Red Cliff

Seriously. It's an awesome movie and you should watch it at once. And with one-liners like "I never expected I would be defeated by a cup of tea" I'm at a loss to explain the complete absence of internet memes. Sure, it's 5 hours long and subtitled, but so what ? It's 5 hours of AWESOME. After watching the blu-ray, I have no problem with labelling this as one of the most spectacular films of all time, right up there with Waterloo. So go out and buy it right now. That is all I have to say.

Ten Things We Could Have Done Instead Of Watching Some People Run Around For Two Weeks, But Now We Won't Be Able To Because We're Short Of Cash

The Olympics have reportedly cost the UK about £9 billion, which is roughly about $15 billion US. That's quite a lot of money. What it's bought us is the privilege of watching some people go running, swimming, and generally larking about for two weeks in the summer. And some urban regeneration. which I suppose is fine if you believe that what deprived inner-city areas need most are world-class sports facilities. 

Now I'm all in favour of grandiose projects, but nine billions pounds for a two-week project is perhaps a tad extreme. We could have done quite a lot of other things with £9 billion. Here are a few suggestions. What's really bothering me is that it doesn't actually cost anything at all to get people to run around, or go for a swim, or even swing lumps of metal around.

1) Fully-fund the Arecibo Observatory for the next 1500 years, a period longer than the entire span of the Western Roman Empire. Now that's job security.

Say what you like, but I want my 15 centuries of science damnit !

So let's just be absolutely clear on this. The Government is forever complaining that we just don't have enough money, and have to make massive cuts to prevent an economic disaster. And then they spend enough money for people to take part in inherently free activities for two weeks that could have kept a first-rate scientific facility operational for fifteen centuries.

Bread and circuses anyone ?



2) Fund at least 260,000 post-doctoral researchers for one year. Or 2,600 post-doctoral researchers for a hundred years. Or about 250,000 PhD students for 3 years.
Two hundred and sixty thousand. That's a moderately sized city. There are roughly 50 or so PhD-level scientists in Cardiff's Astronomy department, so we're talking about enough staff for five thousand institutions. Or we could get some people to throw a ball over a net.

Perhaps funding a quarter of a million students is a bad idea. Best to give it to the post-docs instead, we're much better behaved...

3) Build an Even Larger Hadron Collider. Just to really make sure. Because, you know, we could either explore the fundamental structure of matter, or put some people on trampolines.

OK, I'd take it all back if Olympic trampolining was an event entirely for pigs.

4) Build about 170 Green Bank telescopes. Of course, that'd be silly. What possible use could we find for all those elaborate facilities dotted around the landscape in unexpected places ? Building white elephants isn't what the Olympics is all about, is it ?

For context, there's only one other steerable telescope as large as the GBT in the whole world, in Germany. We could have built 170 more of them, but decided that a large puddle* and a field** would be more useful.

* Swimming pool.
** Archery range.


5) Build 8 Square Kilometer Arrays. This is radio astronomy's Next Big Thing. It's going to solve all the mysteries of the Universe, and this time we really mean it. It's got a billion Euro budget and probably won't be ready for another 20 years. It ought to be pretty terrifying that the UK spent enough money in a fortnight to build eight of them.

However instead of funding a vast international project to understand the workings of the Universe, we decided to get some horses to jump over things instead. I hope the horses are well paid. Maybe if the SKA was somehow powered by jumping horses, we'd get more funding ?

6) Build 375 Allen Telescope Arrays. Last telescope in the list, I promise. This one is specifically looking for aliens. It's going to have 350 dishes when complete, but for $15 billion it could have about 131,250 of them. However, rather than wasting all that money in a boring attempt to make the greatest discovery in the history of history, we've instead opted to get some large burly men to hug each other.

7) Buy both of the UK's shiny new aircraft carriers with planes included. Sure, aircraft carriers aren't everyone's cup of tea, and maybe they're a terrible way to spend £9 billion. Still, this really ought to stop us complaining about the cost of them. On the other hand, maybe it's better we decided to throw some pointy sticks into the ground instead of shooting missiles into people.

8) Buy everyone in Britain 50 pints of beer. Or cider. Now this might not actually last as long as the Olympics for many people, but it'd be a nice gesture. A lot friendlier than those nasty aircraft carriers with all their frightful aerial weapons of death and what have you. Certainly I'd choose this option, if the alternative is nothing but sport on the TV for two weeks.

9) Build a tower of chocolate stretching more than halfway to the Moon, or nearly 4 times around the Earth.


Try as I might, I just cannot think of a good reason not to do this. Or even a bad reason not to do this. And I'm haunted by the idea that at some point in the bidding process. someone must have realised that yes, we could host the Olympic Games, but we could also give the entire country a year's supply of chocolate, but decided against it.

What a complete and utter bastard.


10) Fund the whole of science in the UK for two years. As opposed to a a sports contest that lasts two weeks. If I haven't made the point already, this should prove that science is quite cheap.


Which just goes to show that the Government is, in fact, amazing. Really, absolutely, genuinely amazing. Just not in a good way.

History Lessons

What with all the sightseeing and assorted shenanigans of late, I almost forgot something very important. Something small and fluffy wid a widdle nose an' widdl wegs an' a widdle tail an' that goes "maaaaow !" Yes, you've guessed it,  for two weeks - just before gallivanting off to New Mexico - I got to experience life with Egypt's greatest Pharaoh, Ramesses.

Err, well, alright, it was an 8-week old kitten named Ramesses. The title of this post is, in fact, A Lie. I've no idea why the name Ramesses was chosen, because there's not a lot of similarities between Ramesses the Great (or even any of the other Ramesses, come to that) and a small fluffy kitten. Let's compare :

This incredibly poorly named fluffy creature has many advantages over a Egyptian Pharaoh who's been mummified for 3,000 years. For one thing, having a kitten around the house doesn't tend to freak people out in the same way that a preserved corpse would. On the other hand, corpses don't tend to pounce out unexpectedly on people, claws outstretched with an expression of mad, psychopathic glee :

Another important difference is that the dessicated bodies of Egyptian rulers aren't known for looking adorable if you put them in a box, or a bag, or indeed anywhere else for that matter.

On the other hand, while both the Ramesses were/are fully house trained*, the pharaonic Ramesses weren't known for an obsession with trying to eat internet cables. Ramesses the Kitten, on the other hand, was particularly fond of the antenna on my wi-fi router. Possibly, being an astronomy cat, he was trying to stop me from generating RFI.


* At least I assume so. There's no mention of Ramesses the Great crushing the Hittites and then pooping everywhere, so this is probably a safe bet.

Finally, if you take an Egyptian ruler and stuff him in a washing basket, you'll be in big trouble when he gets out. If you take the corpse of Egypt's greatest ruler and roll it around inside a washing basket, you won't live very long. But if you put Ramesses the Kitten inside a washing basket, you'll get an evening's entertainment.

While I haven't had a kitten since I was about 8 years old, and like all right-thinking people know that cats are the higher form of life, I had mixed feelings about giving him back (fortunately, this was immediately before the Socorro trip, so I had no choice). Having an adorable fluffy kitten is one thing. Having it continuously attack everything in sight is another. Especially at 12:30am. So, the house is calm, once again. And quiet. So very quiet...

Wait, what ?

I apologise for writing yet another post about science, but not a lot has happened lately it's either this or posts about Netflix. Anyway, recently I discovered that the British government is to make publicly-funded research freely available* to the public who paid for it. This should be a given. But alas, while the scientific world has reacted far more sensibly to the advent of the Internet than the music industry - and so we should, because the modern internet was invented at CERN - the publishing aspect of it is still a little bit Victorian gentleman scientist.

* Read this link, it's important.

Firstly, let's be clear - publicly-funded research isn't "freely available" at the moment, but only in the sense that you have to pay to read it - NOT that it's kept secret. The reason that you have to pay is because once upon a time, in a dark and fearful age of myth and mystery, there was no internet. People had to spend their entire lives making their own entertainment, which led to travesties like Music Hall, and we all know how that turned out.

Not only was there no internet, but there weren't any photocopiers either. The only way to copy a paper was to have your secretary make a woodcut of each page. Err, well, not quite, but with no long-range communications aside from carrier pigeons, the only way to find out what other people were doing was to either spend three days travelling by stagecoach to talk to them, or buy a physical copy of a journal.

Indians were a common hazard on the London - Manchester route.

Although paper does grow from trees, trees are quite precious, as evidenced from the existence of paper money. Paying for journals made sense - but no longer. I quote from American Scientist, which sums up the whole affair very well :

"The government takes tax revenue from citizens and uses it to fund university research groups and libraries. Researchers obtain government grants and use the money to conduct experiments. They write up the results in manuscripts that are destined to become published papers. Manuscripts are submitted to journals, where they are handled by other researchers acting as unpaid volunteer editors. They co-ordinate the process of peer-review, which is done by yet other researchers, also unpaid. All these roles—author, editor, reviewer—are considered normal responsibilities of researchers, funded by grants.

At this point, researchers have worked together to produce a publication-ready, peer-reviewed manuscript. But rather than posting it on the Web, where it can contribute to the world’s knowledge, form a basis for future work, and earn prestige for the author, the finished manuscript is then donated gratis to a publisher: the author signs away copyright. The publisher then formats the manuscript and places the result behind a paywall. Then it sells subscriptions back to the universities where the work originated. "

Scientists are neither as stupid nor as wealth-obsessed as those in the music publishing industry, and everyone agrees that the current journal model is a dead duck walking. Unfortunately, the duck is not quite buried yet, so things are going to get pretty ugly while we struggle against its feathery zombified corpse before it completes its ducky death-march. And that's why the British government is planning to make research freely available by paying the journals. With £50 million that would otherwise have been used to fund actual freakin' research instead.

NO, NO, NO !!!

This is the worst possible solution to something that isn't a problem. For starters, a lot of papers are already freely available - at least as pre-prints. More importantly, the general public aren't going to be remotely interested in reading the vast majority of scientific papers in any case. They're sure as hell not going to be capable of understanding them if they do.

Sounds patronising ? It isn't. The prime source of finding new reading material in astronomy is astro-ph, where about 50 new papers are posted each day. I wouldn't like to risk claiming that I'm capable of understanding more than 10% of them. Every so often I note down papers with particularly catchy titles and/or bizarre abstracts - here's a select few. Hopefully, this will give a flavour of the gripping bedtime reading that £50 million will buy you :


A note on unparticle in lower dimensions
Using the gauge-invariant but path-dependent variables formalism, we examine the effect of the space-time dimensionality on a physical observable in the unparticle scenario. We explicitly show that long-range forces between particles mediated by unparticles are still present whenever we go over into lower dimensions.

Dark Energy, Hyperbolic Cosecant Cardassian and Virial Collapse for Power-style Cardassian 
Tthe Cardassian dynamical equations are introduced generally and logically under GF fluid scenario, together with the flowing process of constructing phase space and differential dynamical systems from Friedmann equation. Hyperbolic cosecant Cardassian term is employed for concrete computing. The analysis proceeds in two cases, namely a unified description of matter and radiation energy density (case 1) and a separate description of matter and radiation terms (case 2).Formalism of case 2 is more exact at the expense of more complicatedness, and due to the mathematical symmetry of matter term and radiation term in hyperbolic cosecant function, the differential dynamical equations are considerably simplified. Phase space and dynamical systems for both cases are achieved. When we calculate the critical points for case 2, amazingly interesting behaviors of self-consistency and auto-normalization are exhibited, which is a strong support for the new model,along with a forever positive sound speed. The process of virial collapse in Cardassian cosmos is analyzed. Power-style Cardassian term is employed for its simplicity.Calculation declares that virial collapse of matter alone isforbidden. Yet Cardassian has excellent ability for virial collapse,after the virial collapse ending up with a stable sphere, the ratio of the ultimate radius to the original radius depends on the adjustable parameters in Cardassian term. And, the mixture of GF fluid and matter could conduct virial collapse, the ratio of the ultimate radius to the original radius depends on the adjustable parameters in Cardassian term, too. No singularity is generated. 


Holographic Cosmology from the First Law of Thermodynamics and the Generalized Uncertainty Principle
The cosmological Friedmann equation sourced by the trace anomaly of a conformal field theory that is dual to the five-dimensional Schwarzschild-AdS geometry can be derived from the first law of thermodynamics if the apparent horizon of the boundary spacetime acquires a logarithmically-corrected Bekenstein-Hawking entropy. It is shown that such a correction to the entropy can arise when the generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) is invoked. The necessary condition for such a thermodynamic derivation directly relates the GUP parameter to the conformal anomaly. It is consistent with the existence of a gravitational cutoff for a theory containing $n$ light species. The absolute minimum in position uncertainty can be identified with the scale at which gravity becomes effectively five-dimensional.


Does that mean anything to you ? Because it sure as hell doesn't to me. But just because I don't understand it doesn't mean I want to cut their funding just so a lot more people can fail to understand it as well. That just seems spiteful. For all I know, they could be doing something really useful ! Knowing what the coalface of science is like, I'm prepared to trust that they're not just spewing forth words in the hope that a coherent sentence will develop.

Although sometimes I wonder...

And here's an important disclaimer. Public outreach is a vital component of modern science. It's entirely possible that all of the above authors have some really awesome lectures or public demonstrations, where they explain Cardassian virial collapse in an engaging and interesting way. Yes, yes, they probably don't, but they might. The point is that scientific papers are not part of public outreach.

Which begs the question, "Is it necessary to allow free public access to scientific papers ?" Yes, of course it is, you dolt. The public paid for every part of it. What's more, while there are not that many people hanging about with an interest in gauge-invariant Cardassian unparticle power cosmology, or whatever it was, only a fool would claim that the only people who benefit from reading papers work in academic environments. But taking away public money to pay private institutions so that the public can see what they paid for in the first place is Bloody Daft.

Fortunately, there is light at the end of the tunnel - and it's probably not an oncoming train. Already scientists are clumsily exploring the world of open-access publishing, and let's not forget that so much stuff is available for free anyway. If I had to guess, I'd say that within a few years someone will succeed in making this approach work really well, at which point the whole thing becomes moot and our wacky Tory government can find another excuse to cut public funding.

Review : The Count of Monte Critso

Well well well, it's been a long time since I bothered to post a review of anything. I figure that more than enough people do that anyway, but very few of them take the trouble to tell you about the time they didn't meet the British Ambassador, or accuse amazon of racism out of sheer spite. However, the time has come to make an exception.

As I've previously mentioned, owning a Kindle is a perilous affair. I haven't even made a dent in its 3GB memory yet (filling it only with books is a good way to appreciate just how large a gigabyte really is) but I've already got more than I could hope to read in a year. Or, based on one of my latest reads, 20 years.

Having seen a decent film with Richard Harris some time ago (no, it wasn't Harry "Angsty Wizzard" Potter), I've long felt that The Count of Monte Cristo might be a worthwhile read. So, this being a Kindle, I downloaded the complete unabridged works of Alexandre Dumas for some amount of currency so small it's zero within errors. However, it's fortunate for Monsieur Dumas that he is dead, or I would be forced to write him an angry letter. I might do so anyway, but it probably wouldn't help much.

"Dear Mr. Dumas,
While your hair is truly something to behold, your writing isn't.
Adieu."

From the 800 reviews on amazon, I was expecting a magisterial masterpiece that would be indisputably one of the cornerstones of Western literature. I was wrong. What it actually is a bloody awful book that is almost entirely forgettable. Not that I gave up without a fight, oh no. I made it 70 chapters of the way through (there are about 120 total, I think) which took me about 4 months before I've finally had to admit defeat. Because, you see, it's just not very good.

99% of the time it feels about as twee as Lark Rise To Candelford, a comparison not to be made lightly. Almost everyone is an unbelievably prim and proper superlative of something, which results in them being completely unlikeable. The descriptions of places are almost incidental, Dumas preferring to insert 20 pages of completely pointless dialogue that doesnt't go anywhere rather than tell us anything about the setting. And when he does, it's again nothing but superlatives.

Well isn't this just jolly SPIFFING, what what !

The plot, for those who aren't familiar, is that our hero Edmond Dantes is imprisoned for a crime he didn't even know he didn't committ. Abducted from his wedding to the extremely boring Mercedes, he spends 15 years in a dingy dungeon. There he meets the impossiblly knowledgeable Faria, the 19th century equivalent of Google. Fortunately our hero has a perfect memory, and Faria, taking a shine to the young lad, tells him (via a long and
 REALLY
FRAKKING
BORING
backstory) of a treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo.

On escaping from prison (a rare example of a good part of the book) Dantes embarks on a mission to very, very slowly track down his enemies, and very, very slowly exact his revenge upon them. Along the way there are yet more endless RFB backstories and improbable plot twists, or least meanders. It even features a 19th century version of Captain Pike - Monsieur Nortier - who can only communicate by blinking.

Why this mighty tome is deemed a classic by anyone is something which utterly escapes me. Maybe you're not supposed to actually read it. Maybe you're supposed to buy the hardback edition, for which I can think of a number of uses :

• Starting forest fires
• Blocking a toilet
• Beating your enemies into submission
• Making a lot of paper aeroplanes
• Starting more forest fires
• A handy substitute for cat litter
• Weightlifting
• Starting even more forest fires
• Making yourself look erudite on the bus
• A doorstop
• Something to drop when you really need to generate a satisfying "thoonk" noise
• Crushing small animals
• Continuing to start forest fires

By the time I admitted defeat, Dantes had done no more than cause some mild inconvenience to his supposed enemies. Sure, there are a few much darker passages - like burying a child alive - but they're embedded in such a thick, rose-tinted mush that they lose virtually all force. And sure, the complex lives of the RFB characters are intertwined very cleverly, but it takes a life-age of the Earth to start to reveal any of this and it's just not worth the effort.

This could have been a memorable swashbuckling adventure, chock full of pirates and a man on a quest for bloody revenge. What it actually is is tedium incarnate. In short, I can think of better things to do with my time. Like stare blankly and silently into space for six solid, uninterrupted hours, all the while reminding myself how much worse it would be if that dreaded book was in front of me instead of a nice blank white wall.