The Best Phone Call IN THE WORLD !

Most readers will be aware that I recently went on one of my necessary-for-sanity trips back to Britain. I returned via a Star Trek conference in London, of which I expect I'll have more to say at some point. Unfortunately, the journey did not quite go according to plan.

The last trip I went on was an epic expedition to Socorro and Anchorage, and I've already related the horrors of that particular journey. Travel wise, things weren't anywhere near that bad this time. I got on a train from Horsahm to London and then Heathrow without incident. The plane to JFK wasn't much fun - it was full and the seats were unusually small, so I was literally elbow to elbow with my fellow cattle (I mean, passengers) for 7 hours. On the other hand, that's an hour less than I was expecting, which was nice.

I arrived in JFK on time with 4.5 hours until the flight to San Juan. Even so, since I had a connecting flight, I was able to skip the huge immigration line and go to this new-fangled "Quick Connect" thing that no-one else has ever heard of, and I was inside the airport in about 10 minutes. If you've ever been through US customs and immigration, you'll know that this is no small achievement.

Then I remembered that the spaceship Enterprise had been moved to JFK - literally, a real-life spaceship called Enterprise. The first space shuttle. It even features in the opening credits of the Star Trek series of the same name, which may well be the coolest possible way to break the fourth wall.

So, this is a spaceschip named Enterprise in a show of the same name which is derived from a previous show featuring a fictional spaceship named Enterprise which led to the naming of the real Enterprise which is seen in the credits of the fictional show called Enterprise. Just to be clear.

Since I now had several unexpectedly free hours, I wandered around the airport for a while hoping to find it. I didn't, because (as I half-suspected) it was quickly moved from the airport to a museum. Which is a pity, because riding atop a space shuttle called Enterprise would have been the perfect way to outdo my friend's efforts to fondle Kate Mulgrew while the Star Trek convention continued without me.

Be afraid, Kate. Be very afraid.

No matter. I got on the next plane, wherein being awake for over 20 hours began to take its toll. It wasn't as squashed as the first one, thankfully. So a little under 4 hours later I staggered off the plane and collapsed into a pre-arranged taxi. About 2 hours later I found myself back at my little orange concrete bunker, and only then did I realise I was now devoid of such essentials as my coat and wallet.

This turn of events caused me some level of distress. Normally, I'm so ultra-paranoid about checking I have all my belongings that losing any just can't happen. I check the pocket on the back of the seat in front of me at least 5 times. Even when I know full well I never put anything in it. I check for the essentials of keys, wallet and mp3 player in such a repetitive fashion that an anthropologist once wrote a paper on my ritualistic habits*.

* This isn't literally true. In fact, it isn't true at all.

This time the paranoia must have created a peculiar brand of self-confidence. Knowing that I'm too unsure of myself, I knew I must have already checked that I'd got all my stuff, because that's what I always do. So I proceeded from the airport safe in the knowledge that I was far too worried about leaving my stuff behind to have left any of my stuff behind.

Fortunately, though one rather major thing had gone horribly wrong, absolutely everything else was going right. The taxi driver is familiar with the observatory and nice enough to defer payment, knowing that I'm not attempting any scam. But I did have a thoroughly miserable 30 minutes while I struggled with second-guessing myself as to how I could have lost it. I concluded that it was probably on the last aircraft, but I wasn't sure.

Then I got a phone call.

"Hello, is this Rice Taylor ?"
"Err... yes."
"Hi, this is XXXXX from American Airlines -"
"Oh, hello, have you found my wallet ?"
"Yes - "
"Ah, wonderful. We should have dinner sometime, as I would like to father your children."

Even better, I had indeed left it on the plane to Puerto Rico, and it sounded like (from the remainder of the conversation, after we'd sorted out the family planning) everything was intact. Though I'd have to pay to get it Fed-Exed to me, this wasn't necessary, as by an extraordinarily unlikely coincidence I was planning to be back in San Juan anyway two days later (for a mini-conference I will describe later).

And indeed, I was back in San Juan two days later, where I retrieved my wallet which contained absolutely everything it was supposed to contain. Then everyone was happy and there were rainbows and kittens and sunshine and lollipops and all other wonderful things.

Rainbows are produced by vomiting unicorns, obviously.

Myths of Star Trek (I)

I've just finished watching the first series of the original Star Trek. I've seen all of the others, of course, but until now I've only seen a handful of the original. I always had the impression that it was a much more primitive show, laughable by modern standards. And of course I was certain that every episode, Kirk would make out with a hot alien babe and a dozen men in red shirts would be brutally slaughtered.

Well, I was wrong on all counts. Yes, it is a lot more primitive, but once you swallow the cheap '60's styling, it isn't all that bad. The modern remastered version has replaced most of the effects shots with CGI, so the ship isn't made of stickyback plastic covered in tissue paper and PVA glue any more. Not all of them though - in "The Alternative Factor", the ship still gets attacked by the Triffid Nebula and (for some reason) a whirling newspaper. And yes, I mean that literally.

The Triffid Nebula will not stand for your shenanigans.

Watching the original series 40 years late is a little weird, sociologically. It's at once ground-breakingly politically correct (probably more than any show, ever), what with a black female officer and a Russian flying the ship, yet it's also quite bizarrely anti-feminist. So while most of the women are intelligent and professional (Uhura not only deals with communications but also takes the helm when required), the minute they find a pretty dress they become useless baubles who are totally incapable of doing anything. Not to mention the immortal line by Captain Pike in the pilot episode : "I just can't get used to having a woman on the bridge."

The characters may be identical but at least one of them is now ironic.

I already knew that Kirk never says, "Beam me up Scotty", but I was still expecting him to be a gung-ho womaniser. He isn't. He spends a great deal of time signing forms (seemingly without ever reading them) and often restrains his crew from violence rather than the other way round. And although he does sometimes order the hand phasers to be set on kill, when stun isn't working, he doesn't even use the ships phasers until episode 10. I contest that he's no more trigger-happy than Picard, and probably a lot less than Sisko and Janeway.

On the other hand, Janeway becomes very angry when she's drunk, which is all of the time.

There's also another aspect to Kirk (and Pike even more so) that we don't see in any of the other Trek captains : they're worriers. Picard wouldn't know self-doubt if it punched him in the kidneys and bit off his nose, and Sisko doesn't face more than occasional misgivings. Janeway admittedly does wrestle with her conscience that blowing up the only thing that could get the ship home might have been a bad idea, but that's the only thing she ever really questions. Whereas Kirk and Pike confess to doubts about being a starship captain at all, and admit to not enjoying the responsibility of trying to keep hundreds of people alive every day.

What of the famous Kirk the ladies man ? Lies and slander. He has many female admirers, it's true, but he could hardly be called a womaniser. In fact he usually stalwartly resists the flirtations of alien seductresses while his crew go instantly weak at the knees ("How'd you like to have her as your own personal yeoman, hur hur hur..."). He has one very brief, demure kiss with an old flame, but that's about it. Admittedly he does try quite forcefully (and utterly unsuccessfully)  to seduce a sexy android in "What Are Little Girls Made Of ?". but in context this incident is really quite bizarre and actually out of character. I'm going to give Kirk the benefit of the doubt and put this down to bad writing.

Then there's the famous guarantee that wearing a red shirt is a death sentence. It isn't. To prove this, I'm keep a tally of all the casualties reported during each episode, including what colour shirt they were wearing (when possible). Now, it's true that the average death rate is about 16,000 per episode in series 1, which, quite wonderfully, is because 500,000 people walk into actual freakin' suicide booths in "A Taste Of Armageddon".

It's also true that the first few episodes are particularly bloody for the crew of the Enterprise. In fact the rate of attrition is so high that a five-year mission is off the cards, because everyone would be dead in about three years. But these too are anomalies. The total number of on-screen permanent (i.e. not brought back to life by aliens / gods / McCoy / sheer luck) crew deaths is 4 red shirts, 3 blue and 4 gold. There are also reported casualties that we don't see, but these only total about a dozen. So, sadly, there's absolutely no basis for the idea that wearing a red shirt shortens life expectancy.

All in all, season 1 leads me to conclude that the good name of Captain James R / T Kirk (it's R in an early episode, then changes to T later on) has been sullied by later parodies. A violent womaniser happy to see his men fall in the line of duty ? Hardly. He's a worrying bureaucratic gentleman, devoted to his crew and mission of peaceful exploration. Ensign Ricky need not fear for his insurance premiums in season 1. Of course, whether all this lasts into season 2 remains to be seen...

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in ourselves but in our software

That's right, it's time for another post about FRELLED, my very own FITS viewer. Well, I have been tinkering with it on and off for about a year. I spent a large fraction of the summer ignoring... avoiding.... I mean, encouraging my students to work independently to finish coding it. Was it worth it ?

YES.

Never mind the fact that looking at data in three dimensions is pretty (we'll get to that in a minute). Or that I strongly believe in doing thinks on the basis that they are cool, regardless of whether they suffer from such petty attributes as usefulness. Nope. in this case it was worth it for hugely simple pragmatic reasons. Namely that instead of spending a full month searching a data cube, I can now do it in a day.

Just to emphasise - that's a full working month, every day, doing virtually nothing else besides staring at images of static hoping that they might contain galaxies. That's actually not so bad. The problems start when you find something, because then you have to carefully record the coordinates and type lots of different parameters into another program to measure it. Not any more. Now you can just point to the source, click on it, and FRELLED will generate all the parameters for you. It also masks the source at the same time, so there'll be no more wondering whether you already detected something or not.

Typing in the parameters for one galaxy isn't all that bad. Typing them in for 400 is massively tedious, and with that many objects it would normally be impossible to guarantee that you don't miss any, or record some twice. Not any more ! It's not every day that you get a factor x30 speed increase with no loss of accuracy, so you'll have to forgive my repeated excited posts about this.

I've previously posted a few short clips trying to show how lovely HI data is, using more primitive versions of FRELLED. Now that it's more sophisticated, making nice videos of data is much easier. So I've decided to enter this year's National Science Foundation Science And Engineering Visualisation Challenge. Wish me luck !

Here's my entry. It's a 5min video all about hydrogen. Hopefully it stands on its own. I would have preferred to call it "Pimp My Hydrogen" but I suspect that wouldn't go down so well with the NSF types. If this doesn't convince you that hydrogen is pretty, then I may as well give up and go home, 'cos I got nothin'.

In other news, my second paper as first author has been accepted for publication. That finishes off my thesis research, which I first started in 2006 - a terrifyingly distant era. At last I can bid farewell to the Virgo Cluster and move on to shiny new data set. This time I won't have to spend weeks cataloguing the galaxies, only have to do the whole thing again months later because more data becomes available. Hurrah !

.glass

Readers should by now be aware that I work with 3-dimensional data and have a minor obsession with building a better FITS viewer. 3D rendering on a screen is all very well, but electronic data is sooo impersonal. Whatever happened to that bygone era when astronomers looked through telescopes and had no other option but to draw what they saw, or write poetry about it ?

Err, well, nothing, actually. Anyway my point, inasmuch as I ever have one, is that sometimes it's nice to have something good and solid that you can point to and, if necessary, bludgeon people with. Because laser pointers can only blind them in one eye at once. Or, if they're not trying to steal your research, you might just want to give them something to eat, and astronomical data may be many things, but no-one would ever describe it as nourishing.

For preference, I'd like all my data printed in .cake format. This would be something like a Battenburg cake (but with a better colour scheme). It'd be made up of hundreds and hundreds of little cubes of cake, each of just the right colour, so that the whole thing would be a physical model of an electronic data cube. As you slice through it, searching for galaxies, you'd also get a tasty snack. Of course, the resolution of the .cake format couldn't be much better than about 1cm per pixel. Which means that for a decent-sized data set, the cake would have to be about 7 metres long and 1.5 metres tall.

That's about right.

This of course is just idle fantasy. For now. But other approaches are yielding results. The .glass format offers the prospect of better data archiving (not being able to present your work because you ate it isn't normally a valid excuse), better resolution, and is much more shiny. Plus, when asked "what's a data cube ?" I can now just say "there's one on my shelf."

This cube is of HI data of the Virgo Cluster, which took 4 years of my life to analyse. Each blob is the gas in a distant galaxy. It measures approximately 14.5 x 14.5 x 6.5 cm. It looks somewhat better in reality, especially when properly illuminated. It doesn't photograph very well though, and owing to a lack of black surfaces I had to use a coat for a background. Here's what the data looks like electronically :

To create the physical cube, I converted the original FITS cube into a text file of x,y,z,v format using an IDL script I'd already written. Then I sent the data off to Bathsheba Sculpture. I stumbled on them having searched for custom glass etching companies. I couldn't find any that would just allow me to submit a model or text file, but I saw the astronomy section of the site and sent them an email - reasoning that since they'd obviously had prior dealing with astronomers, so were less likely to be thrown into a state of bewilderment.

Indeed they weren't. It took a couple of months to go from a state of raw data into a physical cube sitting on my desk, but this isn't very long considering the length of time I spent looking at this thing in its original format. Now all I need to do is find an illuminated base so that it's easier to see in daylight.

Why Star Trek Is Clearly Better Than Battlestar Galactica

I've just finished re-watching Battlestar Galactica for the second time, and Star Trek : The Next Generation for the ten millionth time. They're both very, very good shows and I've no doubt I'll watch them both again. And again. And again and again, eventually. Now it must be said that while BSG is far superior in terms of special effects, plot, dialogue, acting, storytelling, character development, political intrigue, costume design, sound quality, lighting, props, sets, hairdressing, and cinematography, TNG will always be the better show.

To be more specific, in terms of political drama BSG kicks donkeys. That's because it is a political drama. One that just happens to involve mystical forces in space with explosions and killer robots, which are pretty much guaranteed to improve anything.

Trek never tried or even considered being a commentary on contemporary American politics. Where it exceeds BSG is as a science fiction show. That's because it's got actual fictional science in it. Like phasers and photon torpedoes and warp drives and holodecks.

Spaceships not good enough eh ? Fine, add dinosaurs.

Neither show would benefit by gaining what the other lacks. Suppose Saul Tigh decided one day that instead of drinking to solve his problems, he'd go for a chat with Councillor Troy. Or that Gauis "Frakking" Baltar just got on with quietly scanning nebula all day like a good little scientist. Or that Captain Picard, instead of throwing the aliens a buffet reception, decided to shoot them all. Or that Dr Crusher found that treating patients was a waste of time and that she'd rather go and have sex with a nymphomaniac ghost.

I figured people would rather see this than Dr Crusher having sex with a ghost.

Err, well, ok, forget the last two - TNG actually featured both of these. But my point still stands. BSG is no more a science-fiction show than Star Trek is a political drama. In fact, comparing the two on equal terms is a complete waste of time, because it's impossible.

HOWEVER, the underlying psychology of the shows does not escape so lightly.  In fact that's where it gets interesting. While BSG is not really about cool tech in the way that Trek is, technology in the show is conspicuous by its absence. About the only ways in which the human civilisation in BSG is more advanced than our own is the use of FTL and cybernetics (although, importantly, Caprica did remind us that the Colonials were rather further ahead than this before the holocaust).

It also reminded us to beware of killer emo teenage robots. Very few shows do that.

The story of a great civilisation brought low by its own hubris and arrogant technological prowess is one of the oldest stories of all time. While the Colonials may have once prospered thanks to their advanced tech, ultimately their abuse of that technology becomes self-destructive. In the form of a bunch of angry robots, who were probably sick of having to spend every evening being miserable and alone in their black-painted bedrooms, in accordance with their emo progenitors.

There's nothing wrong with warning about the dangers of abusing technology. But Star Trek showed us what happens if we use it properly. Sure, it didn't come with anything quite as out-and-out cool as a lightsabre, but it did have holodecks, replicators, transporters, force fields and... iPads (they even called them pads, and this was 1993 for heaven's sake). It was also undoubtedly the inspiration for Google's decision to call their phone-based operating system "Android".

Star Trek was so utopian that even iPads and Androids could coexist.

While the Enterprise is basically a techie's flying holiday resort, you'd have to be stark raving mad to want to live on the Battlestar Galactica. Terrible food, squalid conditions, highly aggressive (though sexually insatiable) crewmates, and the prospect of a horrible death by killer robots / irate crew members / terrorists / the ship falling apart / summary justice / Adama's steely gaze each and every day. Worst of all, unlike Star Trek, I've never seen a single damn one of them drink any tea*. Actually, that probably explains why they're all so very, very angry. That and the genocide, of course.

* Caprica Six claims she does, once, but I don't trust her, on account of being a psychopathic anorexic killer robot.

What worries me is that Star Trek, by its very nature with a happy-clappy, "YAY TRIBBLES !" attitude, is a proven source of inspiration for legions of today's scientists and engineers. Battlestar Galactica isn't going to inspire anyone, because it doesn't contain a single piece of technology anyone either doesn't already have, or would want to invent. Unless you count - like many strange people - Caprica Six, but if anorexic genocidal robots are your thing then you can keep them to yourself, thanks.

"LOOK ! The monitor is too small. We need a viewscreen !"

In fact, I'm not so worried about BSG itself any more than I would worry that Yes Minister didn't feature enough zombie dinosaurs with lasers for eyes. What concerns me is the total lack of inspirational sci-fi shows around at the moment. Even Stargate made an attempt to jump on the "oh let's all be incredibly ANGSTY !" bandwagon, which it did with all the masterful control of a sheep trying to herd a bunch of rabid cats.

Perhaps we don't really need science fiction for inspiration, and this meandering rant hasn't achieved anything. All I know is that Star Trek is one of the two reasons I chose my career (the other is that nebula are goddamn pretty), and this is true for a lot of other people as well. Scientists are by no means Trekkies by definition, and vice-versa. And no doubt some scientists became Trek fans after discovering science, rather than the other way around. Just don't come running to me in twenty years when today's young BSG fans grow up and the hordes of angst-ridden robots start nuking the place.