House Hunting

I was extremely lucky in Puerto Rico in that I basically fell into a house recently vacated by another postdoc, bought all her stuff, and lived happily ever after.* It was 10 minutes (drive) from work, had reliable electricity, internet** and - most unusually - water. It was all much simpler than it had any right to be.

* Metaphorically speaking.
** With one unfortunate exception.

Not so, it seems, in Prague. To save money, I opted to share with the even-newer postdoc. An undoubtedly sound economic decision, but one which does make things rather complicated. There's no shortage of places to live, but finding one which ticks all the boxes was damned hard. In the interval, I had to sleep rough on the streets, a.k.a. the very nice guest room at the institute.

Strangely, although the Academy of Sciences owns several apartments, they're not particularly cheap. Nor do they currently offer anywhere particularly suitable for singles. My 50 sq m house was considered tiny and/or cute in Puerto Rico, but having seen the 80 sq m place offered by the Academy, I can't imagine what I'd do with all that space. Set up an animal sanctuary ? A small opium farm, perhaps ? Run a very small brothel ? I think not.

Ask our hooker for heroin !

In any case, the place was too far from the city center, and no-one's going to trek that far out to find a brothel. You don't need to. They're really rather unmissable* in the middle of town. Although one presumes such places must have fallen victim to the economic crisis as much as anyone else, since they explicitly advertise the availability of... free wi-fi. Fortunately, there's a meme for that.

* As in, "you can't fail to notice their existence" rather than, "they're the best thing in Prague, you must go at once, take my car !"

But I digress. What was I babbling about ? Oh, right, apartments ! We rejected the Academy's flat, because even a cursory Google search revealed many fully furnished apartments in better locations, for a similar price. But of course, the devil's in the details...

The second place we saw was absolutely great, apart from being on the 4th floor without a lift (5th if your're American). Actually that sounds awful already. There would also have been a furnished kitchen but not much more than that. Someone else - obviously an avid fitness fanatic - took it the next day.

The third place wasn't awful, but was overly-furnished. Converting the living room into a second bedroom would have been quite a bit of work, plus there was no fridge. And the landlady* had a "no parties" policy.

* Who was also the owner of the building. This seems very common in Prague that huge apartment blocks are owned by individuals, who live there, and not giant faceless corporations.

Number 4 was oh so very, very close. Again, lots of room, fully furnished. Owner definitely not one with a thing against parties. But here there was a single fatal flaw : one bedroom could only be accessed by going through another. Awkward !

We visited number 5 while it was still a building site, and talked directly with the owner of the building who was also the head of the construction company. It was gigantic - 96 sq m - and very reasonably priced, but unfurnished. Well, it had an oven, a dishwasher, and a bathroom, but that does not equate to being partrly furnished in my mind. "Oh, I don't have to fit my own shower ? How convenient !" - I think not.

Number 6 was crazy-expensive (price of utility bills isn't always advertised) box a few minutes from the castle. We wouldn't have saved anything by sharing at that price, plus we'd have had far less space each than renting separately.

Seventh time lucky - a large, 85 sq m flat in Karlin. Two large adjacent rooms, well soundproofed, a decent sized kitchen, about 20-30m walk from the city center. Fully-furnished kitchen and living/bedrooms room with all the basics : beds, wardrobes, sofas. Voilá.

Keen-eyed viewers may spot the Arecibo poster (signed by members of staff) which is given pride of place above the T.V. I still haven't worked out what to do with the amazon gift voucher, although maybe that will be easier now that I have an address. Unfortunately this is not a proper address, because the letterboxes aren't big enough for packages. One day I'll live somewhere so incredibly sophisticated that I can get boxes delivered to my door...

Also on display are my crossbow, hanging on the wall, and Swiss horn, in front of the T.V. I lost most of the ammunition for the crossbow at a pool party, but there's plenty left. The target on the wall comes from Prague Castle. The horn is epic, as we proved during the great Alpine expedition to Skyrim.

The camera is held at a jaunty angle because the mountain is like, reallly steep.

There aren't any mountains on view here. Instead, a small balcony overlooks the utterly non-descript space between the apartment blocks. There's also a kitchen, because kitchens are generally reckoned to be a good thing.

The downsides ? The bathroom is teeny-tiny and there's only a shower. There is only one toilet. The laundry room has only a rather small, extremely slow washing machine, no dryer. But since I'm not living in a sauna any more, the need for showering fifty-seven times a day is less pressing. Nor do I have some weird laundry fetish, so really there's nothing to complain about.

So far the property agency haven't given cause for complaint. The boiler broke on the first weekend, but it was fixed on the following Monday (which is good, because now it's -13 C outside). They found us some extra furniture and might have even more. Internet was installed by O2 within the space of a week. A trip to Tesco restored my British superpower of the ability to make tea (i.e. I bought a kettle), and thus all is well with the world.

Dear Peter Jackson

and also Guillermo del Toro and New Line Cinema....

Thanks for making The Lord of the Rings ! Wasn't it just awesome ? Everyone I know thought so. In fact, I think it's pretty tough to find a better movie adaptation of a much-loved book. Like Shary Bobbins, it's practically perfect in every way. No need for me to wax lyrical about this, because the millions of dollars earned (and all those shiny Oscars too) are well-deserved. I hope you all sleep soundly at night on top of a pile of money with many beautiful women, or, possibly, the other way around.

I'm not so sure about The Hobbit though. Now, before we get off on the wrong foot, let me say that I saw both films in the cinema (the second in HFR) and will definitely see the third next year. I may even buy the blu-rays at some point, so you haven't lost a sale here. On the other hand, LOTR was an easy top-of-Christmas-list three years running. So, let me humbly offer a suggestion that I think would make you even more money and make the film even better. It's very simple :

Release a truncated version as well as the special extended editions.

See, isn't that easy ? If you re-release The Hobbit as a single three-hour film, I absolutely promise I will go to the cinema to see it and buy the blu-ray. Because nine hours is just too dang long for a 200-page children's book. I don't want to listen to the dwarfs singing for fifteen minutes while they wash dishes. Or watch some crazy-ass weed-smoking wizard dash through a forest in a rabbit sled. Or even listen to a dwarf-curious sexy "she-elf" prattle on about absolutely nothing for no apparent reason.

A.k.a., "Honestly, there's a dragon later", and, "That's right, there's
 an even longer version ! With 63% more dish washing !"

Not that there isn't much about the films to admire. Casting is decent - Gandalf, well, he's still Ian Mc-frakin' Kellen, so nothing can go wrong there. Bilbo - Martin Freeman will always be Arthur Dent to me, but he does look quite a lot like Ian Holm from the right angle, so that's good. Special effects are solid, even if there's too much CGI and not enough models. Most importantly, I thought the all-important conversations with Smaug scenes were pretty near perfect, and if you'd messed that up then rest assured I'd have let you know.

EDIT : I just thought I'd say a little bit more about how frickin' awesome Smaug is. Also, it would be criminal not to link to his interview with Stephen Colbert. I wish him well in his future career eating T.V. interviewers.

As an aside though, please take note : Smaug is a British dragon, so it's pronounced how it's written - Smaug. As in "Paul", or "maul", or "Gaul". Not Smowg. That would only be the case if Smaug were, in fact, a German woman ("Guten tag, Frau Smaug !"), not a 500ft long British dragon. Hope this helps !

Note the key difference - one hoards gold, while the other - according
to the internet - hoards beer. This makes it easy to tell the two apart.

On the other hand, what was going on with Legolas ? It was fortunate that the character is completely generic, so I could pretend it wasn't Legolas at all, but some other random elf. Later on, it was a good idea to have the dwarfs venture into Smaug's lair to rescue Bilbo, but what was the point of the ridiculously overblown scenes with the forges and the giant molten gold statue ? Or the singing goblins in the first film ? Fortunately, most of these scenes seemed designed to be easily removed later, so hopefully you've already had "my" idea.

But by all means, go ahead and release a extended special edition that's sixteen hours long. Heck, let's shoot the moon - make a reality T.V. show where we see the hobbits trekking to the Lonely Mountain in real time. Call it... err... Little Brother. On account of the hobbits being small. Yeah. Each day we'll discover what Bilbo had for breakfast and learn how he keeps his great hairy feet clean.

Alas, this may not quite be ambitious enough, so why not go the whole hog and make a movie about Tom Bombadil as well ? Or the Silmarilion ? And forget high frame rate - do the entire thing in slow motion, just in case anyone should somehow miss anything. Maybe remake them all as musicals !

Please feel free to use all of these ideas. I don't mind. But just remember to also release a version without all the faffing about. Fantasy is, when you get right now to it, just someone making stuff up, but so is all fiction. Making edits to the novel to make it screen-friendly is one thing - and the (relatively) subtle revisions for the Lord of the Rings movies were a masterclass in this - but don't think you can easily get away with inventing your own extra scenes or even hacking in other Tolkein stories. To do that, you'll have to travel back in time, become a WWI veteran and then an Oxford professor of English literature. Just because a story involves magical dwarves and dragons doesn't mean you can do what you like with it.

Sincerely,

Me.



P.S. It is now one year later, and I have seen the conclusion of the trilogy. I congratulate you on apparently paying very close attention to this post, as I see that you have mostly taken my advice to heart. The invention of random extra scenes was this time kept to a minimum, thus making this much the best of the Hobbit films. However, I still think a single 3 hour film would be 3 hours of pure awesome, compared to 9 hours of mostly padding. Not only would it cut out a lot of the "anyone got any chloroform ?" moments of the first two films, but it would also make the whole Smaug sequences tie together in a much more satisfying way. Because, in the second film, we ended with :

I. AM. DEATH.

Then, a year later, but barely ten minutes into the third film, we get (effectively) :

I. AM. DEAD.

Which feels like a tremendous anti-climax, and leaves me thinking that the writers had been smoking too much of some rather "special" pipe-weed. I mean, at some point someone must have said, "Guys, should we add an extra ten minutes of the last great fire-drake of the Third Age, or the dwarves washing dishes ?". And given that the battle scene lasts a full hour* and features Billy Conolly riding a battle pig, don't you dare tell me that CGI is expensive.

* Not that it doesn't have some fine moments, but it's not Helm's Deep.

So anyway, a shortened version still seems like a damn fine idea to me. An official abridged version would be easy to make, you could release it at cinemas and make even more money (sell even moooaaarr merchandise ! release another soundtrack !), fans will approve and shower you with rose-petals, and basically the world would be a better, happier place... and let's be honest - if you don't do it, someone else will. And that'd be a shame. Don't be the rich douchebags who sue fans for making their movie better. Be the kind-hearted douchebags who redeem themselves by also making the movie most Tolkein fans actually wanted in the first place.

Are You Sitting Comfortably ?

You'd better be. By the time you finish reading this, you'll have travelled about 42 thousand miles.

... or about 66 thousand kilometres if you insist on using the metric system like most sensible people.

The Earth rotates at about a thousand miles an hour on the equator. If you stand on the poles you won't move at all, you lazy bastard... not around the center of the Earth, at any rate. And of course if you're an astronaut you'll be going much much faster. The rest of us are rotating at several hundred miles an hour, just from the rotation of the Earth alone (which would only be impressive if we suddenly stopped). At that speed, you could make it most of the way to the Moon inside a week, while in a month you could make almost 3 return trips. A year would get you about 9 million miles - just enough to be really far away from Earth, but nowhere near any other planets.

So LAZY ! Except that the whole Earth is moving around the Sun
as well as rotating...

Of course, the whole Earth-moon system is also orbiting the Sun, and very much faster than the rotation of the Earth on its own axis. A month of travelling at 67,000 mph would be just about enough to get you to Mars or Venus when they're closest to Earth. A year would get you to Jupiter, while if you spent your entire life at this speed you'd end up ten times further away from the Sun than Pluto and be incredibly lonely. You'd be about three times further away than Voyager I is currently, so you'd be in a really tedious part of interstellar space.

Then again, the entire Solar System is orbiting the center of the galaxy at about 138 miles every second. That would get you from London to Sydney in just over a minute, the Moon in half an hour, Mars in 3 days, Pluto in a little under a year. But it's still nowhere near enough to explore the galaxy. Even travelling at that speed for 70 years, you'd only travel about 1% of the distance to Alpha Centauri - actually reaching our nearest star would take about 6,000 years (in case you're wondering, Voyager I is currently moving at a paltry 17 km/s away from the Sun; bullets move at a pathetic 1 km/s).

Conclusion : space is big. As a wise man once said, really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is... Also, everyone on Earth is moving much faster than a speeding bullet. I love science.

Winter is Coming, look busy

Christmas is upon us, so how better to end the blogging for a year than with pictures of Prague in the snow ? If I post anything else over the next two weeks, it probably means I'm not having a good enough time and you should shower me with pity.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Prague was treated to a light dusting of snow. Immediately I went for a walk. The webcams indicated the city center wasn't amazingly snowy, so I stuck with the less-picturesque local area where the snow was pretty heavy.

Nothing particularly special, although to be in a country where snow just magically freakin' falls out of the sky every single year ! as opposed to somewhere where such an event would be nothing less than apocalyptic is rather gratifying. Much more interesting, though, was the effect caused by two spotlights illuminating a billboard. This is in fact a giant glowing snowcone.

The next day I willingly dragged myself out of bed by 6:30 and was in the center of town by 7:30. It was still dark as I left the Institute, but unfortunately it was more or less full daylight by the time I got to the center. This time I at least had the good sense to check the webcam beforehand, just in case everyone else had the same idea and already trampled the snow into mush.

They hadn't, though the snow was not quite as thick as in the exotic mountain land of Roztyly. But it was enough. Wenceslas Square and Old Town Square are both lined with stalls for the Christmas market. While this is quite famous, it's surprisingly small. Actually it probably consists of no more than half a dozen small stalls, but someone accidentally hit CTRL+V a bunch of times, so it looks a lot larger than it is. 

More annoyingly, they don't sell anything you couldn't buy in the shops anyway (apart from maybe the one selling swords and medieval armour). It's quite pretty, but actually as a functioning market where you'd buy things, it's rubbish. Don't go. Even if you like tourist tat, and I do, the selection is poor and the prices high. You're much, much better off staying at home.

Somewhat surprisingly, Prague isn't big on Christmas decorations. I suppose they're probably unnecessary. Wenceslas and Old Town Squares are very nice at night though, with the trees covered in thousands of white lights. The Christmas tree in Old Town Square is particularly impressive. The surrounding market may be useless, but it does look nice.

Then I wandered to Charles Bridge, and was not disappointed. Though next time I shall force myself to get up even earlier and see it with the street lights on.

Convinced that the snow might suddenly disappear at any moment for no reason (it was -3 C and there were still occasional small flurries) I happily walked up to Prague Castle. The snow wasn't really heavy enough to make this look any more extraordinary than usual, but the view down the hill was worth it.

By the time I returned to the town center the hours of tourism were fast approaching so I headed up to Vysherad, fast becoming one of my favourite spots. I mean really, could it be any more gothic ? It was busier than normal, but it's quite a large space so this didn't really matter.

There is one thing, though, that I must admit. The pool at the Astronomical Institute just isn't as good as the one at Arecibo (except maybe as an ice rink, if it got even colder).

Identifying which is which is left as an exercise for the reader.

Back in Cardiff, all shopping was complete within 6 hours. No-one in their right mind takes their holidays in Cardiff (except for serious Whovians) so there are no pointless tourist souvenirs to get in the way. The fact that everything is in English may also have helped, slightly.

Well, that's all for 2013. Tune in again next year when anything could happen... but it probably won't.

I Set Fire To The Sky

At last, I've managed to combine recent efforts to depict the hydrogen of the Milky Way into a coherent YouTube video. For this one I'm trying something new : narration. But not by me. Alas, my suave and sophisticated British accent is... err... the wrong kind of suave and sophisticated for mere narration. Yeah. That's totally the reason.

There's no point writing another blog post about this, because I covered pretty much everything recently anyway. I updated the previous post to include the major new sequence : the hydrogen sky itself. This is what the sky would look like if we could see neutral hydrogen instead of all those stupid stars, and it's one of my favourites. Honestly, sometimes I think people who don't study neutral hydrogen must have some sort of serious mental problem. What a bunch of losers.

Without further ado, for that weird particular subset of people who only follow the blog but not my Google+ or YouTube channel... come on people, get with the program ! But anyway here's the video. The soundtrack is a bit gloomy, but it has the redeeming feature of making the narration sound tremendously melodramatic. And don't forget to watch The Hydrogen Universe too.