well-meaning guardians of the Constitutional Monarchy for half a generation. Slowly he is corrupted by the evil forces of Darth Cameron, a Sith Lord who has deceived everyone into thinking he's not all that bad. But grandmaster Charles Yoda, lurking quietly in the background, isn't fooled, and soon conflict is inevitable.

If their physical resemblance isn't quite accurate, their policies are

Soon Anakin is completely under the thrall of Darth Cameron and proceeds to the Liberal Democrat Temple (Sheffield University) where he massively increases all the Youngling's tuition fees. The slaughter is terrible. Not even Yoda can stop the Emperor, which makes a lot of sense considering his insurmountable drinking problem.

But soon the rest of his party become rapidly disillusioned and form the Labour-Democrat Rebel Alliance. The battle is hard-fought. The Coalition Empire grows rapidly, and eventually constructs a policy of such awesome oppresive power than it could obliterate the entire deficit (powered by a set of massive nuclear reactors). "That's no moon," says general Alan Wan Johnson Kenobi, "it's a tax hike."

(Its first target is the peaceful yet poverty stricken Film Council, leaving the much richer Banking Clan strangely untouched.)

Unfortunately for our plucky underdogs, Kenobi is killed soon after investigating this monstrous weapon. For reasons that are entirely unclear, he chooses an apparently needless self-sacrifce, saying only that, "You can't win Darth. If you strike me down you shall become less powerful than I can possibly imagine."

The Rebel Alliance make significant gains against the Empire, ridiculing their massive tax station with small, highly adjustable attack policies. But they are unable to break the power of Emperor Cameron. Eventually they unexpectedly marshall their entire forces under the leadership of hideous Admiral Ed Milliband Ackbar. Alas the Emperor has regrouped his remaining minions and constructed a new and even deadlier tax hike ("It's a trap ! We can't repel policies of this magnitude !" says Ackbar).

Well they are both pretty weird-looking...

Their only hope is a strike force led by a cool token black dude from the distant planet of America : President Barrack Kalrisian. But then they stumble upon an unexpected ally : not all of the Younglings are dead after all. Bereft of tuition fees they have degenerated into small, unintelligent furry creatures, who are happy to fight the Coalition with anything to hand, but mostly fire extinguishers.

Crazed little eco-warrior that can't afford to shave and hates the government. Sounds like a student to me.

The strike team and the student Ewoks buy the Alliance a little time to formulate a coherent set of policies with which to fight the machinations of the Empire, but all the while Liberal Democrats are dropping like flies as their cherished policies are destroyed. Finally, at the bitter end, Darth Clegg cannot stand to see the evil Emperor destroying his beloved party. He turns on his mentor, throwing him into a hated nuclear reactor, ending the madness forever. And then their are wild parties in the form of the Olympic Games, and Ewok students everywhere dance around madly until the credits roll.

Fallout : New Vegas

2011-01-18T21:35:00.002Z

So beautiful... they should have sent a poet...

Let's be clear on this : Fallout 3 was amazing. I completely completed it and its 5 expansions, or near as damn it as makes no difference. So with a spring in my step and a song in my heart (but not anywhere near my vocal chords because that would cause the old and vulnerable to drop dead from fright) I happily plunged right back in to the weird, wild and wonderful world of the wasteland. Wooo !

For those who have spent the last few years as a hermit, entombed in ice deep underground in a cave on Mars, congratulations ! Not only have you finally escaped your cruel and very unusual prison, but you've emerged into a world where you can play a really addictive RPG. Lucky you. Anywho, the Fallout sequence is basically this : you play a lone wasteland wanderer, ~250 years in an alternative future where the culture of the 1950's continued, culminating in a massive nuclear war. Consequently the world is now not only quite untidy, but also chock full of radioactive monsters. None of which are at all interested in cleaning up the place.

Though it may voraciously consume ~100 hours of gameplay, FNV can be summarised in a single breath : like F3, but slightly better. Last time there were fire ants in one town, this time there are fire geckos all over the place. Previously we had the smartly dressed Enclave to contend with, this time it's a legion of really angry Roman re-enactment enthusiasts. That's right people : this is Fallout with radioactive cowboys and Roman soldiers. Someone somewhere has obviously sat down and thought, "Let's make a game for Rhysy today. And let's add some Mongols too, just to make sure. Not enough ? Two words : SPACE ZOMBIES." Sold.

How many other games let you bazuka giant scorpions while dressed like a Roman solider from the 23rd Century ?

First impressions are that it is in fact F3 but in a slightly different location. Be ye not deceived - this IS a different game, though most of the differences are subtle and it's certainly not a massive leap forward (nor did it ever claim to be). It is true that large parts of the game are visually strikingly similar to F3 - far too similar, in fact this smacks a little of laziness. How long does it take to download a different rock texture from the internet, Bethesda ?

But there are differences, some of them subtle, some of them striking. The sky is blue and there is some level of weather, although still no rain for some reason. Without the contaminated water that afflicted Washington D.C., there is as much wild vegetation as there ever was in the Mojave, along with farms and even - in places - snowy forests and the best botanical garden ever. Oooh, preetty.

A 23rd century Roman, a cyber-dog and a wise-cracking doctor visit Kew Gardens

Much as I love F3, some similarities do irk. The Pip-Boy is identical to that in F3, which is a shame because it lacks a proper journal to keep track of your many adventures. Oblivion did this far better and someone should tell Bethesda this, possibly in a loud obnoxious voice with the aid of a megaphone. For some quests are, as in F3, extremely elaborate, and certain side-quests aren't even recorded at all. And while the latest iPad may not yet be able to tell you the status of your limbs, it can access Google Street View, which is infinitely superior to the Pip Boy's mapping technology. Why can't we have a Pip-Boy Tom Tom ?

"At the Lucy 38 casino, kill the Securitron, then proceed - immediately - left."

Gameplay is very repetitive, extremely similar if not identical to F3 - and as addictive as crack, probably. All missions boil down to same few varieties :

1) Go and kill things
2) Go and find things
3) Go and talk to things

Sound dull ? It isn't. For you see :

1) Killing things is always fun, especially given the wide selection of weapons, with new ones to discover at a very suitable rate. And proper weapon choice depends on enemies, so there's lots of variety here. Though for some of the longer missions, this can begin to be a chore. I don't want to kill 500 zombies in a dungeon, I've done this before in F3. And Oblivion too, come to that... hmm, Bethesda, how's about something other than zombies, eh ? Let me get that megaphone again...

2) This is made fun by the graphical beauty of the game. Exploring is cool. Much more variety than F3, although the core is the same. There are certainly more epic locations, like Helios 1 and the Hoover Dam.

3) Curiously absorbing just listening to people, especially the sarcastic ones. And you can't really argue with the likes of Neil the Super Mutant. More importantly, here there are genuinely new features. If you've done right by a faction previously, you'll be able to persuade them far more easily and can even skip quite a lot of minor quests if you choose. Equally, if you've ticked off a faction, they'll not be wanting help from the lowly likes of you.

Wearing a cheap suit and a sheep skull helmet makes people trust you, apparently. I suppose this makes sense in a world where bottle caps have become legal tender.

While it possible to become hated by certain communities, quite what it takes to get them to become automatically hostile I'm not sure. Massacring a dozen or so will make them angry enough that they might feel the need to write you quite an irate letter. To become properly hated, it seems that you must commit genocide by cannibalism against that faction's babies.

For the most part missions are well-designed, and generally better than F3 - shorter, tighter, and with more of a point. Though there is the occasional doozy. For example, the mission to recover a special gun from Vault 34 is so excessively long-winded I wanted to write an irate letter to the game designer, or possibly kill his entire ethnic group by eating their children.

It's horrendous. There's no hint of what you're supposed to do, the map - lacking Tom Tom technology - is utterly useless. The vault is radioactive, requiring a good supply of RadAway and/or frequent trips back to a doctor. This makes the zombie-killing mission proceed at a pace a glacier would be ashamed of. It is, in fact, boring. But - and it's a but so large it's practically obscene - the payoff is worth it (a gun that can kill any robot instantly). And not to give too many spoilers, but some of the other payoffs (SPACE ZOMBIES !!! WAGNER !!!) are equally rewarding.

The general feel of the game is, as you'd expect, somewhat more civilised than F3. There are still plenty of dangerous inhabitants in the wasteland - in parts, huge numbers of them - but generally less than F3, which makes exploring more about exploring and less about running for your life like a startled badger. Gone is the need to travel anywhere by zombie-infested subway, which I found irksome. Whereas F3 featured the Brotherhood of Steel waging war against the Enclave, this power struggle was only a sideshow of life in a deadly, oppressively bleak radioactive wasteland. And this was reflected in the main story itself, which revolved around a quest for clean water to keep everyone alive.

Not so in NV. Here a veritable maelstrom is brewing between many different organised factions all vying for control for the shiny, shiny lights of Vegas. Not sure why, exactly. One can only assume that in the future, all organisations are composed entirely of alcoholic, sex crazed compulsive gamblers. Hmm. Anyway, chief among these groups are the bureaucratic New California Republic and the much less formal Caesar's Legion. First big choice : whom to side with ?

Caesar's Legion might have cool armour, but they also crucify people which I found a tad rude. But what really doomed them for me was their insistence of pronouncing Caesar as "Kaisar". NO. That's not even a word ! Just for that, mighty Caesar, I'm gonna rape your pets, kill your women, break your house and burn your legs down. And probably I'll do all of that using my heavy incinerator, which is as awesome as ever.

Firery death for all

Weapons and combat in general are pretty much the same as F3, although there are some nice new additions and a nifty new mod system to upgrade them. One thing I missed was the ability to craft new weapons out of junk. Workbenches are still there, so maybe you can - but if so, there are far less quests-for-blueprints than F3. The damage system has been changed, so rifles and certain energy weapons are now the killers of choice. Alas, the Gatling laser is now useless, But the cinematic replays when you snipe an enemy from halfway across the map remain as satisfying as before.

Which leaves only the story. As I mentioned, this boils down to a conflict between the NCR, Caesar's Legion, and in some permutations it can also involve an army of robots, a horde of Mongols and a bunch of people who are nigh-on horny about explosions. All well and good, but it's not quite as well executed as F3. The main story also doesn't lead you towards the side-quests quite as well as F3 did, and sometimes the lack of a journal makes it difficult to figure out how you're supposed to advance the main plot. But the main problem is not the middle, but mostly the beginning and end.

I found the start a little odd. Unlike F3, your character starts fully grown, so has already lived at least 20 years in the wasteland without your expert guidance. They may or may not have amnesia, it's never really revealed. Yet absolutely no-one recognizes you (well, one old dude does, vaguely, but he doesn't really know you so isn't any help).

The actual storyline is engrossing enough, but lacks heart. In F3 you were searching for dear old runaway Dad and his miracle scheme to provide clean water for all. FNV lacks any personal focus. You're helping decide the fate of a city, but ultimately only by deciding who's in charge and it probably won't be anyone you know. And you make that critical choice before the final mission even begins, rather than right at the end in F3. Which makes the ending rather lack punch, somewhat - even if you do have an explosive ballistic fist. The mission itself is OK, but nowhere near the truly epic finale of that in F3. I wanted something bloody spectacular - instead, there's just lots and lots of fighting. Meh, maybe I'm just missing Liam Neeson (but can you blame me ?).

The very final ending is certainly rewarding - Ron Perlman with a very long, thorough narrative explaining what happens to everyone else in the long term. Great. Can I get back to exploring the wasteland now ? No. For no apparent reason, it won't let me. At least in F3, there was a very good reason for ending it there. In FNV, there certainly isn't. So save your game often.

Now of course I've only played one ending. Maybe the final mission is more rewarding if you're a bit more evil, but I don't want to be evil. The sad thing is I can think of numerous ways to make the ending vastly more spectacular without altering the story in the slightest.

Hoover Dam may be impressive, but the final mission there is less so.

Incidentally, the fact that there are multiple endings is more than a little worrying for sequels, both for FNV and Washington D.C. Neither of these can ever be used again in a subsequent game. I guess there are plenty more cities in the U.S. (but for the next Fallout I vote for Australia - I want to see radioactive kangaroos, crocodiles and koala bears with lasers for eyes...).

Summary : 9.0 / 10.0. Overall, awesome. Not perfect, but more than good enough to overcome its paltry deficiencies. But don't expect anything startlingly new here.

A Blast From The Past : 2001 A Short Odyssey

2011-01-17T22:01:00.002Z

The far distant past, this being my first major, hopelessly over-ambitious project I started back in 2002 and abandoned sometime in 2003. With 2010 over, I've decided to finally call it quits. Meh, everyone should experience the fun of a massive, failed project at least once. So quit whining about all the people starting things they're never going to finish and let them get it out of their systems (yes, I'm talking to you, blenderartists.org forummers).

Anywho, the video :

The goal was to try and show all the scenes in the book "2001 : A Space Odyssey" that weren't featured in the film. This was done in Blender 2.23-2.3, when raytracing was a gleam in the programmer's eyes (and some Terragen also). So don't expect anything revolutionary, this was a learning project (although it does show some nice faked volumetrics). Editing is poor (because some scenes are outright missing), some renders are pretty hideous, and the psychedelic sequence at the end relies too heavily on a kaleidoscopic effect (because back then, rendering times were insanely slow).

I should also point out that my system at the time had 128 MB RAM and probably no more than a 500 Mhz processor. Only spotlights could cast shadows back then. Volumetrics were the work of the devil. Reflection and refraction - I think not. And vectorial motion blur ? Don't make me laugh. Many scenes were rendering at 5 minutes per frame even at this poxy resolution (the very idea of HD being at least as fanicifull as interstellar spaceflight). And another thing, get those damn kids off my lawn...

A more complete description is probably warranted for people who want to understand what the hell is going on :

00:00 - 01:38 Title sequence, following the film
01:38 - 04:08 2,000,000 B.C, an alien spaceship exits hyperspace and explores the solar system. Detecting primitive humans on Earth, it destroys a moon of Saturn, creating its rings and a large black monolith...
04:08 - 05:42 The alien ships flies in complete silence (because I never got round to adding any music) over some cheesy Terragen/Blender landscapes and creates a second, smaller crystalline monolith

MISSING SCENES : The monkey stares into the monolith and sees some swirly patterns. And then does the famous bone-smashing scene, followed by the whole Space Station V sequence, and possibly something on the Moon for completeness' sake. I even started some of this - you can see the proof on my website. Some of the spaceships were pretty detailed, albeit badly textured.

05:42 - 07:52 Discovery explores the Saturnian system where it finds the monolith on the moon Japetus.
07:52 - 08:50 Discovery enters the monolith which is revealed as a wormhole entrance. This is connected to a "grand central station" of other wormholes and it flies through one of them. I suppose it should really be one of the pods, not Discovery itself, but I didn't want to model one.
08:50 - 09:15 The ship now explores a giant ancient space net. Unfortunately, this is crap. It really can't be depicted on a system with 128 MB RAM, it just can't. But I tried anyway...
09:15 - 09:52 Strange blue non-corporeal entities are encountered on the surface of a red giant star, which fly toward an orbiting white dwarf.
09:52 - 14:27 This was my take on the psychedelic surrealism of the film. I'm afraid it does go on a bit. Watch out for the nebula at ~10:32, it was done in Terragen. The sequence from 11:49 - 11:54 is quite good. From 13:18 - 13:59 we explore the Mandelbrot set using some other program, then explore it in 3D with Blender until the end (which I think looks pretty neat).

MISSING SCENES : I then intended to do a zoom in from the large-scale structure of the Universe to the famous space baby, which would destroy an orbiting weapons satellite. Started, but did not finish. And of course there are many others I didn't even start. Still, I got about halfway through my projected 30 minutes total, which isn't bad going I think.

Moral of the story : Bad workman blames his tools... well, maybe, but if you only have 10 bricks you can't expect to build Notre Dame. Except maybe in minature.

EDIT : Within a few minutes of upload YouTube had correctly identified the original copyright owner of the music (no, I don't have access to my own orchestra, so yes, I used an existing recording) and determined that no action need be taken except, possibly, to display some adverts in the side banner. This is technically very impressive and more than a little scary, but kudos to Demon Music for not adopting draconian copyright principles.

On Driving Tests

2011-01-16T19:19:00.003Z

With the need for yet another driving test, I thought I should probably explain a little more about driving tests, and in doing so vent my rage and wrath upon the cruel world that hath such madness in it. For after 4 failures and £412 send into a fiery abyss*, I have to question whether this is due to my own monstrous ineptitude, the bitter idiocy of the examiners, the terrible insanity of the test itself, or an irresistible combination of all of these most melodramatic factors.

* With 4 failures I hold the dubious honour of the record number of failures from my instructor.

On the surface the test is a most simple thing. First, the examiner asks you to read a number plate about 20m distant. Next they ask you a very few hideously trivial questions about the workings and maintenance of the automobile (e.g., how do you test your breaks, how do you turn on your lights, how do you check your oil). Neither of these procedures makes any real sense. What happens if you fail the eyesight check ? Have you just lost your entire fee ? Surely this would be better done beforehand. At least there is a clear and obvious purpose to it - the selected questions asked could be included in the theory test.

Then commences a period of 30-40 minutes of driving, including the 10 minutes of "independent" driving and a single maneuver (it used to be 3 maneuvers, now it's just 1). It may also include an emergency stop. The vast majority of the time, however, is spent driving under instruction from the examiner - e.g., turn left at the end of the road, at the roundabout take the 2nd exit, that sort of thing. All of which will happen on a route you've already done with your instructor because the number of test routes is very limited.

The "independent driving" section is a new and quite pointless thing. The very name is a bona fide lie. If it was really independent the examiner would get out of the car and watch you drive off into the sunset, or, possibly, a tree*. Instead, what happens is that the examiner tells you where to go and draws a little diagram to show you. Since this consists of no more than 3-5 steps to remember, the point of this escapes me (map reading, maybe ?). But then you're also asked to follow road signs, which is more independent and at least seems vaguely relevant (also, it does not matter if you take a wrong turning or miss a turning provided your driving remains safe and legal).

* Not so unlikely. My instructor told me one student who started at the same time as me was back in the test center within 5 minutes, with their examiner mumbling something about "we'll have to leave the car up on the embankment."

The maneuvers are any of the 3 classics : reversing around a corner, turn in the road (you can call it a 3 point turn but this is inaccurate because it doesn't matter if you make it a 5 point turn or even more) or parallel park. And of course there might be an emergency stop, but the ability to slam on the brakes is hardly challenging.

Thus the test is not inherently difficult and contains many areas that are as trivial as the first round of questions on The Weakest Link. So then, why the repeated failures ? Let's review :

1) Mounting the kerb while reversing around a corner

Failing to properly reverse around a corner is not the most dangerous thing in the world to do, assuming you don't flatten any passing cats/hedgehogs/pedestrians. And under normal driving circumstances this is hardly a common procedure at all. Alas there are a few situations where not being able to reverse correctly could be dangerous, so I'm forced to strike this one up to my own monstrous ineptitude. Can't really prepare for unexpected mind farts.

2) Blocking a side road

Well, this one is bloody daft. Lots of people with licenses block side roads every single day. Absolutely no other driver's I've spoken to can understand why this constitutes a failure, particularly given gridlocked traffic on my side of the road and heavy traffic on the other. So I'm quite happy to chalk this one as the terrible insanity of the test itself. I'm afraid delays at junctions in heavy traffic are just a part of life.

3) Not turning enough

To summarise I wasn't turning enough on an empty country road and if I hadn't turned I'd have ended up in a field. The examiner reached for, but did not actually touch, the wheel. We'll never know if I'd have turned at the last moment so this too has to be ascribed to my own monstrous ineptitude. Having driven this route many times before, deliberately driving slower than strictly necessary, and there being no other cars visible, this one's a particularly sucky failure.

4) Pulling out in front of a bus...

... very, very slowy. I should emphasise that the bus too was moving very, very slowly. I mean, my grandmother could walk faster than that, and she's dead. The examiner didn't have to slam on the brakes or grab the wheel, the bus didn't have to slow down, beep or react in any visible way whatsoever. It may in fact be the least spectacular driving accident in history, one so boring that even the likes of Road Wars wouldn't take it. But, pulling out in front of buses isn't to be advised, so I'll generously put this one down to a combination of my own monstrous ineptitude and the bitter idiocy of the examiners. A nice examiner could have let this one go. And c'mon, it was Christmas, damnit !

What have we learned ? Well, nothing much, other than it is entirely possible to fail a very simple thing. By my count that gives a ratio of justified to unjustified rails of 60%. Real driving may be as far removed from GTA IV as Fox News is from intelligent left-wing reporting, but they do have two things in common : (1) they'd be much improved with a decent checkpoint system* and (2) if you fail something 4 times it's very hard to work up enough enthusiasm to try a 5th time... watch this space.

* Yes, I know this is impossible. I'm just sayin' is all.