Lessons for Those Planning a Physics Conference

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

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)

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. Actually, it's a VLBI phase reference antenna - or in laymen's terms it will do all the boring calibration scans while its big brother gets on with doing important science.

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

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

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.