The Bard is Back

... 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 (?)

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 ?

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

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

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.