Madness, Science, and Opium

Recently I made a concerted effort to describe the schizophrenic nature of professional science. Readers will also have noted my heartfelt contempt for the unavoidable chore of writing papers. a process just as much of a double-edged sword as the analysis itself. While original thought is not only encouraged by a basic requirement to publish, original style is often looked on as heretical. 

There is, alas, a very good reason for this - anything that can be misinterpreted could ruin other people's research if they try and replicate the results. Which leads to virtually every paper feeling as though they've been written by the same very dull person. The kind who can't watch golf because it's too exciting and brings them out in a rash.

You might therefore expect that actually collecting the data in the first place allows for the same creative potential, as, say, watching a brick. Not watching it do anything, you understand, just generally watching it in case it misbehaves. In keeping with the theme of schizophrenia, you're only half right. Or only half of you is right. Or are right. Whatever.

What the observing process offers that the other aspects of astronomy don't is free time. Last time I mentioned that most of this is spent reading the BBC website, which is true, but it is not the whole story. One thing I do is to decorate my notebook, using a biro.

An earlier creative outlet, started by another observer, is to write poetry in the observing logs. Mostly these are in haiku form. Possibly this is because Wim van Driel really likes haikus, or maybe just because they don't take too much time and effort to write. The following are the haikus of other observers (namely Steve Schneider and Win van Driel) from the past 6 years of observations :

ALFA rotating

Universe slowly drifting

HI line searching

Warm winter moonrise 

Coquis outside harmonise 

Trained monkeys observe 

Seek on this island 

Koan you can understand 

Then clap with one hand 

End-of-year party 

Hot salsa cool Bacardi 

B4 mystery 

Night watches over 

Let others gas discover 

Sleep to recover 

spring stars flickering

atoms coolly emitting:

distant observing

Wim's busy tonight

no time for any haikus

that makes me so sad

starry night tonight

no time for radio waves

must install software

Ginger beer drinking

Alarms constantly sounding

Chips misbehaving

cajun spice smelling

into Orchid dscending

Lost season ending

Zen rock gardening

Manassas Stonewall standing

AGES observing

My own efforts are generally less poetic, with more of an attempt to use them as an actual observing log :

Observing quite smooth 

Not much RFI tonight 

All beams are working.

Observations fine

Not many warnings at all

Tea keeps me awake.

Not enough haikus

I shall rectify this now

With bad poetry

Beam 6B is down

Why so few haikus lately ?

We need Wim back now.

Just two scans taken, 

ALFA rotation problems, 

But all beams work now ! 

All scans completed, 

All beams are still working well, 

This haiku is done.

Being a fan of Edward Lear, like all good-hearted people, I attempted a single limerick :

It's a survey for deep HI data, 

From a telescope shaped like a crater, 

It really takes AGES, 

So it's done in small stages, 

And has a fixed-temperature calibrator.

Lately I decided that haikus lack a certain something, so I decided to go for broke and try to parody one of my favourite poems of all time : Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It probably helps to go and read the original first, if you haven't already. Coleridge was taking opium at the time, but all I had for inspiration was massive sleep deprivation.

In Arecibo did Kubla Khan, 
A stately observing-run decree, 
Where Tanama, the muddy river, ran, 
Through caverns measurable to man, 
Down to a sun-drenched sea. 

The Tanama is the local river, which flows through some nearby spectacular caves and also goes underneath the Observatory grounds.

So about a mile of telescope ground, 
With fence and towers girdled round, 
And there were gardens bright on sinuous rills, 
Where blossomed many a UMET-imported shrubbery, 
And here were forests ancient as the hills, 
Enfolding rainy spots of greenery.

UMET is the institution responsible for site maintenance. Which includes planting a lot of flowers.

But oh ! that very steep road which slanted,
Down the green hill toward a metal cover !
An underfunded place ! as holy as enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By a tiedown wailing from its demon-motor !

Tiedowns are cables which control the height of the platform. One of the motors is failing, which really does sound like the cry of a banshee, conveniently.

And beneath the dish, from unpaid overtime seething,
The drainage pumps no more were heaving,
A quite small lake momently was forced:
Amid whose swift rain-fed burst
Confusion spread like rebounding hail
Or scientists beneath [CENSORED]'s flail :

On several occasions over the years, for various reasons, a small lake has formed underneath the dish (in this case a reference to not being able to pay the necessary people to come and man the pumps, a particularly daft problem which was quickly remedied). [CENSORED] refers to an individual on whom I cannot possibly comment, for now.

And 'mid these dancing scientists at once and ever
Up flung momently the muddy river,
Several miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and field the muddy river ran
Then reached the caverns measurable to man
And sank in silence to a tropical ocean.
And 'mid this silence so many from far
Sent a twitter message to a nameless star !

Which of course refers back to last year's music video and the current efforts to send twitter messages to aliens.

The shadow of the dome of Gregor
Suspended with metallic grace
Within was heard with mingled measure
A signal from the voids of space !
It was a miracle of rare device
A dome in air, and beans and rice !

The Gregorian dome - named after a mathematician called Gregory but Gregor will do - is where all the really cool instruments live. For the unaware, "beans and rice" is NOT an act of desperation to find something that rhymes - it refers to what is basically the Puerto Rican national dish.

A damsel wearing headphones
In a movie I once saw
She was an American maid
And with some telescopes she played
But what could be the headphones for ?

Of course, this is Contact, because one should never miss out an opportunity to make fun of Jodie Foster for using headphones at a telescope.

Could I contrive within me
To write dialogue and song
For an alt'rnate version of the movie
It would have music loud and wrong, [DAMN YOU KESHA !]
I will use that dome in air
That sunny dome ! The endless rice !

Since Coleridge's "caves of ice" just don't work here, I again refer back to the ubiquitous rice, and the music video.

And all who can should see them there,
A platform tour of ALFA's lair !
With flashing lights all twinkling there !

Clear a circle round him quickly,
And hold your nose with utmost dread,
For he on rice and beans fed strictly,
He rather'd something else instead.

Anyone suffering from questionable poetic tastes may continue to read this doggerel here. Most log entries aren't very interesting though, because not everyone who writes the entry (the "observer" column is the telescope operator, not whoever wrote the log) troubles themselves to assess the literary impact of their record of the night's events.

SCIENCE !

A few months ago my first paper was accepted for publication. This monumental monument to tedium destroyed my ability to write anything just as surely as if I'd slammed my fingers in a door. Fortunately my second paper is nearing completion, so out of sheer perverseness this seems like an ideal time to explain the gruelling and glorious reality of the scientific method.

First, someone thinks of something worth observing. So then we observe it. This process consists of using a small program to make a another small program that the telescope operator runs and lo ! Data is collected. Or we observe it ourselves, which mostly involves reading the BBC News website in great detail because there's not much else to do at 4am in a telescope control room. Except eat cake, and try to stay warm because the air conditioning is part of an experiment to see if humans are capable of hibernation or just die of cold.

The observing can take anything from a few hours to a few years - literally. Mostly it only takes years because the telescope isn't steerable, so we can only observe a target for about 2 hours at a time, and only for a few weeks per year. At the end of all this there's a HUGE orgy. Or, to put it more accurately, we very quietly start processing the data, because raw data is a lot like raw eggs - bloody useless*. Most of what we observe is just noise, so it has to be cleverly processed before we can detect anything.


* Unless you're a chicken. Umm. The similarities probably stop there, actually.

Data processing offers all the fun and excitement of watching a championship knitting contest (cos they totally have those, right ?). What we do is feed in a list of all the files we want to process to some magical software, and then we wait for about 2-4 weeks while it casts its enchantments on the 100 Gb or more of accumulated data. Finally, after years of observations and weeks of data processing, we end up with something that looks like this :

Those white blobs are, in fact, hydrogen gas clouds, even more rarefied than the most perfect vacuum ever created on Earth but with the mass of a billion suns and rotating at 450,000 mph. None of which stops them from looking like a bunch of blobs.

You may wonder what happens during all that time before the observations are finished. Well, I shall tell you, because now I've raised the question it would be cruel not to. Actually, it's very similar to what happens afterwards - at least, it is if your thesis depends on that data and you're not sure if the observations will be completed in time. In that case, you process as much data as you currently have and analyse all the blobs* you can find as you go along.

 *Or, if you prefer, magnificent broiling spiral clouds of gas, where shockwaves propagating across thousands of light years  ignite titanic stars; where white-hot hydrogen is forced to fuse in fire into all the elements that make up man in a hundred billion stars that glitter like a rain of diamonds in a vast cosmic maelstrom, but "blobs" is more succinct. 

What this means is that we run a program to measure the parameters of each blob, one at time. We can measure its mass (at least a million times that of the sun), estimate its distance away (in my field, at least 50 million light years) and measure how fast it's rotating (at least 70,000 mph but usually much faster). We get all this from examining graphs that look like this :

Depending on how large an area of the sky was surveyed, we analyse about 100-400 of these little blighters. Each one takes a few minutes. If you're still waiting for a Foster-esque moment where suddenly a revolutionary signal is found, you probably won't enjoy the rest of the post, so you should probably stop reading now. I haven't even mentioned the days / weeks of the manual examination of thousands of images it takes to find all the blobs in the first place, let alone the months of programming it takes to write code to do it for you.

Once all the measurements are taken they get tabulated. And those tables look like this :

But wait, there's more ! It's still not time to do any science, because small white blobs may be all well and good but they're not really of any interest to anyone except possibly Bill Clinton. Finding the size and spin of the gas is one thing, but the real question is - what is it doing ? Which means it's time to looks at pretty pictures, although people generally prefer to call them optical images.

Since the thing is typically as massive as a billion suns and made of hydrogen, the answer is usually, "forming a s***load of stars." Newly-formed stars are blue, so, usually the gas blobs are found in galaxies that look like this :

Lovely. And not very interesting, a bit like Denise Richards . Of course, people have spent decades trying to understand exactly how and why gas condenses into stars, and if you happen to have resolved maps of the gas there's a lot of interesting stuff you can do. Not with Arecibo though. All we get is the mass and spin of the gas, and that's pretty much it.

Fortunately, what we do have going for us is unrivalled sensitivity. Detecting gas clouds with the mass of ten million suns may not seem like much of an achievement, but if that gas is thinner than the most perfect vacuum ever created on Earth and over 300,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away then it becomes a bit more difficult. In fact your only options are to spend many hours with a lesser telescope hoping to detect something, or use Arecibo, which can generally do it in about ten minutes.

This means we can detect the relatively little gas clouds. And that's nice, because they're way more interesting than the big pimped-up spirals. They're so interesting that some of them don't even have any stars at all. So my job, in a nutshell, is....

 To look for clouds of invisible gas that don't do anything !

And a whole bunch of other stuff too, like finding galaxies that have had most of their gas removed so that no new stars can form. Or, to put it another way, to find the last wraiths of gas ere it is banished from the vast cosmic graveyards of doomed and dying galaxies, which, death-struck, embark on their epochal voyage into the infinite void of blackest eternal night, their reddened and ruined stars starved and choked, bereft of hope, their darkening light a tragic echo of once-brilliant splendour now fading pitiless in the void. Probably.

So, that's what science is. It's the pinnacle of adventure in tedium and monotonay, a hopeless job where the only people who care about your results are your nearest competitors (and they're guaranteed to hate it), the study of the birth of stars and the death of galaxies, the grandest of quests to understand reality but mostly it's all about looking at very long lists of numbers all day and occasionally going "Hmmm." And eating cake.

If I Could Talk To The Aliens...

Whenever someone asks me what I do, I have two standard responses. If I don't feel like talking, I tell them I'm an astrophysicist. Since I spend most of my time cooped up in a small house on my own, I don't use this one very much. My preferred response these days is to say I'm astronomer - which gives slightly less chance that the conversation will screech to a bewildered halt, but still engenders certain risks.

The main occupational hazard is people assuming that this is the same as astrology. Usually, this is because tehy is not to gud wid words. but that's OK. Worse, but much more rarely, they are genuinely unaware of the difference between the two. The most interesting / annoying are the UFO nuts.

Astrologers are basically wizards. I AM NOT A WIZARD.

That particular crowd are more excitable if I've ventured to say that I'm a radio astronomer, because that implies I must be a real life Jodie Foster despite all evidence to the contrary ("No, we don't use headphones, it's a radio telescope, not a radio....").

THESE THINGS ARE NOT THE SAME

Anyway, some radio astronomers really do listen for aliens, something which I think is a jolly good thing because it doesn't cost a lot and could potentially bring about the greatest discovery in human history. So that's fine. But there's a huge chasm between real SETI programs and looking for flying saucers.

Not that I particularly object to some level of search for alien spaceships either, for the same reason as above. It's just that it isn't serious science, any more than cold fusion is. And though I'm wary of completely ignoring "fringe" research, because once in a while something earth-shattering does turn up unexpectedly, I've a very hard time swallowing the notion that aliens have travelled from other stars in order to mutilate cows, conduct anal probing and mess about making avant garde patterns in cornfields. 

National Geographic - bless their little cotton socks - have decided to do their bit to fuel that particular fire by having us transmit twitter messages into space. That's so bizarre it deserves repeating. The National Geographic channel is going to pay us money to film us transmitting messages from twitter INTO SPACE.

...

Unfortunately, the most talked about person on twitter is Justin Beiber. 

...

OH GOD NO !

Humanity's first attempt to beam a radio message to aliens was an overly-sophisticated diagram that looked like this :

Which is a very clever way to tell the aliens that we know about prime numbers, chemical elements, have DNA, four limbs and a big radio telescope. In blind tests, no-one could decipher it. So apparently this time we're going to really dumb things down, and tell them all about a weird-looking youth with mad hair instead.

There will be no more pictures of Beiber on this blog. Ever.

Of course, I shan't be transmitting any messages. Fortunately for me I know nothing about using the radar. More importantly, if I'd wanted to send a message I'd have to have signed up for twitter, and I can think of more useful things to do with my time. Like chopping my arm off, for starters.

Howerver, if I had HAD deigned to do so, you can be damn sure I wouldn't have told the aliens anything about Mr Beiber. Messages I would like to send include :

"Hello, aliens ? Do you have any money ? We need funding !"

"STOP THE PROBING !"

"I CAN HAS INTERSTELLAR COMMUNICATIONS !"

"I feel it only fair to warn you that all your base are belong to us."

"What did those cows ever do to you ?"

"All out lines are busy. To initiate inter-species relations, press 1, now..."

"You could be a winner ! To claim your cash prize, send the secrets of space travel to the following address...."

This project, which falls firmly into the category of "cool but foooookin' mental" is a response to the famous WOW signal. To commemorate this most ambiguous detection, we'll be tweeting the aliens on August 15th, the same date the 'Wow !' signal was received - and in the same direction too. But, since the closest star in this direction is 122 light years away, viewers will have to wait a couple of centuries to find out what the aliens think of Justin Beiber.

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

They're not wrong. Immediately following the Socorro trip (read this first if you haven't already), I went directly to Anchorage, de facto captial of the great state of Alaska, or at least tried to. What actually happened was that I got stuck circling Dallas before the plane was finally diverted to Austin, owing to a storm. It then sat there for about an hour before flying back to Dallas, by which point, again, all of the flights to my next destination were not running.

Quick ! Someone call Bill Murray !

Here it gets slightly worse than before, because this time I was sent to Seattle to await an early morning flight. The flight arrived at 2am with the next one leaving at 5:30, so I had to hang around in the airport drinking strong, revolting coffee. And, since for no good reason I'd gotten very little sleep the night before, I reckon I spent about 48 hours awake.

DAMN YOU SENTIENCE. 

DAMN YOU.

Eventually I stumbled off the plane having no more than a few brief, mild flirtations with unconsciousness and miraculously arrived at my hotel. Of course, my luggage didn't. So after about 5 hours of glorious unawareness, I made a sojourn of Anchorage wearing only the shorts and T-shirt I arrived in. At 14 C, the weather was a tad brisk for shorts, especially considering the 20 degree difference with Socorro. Mercifully my luggage arrived intact and unharmed a few hours later.

I then proceeded to find a random bar to drink in, whereupon I at once resumed my unwilling role of imitating Louis Theroux. This time the guy was neither particularly crazy nor gay (but don't worry, dear readers, much more of them to come). He just decided for no particular reason to recommend me the best strip clubs in town. Which I think I could be bloomin' well forgiven for visiting given the previous week's escapades, but I didn't.

You may think the above an unremarkable tale. Just you wait.

The next day I explored Anchorage properly attired. Personally, I really like the place. Anywhere where you can see snow-covered mountains in June is a good place in my book. And compared to Arecibo it's a cultural mecca. You can walk to places. You can catch a bus. Heck, you can buy a life-sized model of a bear, although if you do you'd better really like bears, 'cos they cost $5,000.

There being a full two days before the AAS started, I booked some tours and visited the museum. It's pretty good, but Alaskan history is somewhat... uncomplicated by European standards. From what I learned, it was a two-stage process :
1) The Russians found it
2) The Americans bought it off them
You can see why there's not a lot of material for a museum to work with. As for the native tribes, as far as I can tell all they've done is quietly mind their own business for ten thousand years, which is wonderful but not exactly material for a Hollywood blockbuster.

Actually, I do have one idea for exhibits. Republicans. The state is full of them. You could put them in a display case with a button that offers them a beer if they'll say something right-wing. I met a bona fide, died-in-the-wool Republican in a bar that night, the kind that says things like, "I'm not a birther, but I don't think Obama was born in this country." Riiiight. He wasn't a racist as far as I could tell, just reeeeally anti-socialist. As in, the kind who feels the need to state entirely randomly : "Obama's a COMMUNIST !" (yes, he literally did that). Perhaps more surprisingly, he was also firmly against W's war's in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I actually saw this stuck to the back of a car.

Having nothing better do that evening, I threw myself into the role and pointed out that America is only 200 years old, so why does it matter where Obama was born ? His defence was the Constitution, though no-one trusts medical textbooks from 200 years ago so I'm not sure why old political documents are held in such high esteem. So I asked him if someone who has become an American citizen later in life has any more claim to be American than one by birth, to which he didn't really have an answer.

That brings me to the tours. Surprisingly, this is firmly in-keeping with the mad Republican theme. The first tour was a day cruise to see 26 glaciers, which was spectacular but I suspect readers will care far more about the second day. This involved a tram ride up Mt Alyeska, a short boat trip where we smashed through ice to try to reach Portage glacier, and a trip to a wildlife refuge. Our tour guide for the day was Sarah Palin's older sister.

No, it wasn't a different Sarah Palin. Yes, it really was her older sister, I looked her up on the internet afterwards. Regardless of whether Sarah Palin is truly as insane as the creature portrayed in media myth, her older sister is outright lovely, and a damn fine tour guide too. I'd recommend her, but I'm sure she'd rather get on with her job and doesn't want to be defined by being someone else's relative. I only found out about this rather remarkable genealogy as the discussion came around to the fact that you really can see parts of Russia from parts of Alaska :

ME : "So, Sarah Palin wasn't lying then ?"
GUIDE : "No she wasn't, and she's my younger sister. But she never actually said that..."

I then kept very quiet indeed for the next 30 minutes.

She then proceeded to complain about the famous Tina Fey impersonation and the whole media coverage of Sarah Palin, which is perfectly understandable given that it's her sister. To her huge credit, this small incident didn't affect the rest of the day at all. Wonderful lady.

Thence we arrive at the conference, which as conferences go was not all that great. However, the now established process of meeting weirdos in bars was about to reach its zenith, veering from the politically insane to the downright baffling with a man now known forever as Fractal Metaphors Guy.

Sadly, this man was not related in any way to Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

We had chosen to eat in a bar called Humpy's, which should have sounded alarm bells by itself. Alas, it didn't. This random guy approaches us and makes evident his lifelong desire to talk to astronomers, having also an ability to smell them out. I have only blurred memories of the evening, although a few choice phrases are burned indelibly into my brain :

"I don't believe in statistics. I mean, if something's already happened, then the chance it would happen must have been One Hundred Per Cent, right ?"
Yes, actually, he did pronounce the capital letters, somehow. And I pointed out that you can't predict the probability of something having already happened if you already know full well that it did, but this didn't seem to perturb him in any way.

".... fractal metaphors."
I deeply regret not remembering the context of this phrase. Their followed a discussion wherein we tried to understand what the hell it meant. Sadly, all we came up with is : ' a self-similar comparison that doesn't use 'like' or 'as'. '

"One day, you're gonna be soliloquising your wife's clitoris."
This was addressed directly at me while slapping me heartily on the back, a grim portent of the following evening. I guess he had apparently mistaken me for Al Swearengen, which is not an easy mistake to make. He knew an awful lot of long words, but didn't have much of a clue as to what most of them meant.

The next evening, annoyingly, the timeloop in which I had become entombed continued unabated. At every AAS there's a big unofficial party to which everyone (including the upper echelons, such as the AAS President) attends. For some reason, they're usually held in gay bars. Ah. One can see why this might cause me problems, though at the time I put down the previous week's incident to being no more than a surreal fluke.

Not so. Apparently, I'm an irresistible gay magnet. Not long after entering, despite talking to a girl at the time, two men in their 40's approach and use the old classic chat-up line of, "You are so HOT !". One of them  proceeds to try the other classic approach of the arm-around-the-shoulder technique, which proceeds for a few deeply disturbing moments into something approaching a back rub.

"How many drinks have you had ? TWO ?!? Ah, no wonder you're still straight."

With this declaration they left me alone with said girl, which, of course, resulted in a nothing, Which was still infinitely preferable to the alternative.

Two days later I went hiking on a 15,000 year old glacier, which was just about one of the best things I've ever done. And then I returned to Puerto Rico, via another 3 flights spread over 20 hours which I fear has permanently damaged me. Though not quite as much as the back rub. 

So, that's it. I lived for a week on top of a magma plume, hiked 7 miles up a mountain, saw bald eagles and humpback whales and Sarah Palin's sister, conversed with alien conspiracy theorists and ultra-Republicans, discovered I have worryingly strong gay sex appeal, and walked on a glacier. Oh, and I learned something about science too. Probably.

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.