How I Became Louis Theroux and Wished I Hadn't (Part I)

I've just returned from a trip positively bursting with superlatives. I'd travelled to places hotter, drier, colder, higher and further than I've ever been before. The round trip was about 10,000 miles, involved 9 flights (arguably more), a lot of science and an awful lot more drinking.

We begin with a jaunt to NRAO's 13th Synthesis Imaging Summer School. This is a 9-day workshop in Socorro, New Mexico where they teach everyone how to do radio interferometry - basically, how to use multiple telescopes to give the resolution of a freakin' massive one. Even though the maths involved is remarkably ugly, it wasn't as bad as getting to Socorro in the first place.

The journey was ever destined to be a very unpleasant affair, involving 3 flights with a 4-hour layover in Miami. That would have been fine, except that just as the plane was about to leave an oil leak from the engine was discovered. So everyone was loaded onto a shiny new and presumably more well-sealed plane, which took off about 2 hours after the original scheduled time. Then, after about 3 hours of flying, it was diverted from Dallas to Austin just as it was about to begin its descent.

The plane then sat there on the tarmac being refuelled until the storm over Dallas cleared and we went back. By which time there were no more flights going to Albuquerque, so I got put in a hotel for the night without any luggage. I arrived in Socorro the next morning several hours late, having missed the opening lectures. My luggage turned up though, which was nice.

I found Socorro to be a wonderful, glorious travel-shock after Puerto Rico. Whereas Arecibo typically experiences 90% humidity, in Socorro it's more like 5%. Unlike Arizona, it has a lot more interesting plants than Arizona's ubiquitous and surprisingly boring Saguaro cactus. Although it's vastly smaller than Arecibo (population 8,000 in Socorro, 100,000 (supposedly) in Arecibo), about half of those are students. Even better, those are largely split between geology and astronomy, which as everyone knows are the subjects all the really cool people take. Plus, you can walk across the whole town in about 30 minutes.

Socorro is slightly hotter than Puerto Rico, but the almost complete lack of humidity makes it precisely 516 times more bearable. That means that a 7-mile hike up a mountain doesn't feel like a death march to a gulag. Not until you gain a few thousand feet in elevation, anyway. The summit of this particular mountain is at 3,287m, way higher than anywhere in Britain. By the end, going upwards more than a few steps is like Frodo's final ascent up Mt Doom. Fortunately, when perseverance, determination and physical fitness have long since given up in disgust, sheer bloody-mindedness keeps going.

Look, it's a bloody great mountain. I can look as ridiculous as I damn well please.

On the summit of this mountain is an optical observatory which has a parking space for the disabled (a wonderful example of the long arm of bureaucracy given that it's about 50 miles from anywhere at all and there's not exactly a shortage of space), and what is surely the world's most scenic fire hydrant.

The fire hydrant is not as ludicrous as it may appear. The haze in the photographs is due to an area the size of Chicago being on fire about a hundred miles way. So, if it helps prevents mountains from burning down, I'm all in favour of scenic fire hydrants.

The next day we were treated to a tour of the adorable little VLA telescopes. Bless 'em, they're only 25m across, the same size as Arecibo's secondary reflector, but they do let you walk around inside them which is pretty cool. 

Listening pose ! Now mandatory at ALL TELESCOPES.

The evenings were spent in BOTH of the town's bars. Yup, it has just the two, but given the town's pretty awesome populace, that's not so bad. There's no air hockey but they do have pool and shuffleboard, which as far as I can tell is the pub equivalent of curling. And it's in the bars, of course, where I seem to have become an unwitting and unwilling junior Louis Theroux, attracting America's hardened crazies to me like - err, well, you'll see.

First, we have the alien conspiracy theorist, convinced that aliens abducted humans from Earth 10 and 20,000 years ago. Also that religion is intolerant and should not be tolerated. Oh yes, and a firm believer in eugenics, on the grounds that some people are clearly just better than others, and quite certain that genetic manipulation in Columbia is already starting to produce a master race. And a thoroughly well-meaning and really nice guy, to boot.

Then a wholly new experience befalls me. A ludicrously overtly gay older man decides I have an adorable accent and spends the next few hours in a really weird attempt to charm me. Apparently, he's posted photos of me on Facebook to try and make his ex jealous. Never before have I been so incredibly glad that I'm not on Facebook. Although I have seen at least one of the pictures, and it's not a pretty sight.

This is turn causes other uncharacteristic behaviour on my part, namely, to as quickly as possible find the nearest attractive girl and talk to her at length about absolutely anything. Which, somehow, proved very simple, and I spent the remainder of the evening learning all about geology (did you know there's a 25-mile wide magma plume underneath Socorro ? See, I was listening !), life, and for some reason cats. Fine by me. And then, possibly because of the sheer surreality of the evening, I simply said, "Well, it was very nice talking to you !" and went back to my hotel. Which is very probably the stupidest thing I've ever done.

That about sums it up for Socorro. Tune in soon for Part 2, where I describe my surprisingly similar yet remarkably different adventures in Alaska. Actually, the similarities are so uncanny that it's possible I'm stuck in a closed timelike curve and might never escape, but I live in hope.

Mapping the Universe

While at the aforementioned Tully-Fisher conference I saw a presentation by the ALFALFA group. ALFALFA is apparently either a major cereal crop or a huge neutral hydrogen survey depending on who you're talking too - in this case, the latter. Which is just as well because I've no idea how to make a major cereal crop sound interesting/funny/depict in some clever way with CGI.

Anyway one of their slides showed the distribution of the galaxies they've detected in 3D space, which is a standard thing to do. But it got me thinking that it would be pretty neat to show actual images of the galaxies rather than just boring old points. And then, happily, I realised that I already have all the code I need to do this, which is very nearly as good as finding a forgotten chocolate bar.

Of course any fool can plot static 2D images. Yawn. So, instead of opting for the faster but marginally more expensive option for self-gratification of buying more chocolate, I also made a 3D flythrough. This is in keeping with my strict policy of doing things for the sole reason that they are cool. After a well-timed 3-day weekend, an epic download of more than 11 thousand images and probably about that many cups of tea later, this is the result.

Anyone interested in doing their own extragalactic cartography, or just wondering how it was done, can read a short article on my website.

On The Tully-Fisher Relation And Milton Keynes

Readers may worry about the lack of posts of late, but fear not. It's only due to an overload of paper-writing, of which I'll have more to say just as soon as I can find the stomach to confront the agonising self-flagellation of ennui that was involved the whole sorry business.

Anyway, I've just returned from a trip full of win, on the grounds that a combination of spaceships and dinosaurs is the very definition of win. It started with a nice little science conference in Green Bank on the infamous Tully-Fisher relation. This is about as far removed from, say, the Jolie-Pitt relation as it's possible to get, but it's a lot more useful and a lot harder to understand.

Look ! SCIENCE !

I don't have any pictures from this one since nothing much really happened that would interest anyone, with most of the 12-hour days being consumed in talks. The one exception being Brent Tully (of said relation) doing a square dance while a bluegrass band played the night away (or at least the early evening). That was AFTER he cleared everyone's plates away, for some reason, and BEFORE he was honoured with a commemorative plaque that will forever adorn the Green Bank lounge. He also had an awesome tie.

From there I moved to a three-day jaunt in Washington D.C., capital of the most powerful nation on Earth and not all that dissimilar to Milton Keynes. Oh sure, it's got the Washington Monument, whereas all that Milton Keynes has is a couple of concrete cows, but after dark the similarities are uncanny. They both have the population density of Alaska, long orderly streets with nothing in them that don't go anywhere, and nightlife that's as dead as a dead dodo that's just been appointed Professor of Dead at Oxford University.

Admittedly it has a better skyline, and less roundabouts.

On the other hand, it's got the Smithsonian. Which has lions and tigers and bears and... lots of dinosaurs. And a pangolin, one of my favourite animals ever, cos they is awesome. While it doesn't have a life size model of a blue whale like the Natural History Museum in London does, what it does have is an IMAX screen that's 20 metres tall and 27 metres wide. Which shows, among other things, a 3D movie about dinosaurs narrated by Donald Sutherland. And yes, that is as good as it sounds.

Then there's the Air and Space Museum, which has got more win than Sarah Michelle Gellar wearing nothing but chocolate. No, seriously, it does. Original Mercury and Gemini capsules adorn the main foyer, while the Spirit of Saint Louis and Space Ship One hang overhead. They've even got Yuri Gagarin's space suit, for crying out loud. And a planetarium with a narration by Whoopie Goldberg, although no-one knows why. Yes, she was in Star Trek, but so were a lot of people with infinitely superior narration skills.

After this succession of dangerously intense nerdgasms I moved on to explore the National Mall and did all the standard touristy things - the Capitol Building, the White House, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. All very showy, apart from the fact that most of the mall is currently being re-turfed, which somewhat spoils the grandeur.

There's no denying the Mall is an impressive place, if rather larger than it needs to be. Everything is very far apart and often hidden by trees, giving it an apologetically pomp feel - not what I expected from America. I'm also uncertain why building the world's tallest obelisk is a fitting memorial for George Washington, unless he was also a noted Egyptologist. On the other hand, Britain's primary World War II memorial is basically a large lump of stone in the middle of a busy street, so perhaps I shouldn't criticise.

America's WWII memorial is between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial. It's basically a large fountain. It's not as impressive as Lincoln or Washington, but it is perhaps more poignant for what it represents. It's inscribed with various memorable quotes. Unfortunately these live up to the stereotype that Americans believe they won the war all by themselves, except for a rather patronising quote by Truman that comes rather close to reducing the other Allies to the status of cannon fodder.

Website update

I just updated my website. It's got a graphics C.V. and a whole new section on viewing FITS files in Blender, which is really useful if you're a radio astronomer or want to view volumetrics in realtime. And... a demo reel.

www.rhysy.net

SOPA - don't fear the streamer

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Ah yes. I thought so.

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

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