Cake, Science, And Very Large Rocks

The European Week of Astronomy and Space Science conference has a big problem : how do you pronounce the acronym ? E-wass ? Ewe-ass ? Eh-wass ? E.W.A.S.S. ? Nobody knows. The American equivalent, the American Astronomical Society meeting, has no such difficulty, being universally accepted practise to call it the "double A S".

Anyway the two meetings are pretty much the same thing : an enormous travelling circus that meets once (twice for the AAS) per year in order to squash as many astronomers as possible into a small room, in the hope that they'll somehow merge and form a single, gigantic super-astronomer that will wander around the place, crushing small buildings beneath its mighty feet and making witty remarks about astronomy. Something like that, anyway.

What EWASS actually is, or was this year, is 1200 astronomers wandering around the Charles University Faculty of Law building eating lots of cake and wondering which session they should go to.

Like most buildings in Prague, it's quite an impressive place from the outside. Inside it's nice enough, but certainly showing its age.

I found a kindred spirit at the SKA booth, complete with an etched glass cube of the antennas and
a Google Cardboard display of the telescope site.

The main foyer and many lecture rooms are fine, but some of the others have wooden desks which look like they haven't been replaced since the 1940s. As a conference venue it was functional - plenty of space - but not especially comfortable. Most of the time this wouldn't matter, but temperatures were generally 27 - 33 C and the humidity was high. There were no ceiling fans, let alone air conditioning, so it wasn't always particularly pleasant.

Fortunately the conference freebie was a hand fan, which was even more practical and useful than the USB fan at the ALMA meeting last year. Without it I might have collapsed. As it was, I only left one session because the heat was unbearable (and it wasn't especially interesting anyway).

For a large conference the schedule was pretty good, with two half-hour coffee breaks and 90 minutes for lunch. That's about what you get as standard in a regular working university day, maybe even more. Of course the penalty is that for the rest of the time you're listening to so many talks you can practically feel your head expanding and have to continuously fight the fear that it might become too heavy and fall off. Conferences are draining. Unfortunately, the coffee "breaks"* were really only coffee - the tea being so undrinkable that I couldn't drink it - though they did provide a tremendous amount of (mostly very good) cake. Lunch, alas, was something to be endured rather than enjoyed, so a diet of mainly sugary carbohydrate for a week (in mostly > 30 C heat) is not all that brilliant.

* They're breaks from the talks, but often this is when the most important discussions happen.

At some point the heat and humidity exploded in a respectable-sized thunderstorm, which freshened things up considerably.

In terms of the conference itself, the content was of a high standard. There was nothing Earth-shattering, but there were very few low-quality talks. There were hundred and hundreds of posters - too many, really, and they didn't seem to be particularly well-organised so I didn't pay them much attention.

The highlight was definitely a prize lecture by a certain Bengt Gustafsson on "Looking in other directions". Mainly it was focused on the importance of risky projects and the need to avoid the "publish or perish" culture which prevents more controversial research from being funded, but he introduced it with a wonderful story of an early Danish expedition to observe a transit of Venus. Delivered with an upper-class English accent with a tinge of Danish, and a palpable sense of gleeful enthusiasm, it featured the wonderful little section : "And what did they see coming over the horizon ?  [Dramatic pause, eyes widen] English pirates !". It was wonderful, like listening to someone who could be a professional narrator on children's storytime programmes.

This is not that prize talk, it's the opening ceremony, but it's the same room.

I gave a short talk on the usual dark galaxy stuff, plus those hydrogen streams I've been on about occasionally. It seemed to go pretty well, it had a few questions and I'm told I'm been headhunted for a collaboration with someone in the audience I didn't meet. So that's nice. Academically it was a decent conference, though it would have been better if there are been less overlap between sessions on similar topics.

Socially the conference had an unusual number of planned events, many of them being weirdly timed to occur during the conference itself. That's very strange. Although many people often tack on a few days of holiday to conferences in nice locations, it's very strange indeed for conference organisers to plan social trips that occur at the same time as the talks. People generally like to at least pretend they're going for the conference rather than a trip at the university's expense. If you're going to skip a talk, at least admit you're being a naughty little astronomer, you rascal.

Having seen everything in Prague already, the only social outings I signed up for were the welcoming "cocktail" (it wasn't a cocktail, but it was nice) and the concert/dinner. I got invited to the student event on a boat too, but I couldn't go because I'm not a student (and at the welcoming drink they were being very strict with tickets, so it didn't seem like a good idea to boatcrash it).

The welcoming drink was nice enough, with a riverside view on a sunny evening, but I completely and utterly won the concert seating lottery. Guess who had third row dead centre with no-one in the front two rows ? Yeah bitches, me. That's who.

Taken without zoom.

And it was almost literally a lottery. I found out later that the conference bags were given the tickets before the name badges were distributed, which explains why the great and the good were given seats toward the back and off-centre while muggins here got the best seat in the motherfrakin' Rudolfinium. In your FACE, Martin Rees*.

* Well he was there for part of the conference, but I've no idea if he went to the concert or not.

Afterwards there was a conference buffet dinner, which was extremely nice but I mostly had to stand up for that one, rubbing it in the noses of everyone who would listen about how I'd benefited from this totally chance arrangement.

At most small conferences hardly anyone knows each other, which forces people to mingle. That's OK, because everyone's in the same situation. At large conferences this is unnecessary. In this case there was a large contingent from Cardiff and various other associates, which meant that I was kept busy every evening except one. Unlike visitors, who stay in hotels, this means no chance to do the basic little housekeeping chores that suddenly seem much more important when you can't do them. Little things like washing up, hoovering, buying toilet paper. Couple that with a 12-hour day and by the end of the week things become a little bit Father Jack.

But after the conference ended there wasn't much time to collapse, because I had a friend visiting almost immediately afterwards and a 90-minute public talk on the Wednesday. Since this was almost entirely visual-based, with almost no text on any of the slides, it had to be practised in order to avoid me collapsing into a nervous, quivering wreck and scraped off the floor of the lecture theatre using a very sharp scrapey thing. Spending 1.5-3.0 hours per day loudly telling jokes to an empty room is not much fun at all really. The best I could hope for is that it might annoy my rather irritating neighbours, who have developed the habit of performing very loud sex acts at weird, unpredictable hours.

My friend arrived early on Tuesday morning, and since my talk was scheduled for Wednesday evening, we didn't do very much except walk around Prague for the first couple of days. Ian is currently making a mockery of the notion that technological unemployment will make our lives a dreary misery, currently being between jobs on a mission to explore the entire freakin' world for some reason. Apparently this is a fun thing to do and "better than staying in !_@*ing Cardiff", although I disagree. Having already been to Florence and Luxembourg, Ian's next port of call is 'murica-land. I'll be joining that for the eclipse-based section, but Ian is staying for a full six weeks.

I normally keep other people pretty well anonymous - if they crave internet-based glory they can start their own damn blog - so why am I harping on about Ian ? Because 35.4 seconds after returning to Cardiff from Trumpsville, Ian is off on a sponsored trek to Machu Piccu. He's doing this on account of his sister, who made a very moving (and funny) documentary before succumbing to cancer last year. You can watch the documentary here, but much more importantly, you can sponsor Ian's effort's here. Any doubts about whether you should donate or not ? Let me put those to rest.

On Wednesday the talk proceeded as planned. The last time I gave a seminar at the Charles University, it was a somewhat... trying experience. The most reaction I got from the audience was a light chortle, while the rest of the time it was like talking to a brick wall. It's very hard to remain focused when the audience are barely reacting at all to jokes that every other audience has previously LOLed at. Afterwards I was told - and I quote - that it was "one of the best we've ever had."

People are weird.

Anyway, this talk was largely aimed at participants of a high school Astronomy Olympiad, but also open to the public. So the audience was neither compelled to be there nor feeling constrained by the presence of their lecturers (as I'm told is the case for the university students, for some reason - the Czech Republic is a very hierarchical place). Thankfully, after the weeks of preparation (tens of hours on practise alone) this was a success. People laughed loudly at the correct moments. The 3D movies were a success. The data cube did its thing. A good time was had by all. Hurrah !

Also featuring Grumpy Cat, Captain Picard memes, Monty Python, Star Wars, James Bond and a wizard. But not necessarily in that order.

But enough about that. We stayed up until sometime after 1am having a celebratory drink, then got up at 6am (or something) in order to catch the train to the interesting rock formations at Cesky Raj. Apparently it's important to go early in case the rocks decide not to show up as they're nervous around people. That stage of the proceedings wasn't as bad as you might think. For me, the worst part by far was the second part of the train ride.

The first part was an uneventful couple of hours to Turnov; the second part a horrendous 15 minutes to the park itself. The second train is somewhat infrequent, but saves you about an hour of walking. Consequently it's rammed. And then more people get on. More and more crowd on, even if there's no room and they have dogs the size of horses and /or bicycles (also the size of horses), giving them plenty of options to get to Cesky Raj using their own vehicles but nooo, let's ram everyone on, even if that means putting the bikes in the toilet. Oh how wonderful. And they were loud people. By far and away the loudest Czechs I've ever heard, especially one rather large man who thought that deodorant was something that happened to other people. So I spent most of that short but horrible period trying to figure out where my feet should go with a fat man's armpit waving dangerously close to my face while he shouted very loudly to everyone nearby something incomprehensible but apparently related to cucumbers, which he was passing around from a large blue bucket together with salt and pepper. People ate them raw, salted to taste.

I swear I'm not making this up. I'd have taken a photograph, except a) I do not deal well with large smelly shouty crowds in cramped conditions early in the morning and b) it was impractical to fumble in my bag for the camera.

Once we finally escaped this mobile hell-hole, almost the first thing we saw were fields of wheat. Cue Theresa May jokes.

The next thing we saw was lots and lots of trees.

We were wandering more or less and random with no map to speak of save Google, which isn't good in forests, but as we kept wandering we started to see more rocks and less trees.

Eventually we wandered back on to the main path and soon we saw some proper rocks.

The weird rocks are impressive enough that you can spend long minutes just staring at them and imagining what would happen if you pushed your worst enemy of the top... err, anyway, we spent a long time looking at the weird tall rocks. They're well worth a visit, even if they take about 2 hours from Prague. But don't set off at 6am, because that's very silly. We didn't see all the rocks by a long shot, but we spent pretty much the whole day wandering around. And unlike just about everything in Prague, rocks are free to look at and don't incur an extra fee for photographs.

Then we stopped looking at the rocks and went back to Prague where we found an amusing bar with worried-looking beer tanks.

The next day we'd originally intended as a trip to the Punka caves, where you can take an underground boat ride. But we couldn't do that because it was fully booked a week ahead of time, so we went to some other caves in Hranice instead.

We decided to leave at like 5am* because Hranice is such a well-known popular tourist destination* that we desperately wanted to beat the crowds*. When we arrived, we were somewhat disappointed to find that the town was a bit of a dump*.

This is NOT the train station we arrived at, which was much larger.

This run-down, post-Soviet locale had clearly seen better days. Gangs of violent youth roamed the streets* molesting old ladies* while feral cats hissed at us in a menacing fashion.*

Actually it was quite nice. There's not much to see in the town, though its main square is pleasant enough (except for the temperature, which was so high that the entire town burned down*).

* The authenticity of these statements is somewhat open to dispute.

The caves were good, though I don't have any photographs. Unusually they were formed partly through hydrothermal processes, and contain many hydrothermal stalagmites that look like little volcanoes. Some of the caves contain lethal levels of CO2 - one of them is even called the Cave of Death. And they're not fooling around either - a candle, descending on a wire, is snuffed out just a few feet below the level of the visitor path. This is definitely not somewhere you want to ignore the no entry signs.

(I've tried Googling to find out what would happen if you did breathe in concentrated CO2 - the most common answer seems to be that you'd die a horrible death in a few breaths, though a few misguided individuals seem to think it would just make you cough.)

Across the river from the caves lies the Hranice Abyss (cue Nietzsche and Brexit references, there helpfully being another field of wheat nearby), one of the deepest known underwater caves in the world. Just how deep it is, nobody knows. Robots have gone down 400 m from the surface of the water, which is about 70 m below where visitors can stand. Rather satisfyingly, it's possible to throw a rock from the viewing platform and have it hit the surface of the water.

Continuing the rather steep ascent upwards leads to a nice viewing point overlooking the river, where you can sit on an odd-looking statue and watch the world go by.

Then we went back to Prague and spent the next day being extremely lazy.

The day after that, we planned to go to Cesky Krumlov ("the jewel in the south-western Bohemian spa triangle" - how's that for a claim to fame !) but the rather strange man at the bus depot told us this wasn't possible, at least not if we wanted to get back the same day. Which we did. This was because there was a major film festival happening, but I suppose that's what one should expect for the jewel of the south-western Bohemian spa triangle. I imagine the situation in the north-western Bohemian spa triangle must be even worse.

A hasty rethink and we zipped off to Kutna Hora. Since I've been there before, there's no need to describe it again. Though it was good to see the town in sunny weather this time, even if it was once again so hot that birds were dropping out of the sky on account of having caught fire. The little feathery meteors don't show up well in the photographs, but they were definitely there.

It should also be noted that inside the cathedral are statues of St Wenceslas and St Ludmilla apparently having a dance-off. Kutna Hora's Got Talent !

Then we went back to Prague and continued being lazy until Ian left at 3am on Tuesday morning, because Ryan Air sucks donkeys. And then I collapsed, which is more or less what I've been doing ever since.

Cesky Krumlov : Why Medieval Art Desperately Needs To Jump The Shark

Tired of Prague ? Searching for something more exotic and crazy in the Czech Republic, filled with thrills, spills, dangerous monsters and death-defying escapades ? Well you won't find any in the sleepy town of Cesky Krumlov, a tiny medieval place about a hundred miles south of Prague, near the Austrian border. What you will find is a pretty little town that's a pleasant diversion for a weekend.

It takes almost exactly two hours to get to Cesky Krumlov ("Czech Crumb Love" - no not really) by car or about two days by foot. It's your choice, I'm not judging. How long it takes by balloon or camel is left as an exercise to the reader.

We stayed in this nice little B&B, which finally answers a long-standing mystery : why I keep seeing the word "penzion" everywhere. It turns out the Czech Republic is not overflowing with pension-collection centres, but guesthouses. I suppose that's more logical.

Although it was out of season and the weather was bad, this place was fully booked. Czechy Kelvin-Helmholtz is a popular place, so book in advance. Everyone else thought the guesthouse was "OK, not great", though personally I give it massive brownie points for having an exceptionally comfortable bed. I usually sleep extremely badly anywhere new, but not here.

Mind you, that might have had something to do with the excessive amount of walking. First we walked into the centre of town...

That's us, walking.

... which is a pretty little place, even in the damp and somewhat miserable weather.

Checky Krum Lust really is tiny, you could walk from one side to the other in half an hour. But if you go around all the streets and visit the many and various museums, you can easily spend all day on your feet. Which we did. But that's OK, considering how many weekends I spend watching Netflix.

Could this be the world's only nightclub with a medieval water wheel ?

We began with the town's main attraction, since during the low season it's not fully open and even then it's only open for limited hours : the rather fine castle. This is an impressive castle-palace with an extremely dramatic multi-level arched bridged linking two enclosures on different hills.

The castle itself is imposing but not spectacular from below. Like many Czech castles (not including Karl's Stein), it doesn't really look like a castle except in a few isolated areas. It's hard to get a sense of the layout of it even from its interior, though a model in the museum (one of only two parts we could visit) makes it clear that this was a huge fortified area - and definitely a proper, fighting castle, not the fortified palace it appears today.

The museum is good, and quite extensive, though the focus is on the latter stages of the castle as a palace. The other part we visited was the impressive baroque tower, which has a suitably commanding view over the whole town.

After that we went for lunch in a nice restaurant where the food was overpriced and there was a problem with every single order except mine. You win some, you lose some... I suppose that's the compensation I get for being the only single person in a group of nine.

Then we went to a bunch of museums. I forget the order, but there was the torture museum (very silly and the scariest thing was the noise the rotating gate makes), the mirror maze (not bad, actually), and the moldavites museum.

I have tiny feet ! Tee hee hee !

Moldavities are a very interesting and rare form of glass, formed by meteor impacts. The museum was fun, though for all the wrong reasons, with the very first explanatory panel opening with the memorable line, "65 million years ago, the dinosaurs had a bad day." The short video was probably better suited to astrologers than astronomers, narrated by a strange man describing how touching the moldavites made him feel their "cosmic energy" and gave him a "Buddhist attitude". There was also an interactive impact simulator where you use your hands to set the size of the asteroid and hurl it towards the Earth. It didn't work very well, and when it did it gave very inconsistent results. Sometimes the asteroid explodes in the atmosphere yet causes massive ecological damage, sometimes it impacts the ground and causes a massive crater but no burning. Very mysterious.

Then there was even more walking and nice views of Chicky Camelot until we all decided it was time to collapse.

The next day we left Chucky Krumloops for a nearby castle which I can't remember the name of because, unusually in Czech, it's got too many vowels. This castle also had a genuine medieval history, but it suffered from reconstruction (not restoration) much later, so the modern thing is very nice but little more than a fantasy stately home.

This castle was open, but because of the low season the tours were only in Czech with English printouts. On the slightly positive side, we got free entry into an art gallery. I'm not a big fan of art galleries, but this one, it must be said, was exactly the same as all the others. Lots of paintings and sculptures which you walk around thinking, "yes, that's definitely a painting" or more analytically, "well I wouldn't want that on my wall." I really don't get it.

The first level of the gallery was by far the worst. It had a nice enough opening quote by someone, explaining that only the audience can bestow meaning on the art. That's reasonable enough I suppose, but it seemed to me an excuse to justify putting a stick in some concrete and calling it art without any explanation. It was really all that I hate most about modern "art", little more than pretentious twaddle that probably earned some pot-smoking layabout enough money to make a Faberge egg omelette, or something. At least give me some description of what in God's name the artist was thinking so I can rant loudly about how, "Well I don't think much of that ! Doesn't look much like a commentary on socioeconomic policy in Aztec Mexico to me !". Instead I just had to endure a lengthy series of meaningless nonsense, reading the labels for lack of anything better to do.

The second level was slightly better, though what it God's name the artist was thinking here was all too clear : God. Well, at least the paintings and sculptures looked like what they were trying to imitate. But how many identical sculptures of Christ being brutally crucified (sometimes very graphically) do we really need ? Do we really need yet another identical painting of the adoration of the Magi ?

If only the artists from galleries one and two had met, they might have learned something from each other. The modern ones would have discovered some technical skill beyond finger-painting, and the medieval ones would have had a good dose of surrealism. The Adoration of the Magi with a Happy Shark. Jesus dying on the cross but someone shouting in a speech bubble, "He's only MOSTLY dead !". Anything would be better than a dreary series of identicalness that turn the so-called Greatest Story Ever Told into The Most Uninteresting Sequence Of Depictions You'll Ever See.

The third level, impressionism, was much better. Here there was some remarkable technical skill of conveying detail and realistic lighting while painting the sort of brush stroke a 5 year old would feel ashamed of. And they look nice dammit. OK, none of them were particularly provocative or anything, but who cares ? None of the other paintings were either clever or looked nice. And dammit, I think nice-looking paintings are a darn sight better than all those stupid ones of tins of soup or Christ spilling his guts all over the place.

After enduring this strenuous ordeal, the day concluded with the tour of the castle. This wasn't bad considering it was all in Czech, but I came away with the distinct impression that the owner was a complete deranged psychopath who must have really hated deer. Stone animal heads festoon the exterior, real ones cover every square inch of the interior that's not plastered with firearms.

I know that this was a different age when animal rights meant little, and it was all jolly good fun to take the young 'un's out to blast the wilderness into oblivion (literally - they had children's hunting rifles), but this guy was pathologically obsessed. Even the ladies rooms were plastered wall-to-wall with assorted guns. The interior designer's instructions must've been something like, "I want to be no more than two arm length's away from the nearest firearm at all times, in case a deer suddenly appears and I have to shoot it. Did I ever tell you about that time a deer tried to ravage my wife ?! Nasty little devils, deer. Almost as bad as foreigners. Can't trust 'em. Gotta shoot 'em sixteen times to make sure they're dead. Sixteen ! Yes. What was I saying ? That's right, shooting foreigners. Now, the thing about foreigners is..."

Then we escaped the Deer Extermination Centre, had a a very late lunch, and went home. And everyone lived happily ever after, except for the deer because they were all dead.

My Self-Service Checkout Is Definitely A Racist

I had a revelation about the self-service checkout at the local supermarket today. I realised it's a big fat racist and doesn't like me.

Consider the behaviour of this deplorable contraption if I select English mode. "WELCOME !", it booms, with obviously insincere cordiality. "PLEASE SCAN YOUR FIRST ITEM !", it continues at a volume I can only assume was designed to frighten cats. Why they need a cat-scarer in a shopping centre is beyond me. On the other hand there aren't any cats around, so I guess it must be working.

Cowed into meek obedience by this biblical voice from the box, I immediately attempt to comply. But, woe ! I am too slow in finding the barcode. "PLEASE SCAN AN ITEM !" booms the box again in its strange tones of cordial indifference, like someone who's high on drugs and oblivious to the world around them. I hate unnecessary repetitive noises. The machine obviously knows this, because 1.79 seconds later it booms again, "PLEASE SCAN AN ITEM !". There shall be no delays in this supermarket. Or cats.

I endure this series of deceptively friendly orders and reach the end. The last thing left is a couple of chocolate muffins from the bakery. They sell these loose, so you have to tell the magic box what you're buying. The instant I hit the "bakery" button, the box booms yet again. Only this time the friendly/stoned English voice has been replaced by a stern older Czech lady. "NOW CHOOSE THE ITEM." she commands, admittedly at a volume that's more feline-friendly.

With all the speed I can muster I rush through the menus. But I am too slow ! The voice strikes again, "NOW CHOOSE THE ITEM." Wait, they've bloody altered the menu, haven't they ? Indeed they have. About once a fortnight all the little picture icons in each section are shuffled around. Why they do this is a mystery I have yet to solve. But they do. So I must continue to endure, "NOW CHOOSE THE ITEM" over and over and over again.

When I find the item, I'm instantly subjected to the booming instruction, "NOW CHOOSE THE NUMBER OF ITEMS." If I'm quick, I can get away with hearing this message only once. Slip up by more than 1.79 seconds though and I get it again. And woe betide me if I'm too slow in putting the items on the scale, because then I'm told - wait for it - "PLEASE PUT THE ITEM ON THE SCALE". Well where else did you think I was going to put it ? Jupiter ? You stupid box, how quickly do you think I can move ??

The worst is not over. Now I've bagged all my items I want to pay. Stoned English lady returns. "INSERT CASH, OR SELECT PAYMENT TYPE" she says. I do. Then I have to endure a choice of patronising instructions, once again at cat-deafening volume : "PLEASE INSERT COINS INTO THE COIN SLOT, AND NOTES INTO THE NOTE SLOT."

All together now : "The first rule of the tautology club is the first rule of the tautology club !"

Or more commonly, "PLEASE PUT THE CARD IN THE CARD READER, AND FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS". Not quite so bad except that whereas the cash mode shuts up as long as I keep feeding it money, the card mode is really, really determined to deafen the local cat population. It matters not how quickly I insert the card, or even if I do insert the card and start entering my PIN, "PLEASE PUT THE CARD IN THE CARD READER, AND FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS" booms continuously, echoing throughout the store in the sort of voice God probably used when giving Moses the Ten Commandments.

By this point my terror at the prospect of disobeying orders has long evaporated, replaced with a seething disgust at this inane contraption. "You fascist BASTARD !" I think to myself, "It's no wonder people bloody voted for Brexit with the likes of YOU in charge ! You damn Nazi pig, I'm gonna go Basil Fawlty on your shiny metal ass ! Think you can send ME to the gulag, do you ???!? WELL I'LL SHOW YOU THE TRUE MEANING OF CHRISTMAS ! AAAAAAARRRGHHH !!!"

What I actually do is scowl menacingly and mutter, "I bloody AM inserting the card ! SHUT UP !" A bit too loudly as it happens, since the other customers start giving me funny looks.

At last the ordeal is over. But what happens if I don't select English ? If I can operate a radio telescope, a self-service till should be no problem, right ?

Right ! In Czech the infernal device is as good as gold. No welcome message telling me to scan an item. No obnoxious repeated instructions whenever I'm too slow. And no continuous messages about putting the bloody card in the bloody card reader that treat me like an idiot. Hardly any messages at all really, and such as there are almost whisper quiet. All you can hear is the sound of tumbleweed drifting across the open plains, or at least it would be if we were on the open plains and there weren't 200 other busy customers doing their shopping.

Conclusion ? The checkout machine treats all non-Czech speakers as idiotic morons who can't even do a simple task. We have to be told that coins go in the coin slot and notes go in the note slot AS OFTEN AND AS LOUDLY AS POSSIBLE. Heck, if the machine had arms it would surely also make outlandish, expressive hand gestures for good measure, the racist metal bastard.

Or I suppose I could learn Czech.

Fifty Shades of Garching

A career in astronomy almost inevitably carries with it the curse and boon of travel. From the tropical jungles of Puerto Rico to the glaciers of Alaska, from the burning sands of Socorro to the Alpine range of Switzerland... and now to the grey wastes of Garching. This may well be the least exotic place I've ever been to for any reason ever. And that includes Milton Keynes, for goodness' sake.

Cue the least exciting travel blog ever.

Garching is a small, pointless town in southern Germany which for some utterly unknowable reason is a centre of high technology. Astrophysical institutes, cyber technologies, plasma research, General Electric... it's got them all. With a population of just 16,000 you might think this makes it some sort of scientific Mecca, a researcher's paradise without equal, where scientists frolic freely in gay meadows with sunshine and rainbows and lollipops in abundance.

Well, it's got this thing, at any rate.

What it actually is is a bunch of large, grey buildings under a large, grey sky in the middle of a large, grey field. The key point for the designers was that everything should apparently be large, grey, and above all soulless. Why this particular luckless field was chosen to be a centre of European scientific excellence I've no idea. I'd like to say that a cold, grey wind moans across a barren icy waste, but that's too exciting; the poor place can't even be described as a "blasted heath". It's just a big, boring field with some big, boring buildings stuck in it. Even the tea is a sort of grey colour, and I have to reluctantly concede that it's even worse than American tea - which I've long regarded as (in the worlds of Douglas Adams) a liquid almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

I mean now this is just being silly.

The European Southern Observatory building isn't grey. It's brown, which is not much better. Inside it feels uncannily like an airport terminal, except that it's harder to navigate. The building design is a weird triple combination of circular buildings linked by a covered walkway very much like the ramp to an aircraft. Even after a week I still had to consciously think which way I wanted to go whenever I left the office. As for the wider campus, that reminded me of nothing so much as the grounds of a hospital. Not exactly inspirational.

The under-construction "Supernova" planetarium sticks with the brown theme but somehow contrives to make a weird-looking building look reeeeally boring.

My visit was for QA2 training for ALMA. The Atacama Large Millimetre Array is a billion-dollar radio telescope in Chile that's searching the skies at hitherto unexplored frequencies with exquisite sensitivity and resolution. That's what they tell me anyway; while ALMA might pay my salary I can't honestly claim to really know anything about it. Arecibo works at much lower frequencies, and while there's certainly some broad overlap between the two research areas the technical differences are enormous.

At least the ALMA facility itself is more photogenic.

Arecibo is a single-dish telescope. Point it at the sky and it will measure how bright the sky is at that point at whatever particular frequency it's tuned to. Move it around and record the brightness at different points and you can construct an image. The measurements are real - you directly determine the brightness just as with an optical telescope. Oh, you can process the data afterwards in some fancy ways and get different results, but at the most basic level you can (with proper care) actually know how bright the sky is at any point you look at. Easy peasy, relatively speaking.

Not so with an interferometer like ALMA. Interferometers are arrays of telescopes that are combined to produce images with extremely high resolution, equivalent to building a single telescope as big as the largest distance between the individual telescopes. Well, sort of. Not exactly.

The thing is you can't just wave a magic wand and shout, "ALACKAZAM !" and hope to improve your resolution. No, your incantations have to be much more mathematical. You've got to combine the signals from each antenna somehow, and therein lies the difficulty. It would be an understatement to say that the maths behind this is fiendishly difficult, but the bottom line is that interferometers do not measure the brightness of the sky. The images they produce - though marvellous - are reconstructions based on their raw data. They are not direct measurements; you cannot obtain "the right answer" with an interferometer because other ways of processing the data give different results which are equally valid.

As usual, don't go nuts with this. The images interferometers produce are wrong but only for a given value of wrong - they are certainly not fictitious. The point is that with the proper care an interferometer can give you wonderful results if you know what you're doing. I can and have taught students to observe with Arecibo in about an hour or less, whereas with an interferometer it might be optimistic to say "in about a year or less".

Students remotely operating Arecibo from Green Bank.

Which is where QA2 training comes in. ALMA has the incredible and laudable goal of producing a fully automatic pipeline for its observing, so that eventually the scientists will get their data delivered to them in a "science ready" state - that is, corrected so that the images are the best representations of the sky that they can possibly be. What they'll be looking at may not be the whole story and it won't be 100% accurate, but it will be good enough. And this will be done entirely by algorithms with no need for the experienced users to step in and check anything.

Such is the goal. Remarkable progress is being made toward that extremely complicated end, but for now, it's still much easier for a human to gain the necessary experience. So ALMA data undergoes several levels of "quality assessment". First there's "phase 2"*, which consists of coordinating the observing scripts between the scientists and the telescope operators. Then when the observing starts there's QA0** at the telescope itself, making sure all the equipment is working and the weather is nice and so on. No-one seems to have any idea what QA1 is at all - it's presumed to have been lost in the blizzard of acronyms (that list doesn't cover half of them) the telescope generates with a profligacy equalled only by its raw data. After that comes QA2 - checking that the data has reached the requested sensitivity and resolution, followed very occasionally by QA3 when the scientist finds a problem with the data that the QA2 staff didn't.

* Yes, I realise that it doesn't make sense to start with phase 2. I have no idea what phase 1 is or if it even exists.
** Which presumably means there's also a phase 0, further adding to the things I have no idea about. Yay.

As you'll have gathered, they do love their corporate jargon, do ALMA. They routinely say things like, "The DRM at the JAO will open a JIRA ticket and you can download the AOT file and inspect it with the OT to determine if it's TDM or FDM data in TP mode and you can find out lots of other information on SCOPS with communications to the P2G but obviously it's easier if you've already looked at the project during Phase 2". Honestly, they're one step away from, "By streamlining the paradigm we can ensure increased productivity through synergy maximisation but let's talk offline !"

Well, alright, it's not that bad. They're still scientists after all. Nice people that it would be hard to dislike. But while other scientists love to moan about minor bureaucratic procedures, here they don't seem to realise just how incredibly corporate things have become. Maybe this is the future of astronomy, but I hope not.

Learning QA2 procedures if you're already a dab hand at interferometry is probably not that bad. You can certainly learn it inside a week, though I'd hazard you might still think there's some scope for improvement. But what if, like muggins here, you've had barely any experience with interferometry at all ?

Imagine, if you will, an enormous online technical manual from which you need to extract a few key points. Some of these are easily visible but most are hidden in obscure hyperlinks. You can control+F but not search the entire site in any way. Some points are labelled in an obvious way but others require reading and understanding to extract the relevant detail. You'll need at least a dozen different pages from which to extract all the information, but maybe not all at the same time and you can't minimise windows or have multiple desktops (because frak you, that's why). Some information can't be extracted directly from the manual but only by running a series of long, complicated tasks which then require you to check yet more extremely long web pages that are incredibly poorly-labelled and use a program which just plain doesn't work for no reason. The result of all this is access to data which doesn't interest you and you're not allowed to use in any case, and the absolute best you can hope for is that someone will eventually write you a thank-you email.

It's not much fun at all really. In fact it's a lot like completing a difficult mission in a computer game and having it crash at a critical moment - you've got to do the whole bloody thing again. Except instead of monsters and dragons, the most interesting thing you'll see is a fuzzy blob that will eventually be tremendously important to someone else. Not you though.

It got better throughout the week, in that the "long, complicated tasks" became short and relatively easy. Unfortunately the rest didn't improve much. I simply cannot conceive of why there's a version of Linux where you can't minimise windows or even see which ones are active in the taskbar (let alone why it's running at ESO). That alone made trivial tasks very difficult. It doesn't help when those tasks - like retrieving values from files - are made needlessly more difficult by those files being given meaningless names like "textfile.txt" (yes, literally that). Or when there's no clear list of what parameters you're eventually going to need from those files (you often need several so you may as well get them all at once), or which directories they're in (you need at least a dozen different windows open) or a linear set of instructions to follow.

The really, viscerally frustrating thing about the process was not how tedious it was, but how unnecessarily tedious it felt. So much of the really difficult process - the hard mathematics - has been taken care of by the computer, but these final, tiny baby steps feel like they've been deliberately designed to make things as gut-wrenchingly obnoxious as possible. All a human really needs to do is some relatively simple data processing and check the resulting plots for problems. If it's difficult to automatically extract parameters from a file and record them (for whatever reason) then OK, fine, but, come on - there's no need to obfuscate the process to the extent that many times I felt my brain simply shut down and refuse to co-operate any further.

No, I don't want to look for the file again. I already closed it because the instructions didn't say I'd need it again and it took me ten minutes to find it ! AAAAAARRRGHHH !

At that point I realised that no amount of willpower was going to get me anywhere so I gave up and drew on the whiteboard instead.

It would be so, so simple to create a "QA2" directory holding copies of the data files needed to extract the vital parameters from in a single location. I guess maybe if you've done this a hundred times you don't see the need for it, but lordy that's a steep learning curve. The group of us from Prague decided to collaborate and eventually (when we understand the process fully enough) produce our own, linear set of instructions, which ought to help a great deal. Hopefully at some point this learning curve is going to become a plateau...