Defence Spending

The armed forces are woefully underfunded. The living conditions for some army families are a disgrace. So it makes people very angry when the government spends £33 million on asylum centres that were never built. That's right. It cost £33 million pounds for the government to even just think about building such centres, such as the one at Bicester. Think about how many army homes could have been rebuilt with £33 million. And think what we could do with the £20 billion that the Trident nuclear 'deterrent' will cost.

In other news Tesco has launched its US operations. The stores are called 'fresh and easy'. They chickened out on using 'Tesco' because if the venture fails they don't want to taint their name. What I find ironic is that their selling point is cheap fresh food for home cooking. Tesco UK are lousy for fresh food. In my experience their fruit, veg and meat is terrible quality.

The Lie

Bush claims there should be no emission restrictions because China and India would reject the idea outright.

But China and India accept mandatory cuts, they just disagree with everyone else how the system should work.

Lonely Planet

The US government used the 'Lonely Planet' tourist guidebook as a source of information prior to the invasion of Iraq. That's right, the average browser in WH Smith would be as well informed as the US armed forces and intelligence. I suppose the soldiers would know where the best pubs and restaurants were but as for roads and water supplies.... they weren't exactly covered.

It reminds me of the episode of Red Dwarf where the computer Holly thinks the crew are losing faith in him so he tricks them into thinking he gets his information about space from the Ladybird Book of Space. And then along comes the backup computer Queeg who is much more efficient but ultimately makes the life of the crew harder so they want Holly back. I guess the moral of the story is people are prepared to accept second best as long as it makes things easier for them.

Highjinks at our wedding reception

Profound apologies...

...for the lack of recent content. In four weeks I have to go to Warrington to do three weeks of experiments. As soon as I get back we have a visitor from Japan who is going to do two weeks of difficult experiments with us. So in the next four weeks I have to prepare for all of this. The problems we had with our equipment earlier in the summer have set us back quite a bit and it is a race against time to get things up and running and tested before all the key experiments start.

And after all this I get the Christmas break... followed by a month in Japan doing experiments. Phew!

P.P.S. On top of all this I just got married and we have a reception in the UK coming this weekend which takes a bit of planning.

Married in the USA

So I've been away for two weeks to get married in the USA. Radiohead chose the two weeks I had no internet access to release their album online. First impressions; bland and uninnovative.

On the plane back I saw the movie 'Heaven Almighty'. This is a sequel to 'Bruce Almighty' and besides being a crap movie it is scarily right wing religious. It basically brings the Noahs ark fable to today. There is no questioning of the tale or of religion in general. When hollywood makes huge brainwashing propaganda pieces like this which contain no balance or irony then I have to fear for all those people in America who aren't given space to think for themselves by their culture.

Things about the USA which annoy;

* A lack of lane discipline is a recipe for traffic chaos
* Lawyers who drum up business on TV
* Everyone uses their mobile while driving
* Cars don't need to be that big and should have cleaner exhausts
* Religion on TV with no balance or questioning
* Biased TV (Fox especially). Gor bless the BBC
* Tips and sales tax - can't you just add these to the ticket price?
* The coins are too similar

Things I love;

* The food
* The low prices
* Most people are polite and welcoming
* Things just seem to work, like the the way the theme parks are run
* Free refills

Jose Mourinho

Chelsea football club manager Jose Mourinho has left the club. It's not a surprise. He was not allowed to run the club the way he wanted. He could not choose who to buy and, more importantly, who not to buy. Good luck to him. He was fun and a likeable and capable manager.

On the other hand this is superb news for fans of Chelsea F.C. (I don't support Chelsea). Mourinho is more suited to getting smaller clubs with average players to gel as a team and punch above their weight. His style of grinding results out didn't suit a team full of superstars. If I was Abramovich I would want to spend my money on a team of galacticos. A bit like Real Madrid from a few seasons back. They might not consistently win as much but they would be much better to watch. Which is what Chelsea are for Abramovich; entertainment.

The future for the club looks bright. They are in a far better position than in the bad old days of Ken Bates etc. And that is solely down to Abramovich and not Mourinho. It will be interesting to see who they get in to manage them and if they now go on to build a team around Ronaldinho and Shevchenko. Chelsea should be a team of galacticos. With Mourinho gone they might now go on to become this. Better to lose in style.

Migration Impacts Forum

Cambridgeshire police force has an £800'000 bill for translation services. It has to deal with 83'000 legal migrants (that are known about) and more than 100 languages. The immigrant population carry knives and drink drive back in their home countries so they think it is OK to do it here. This has put a massive burden on local public services.

This is just one example of the problems caused by the vast numbers of migrants into the UK. We are told that the UK economy is propped up by such workers. I'm pretty certain that the tax and council tax they pay (if they pay it at all in certain cases) does not cover the extra costs imposed upon schools and hospitals and the police.

What is the solution? A lot of the problems are caused by social differences. Like the Polish drivers in South Yorkshire who think it is OK to park on a roundabout while they retrieve something from the boot of their car. There are some incidents where the people bring problems from their own culture. Like the group of somalis who attacked an ambulance in Bristol in which a man dying of stab wounds was being treated. They dragged a paramedic out by her hair. This went unreported nationally for some reason (see my earlier posts about the liberal BBC). These violent somalis should have been deported to their civil war ravaged country. Maybe once they were back there they would realise how easy it would have been to stay in quiet peaceful Britain, a country where public services are in place to look after anyone. Even stab victims from within a violent immigrant population.

The government solution is to "set up the Migrant Impacts Forum so public services can help shape our tough points system which is introduced in around 150 days time." Yes, that's right. The government is going to invite everyone around for a chat. What about charging some of the factory owners and gang leaders to contribute to some of the costs their slave labour workforce imposes on society? How about immediate deportation (at their own expense, they managed to get here so they should be able to manage to get back) for anyone who commits a serious crime or a series of small ones? And before I get labelled as a Daily Mail reader I do have lots of friends who make up the law abiding immigrant population and who do contribute to society (in some cases more than I do).

Ritual

"I've been fascinated by the recent spate of books casting doubt on religious faith, as if religion meant believing six impossible things before breakfast. Well, religion is a matter of holding certain beliefs, but that's not the only or even the most important thing about it. Religion is also about ritual; and ritual is about taking certain beliefs and making them real in the way we behave."

Chief Rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks, Radio 4, Thought for the Day, 12 September 2007

In India a proposed shipping canal that will provide a continuous navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula has been held up. The canal may disturb or destroy a natural bridge formed by rocks and stones that Hindus beleieve was built by the god Ram and an army of monkeys. A report into the potential damage questioned the existence of the god in the first place and now the whole project has descended into uproar and argument. Presumably this bridge was built by a thousand monkeys with a thousand JCB diggers?

Electron beam heater

For the past two weeks I've been painstakingly rebuilding an electron beam heater. It's used to heat up materials that you can't pass current through. It works by dumping hot electrons onto the object. This all sounds very fancy but in reality it's just been fiddly. Like threading four needles at once in the dark. With an oncoming wind. Now it's fixed and you can see our material glowing hot in the chamber. We put the samples in the chamber so that we can pump all the air away and keep our samples clean. This particular chamber houses a scanning tunneling microscope, used to produce a topographic map of the electronic envelope surrounding the surface atoms - it takes a 'picture' of the atoms if you like. See my earlier post for an example of what it does.

Party Politics

"People became eclectic in their choice of stances on individual issues as they were in their choice of morning newspaper, building up a portfolio of attitudes which defied simple categorisation." All Must Have Prizes, Melanie Phillips.

Party politics is no longer valid. In the past the two parties had clear constituencies; Labour stood for the working class and fair treatment for all. The Conservatives were for supporting those who worked hard for themselves and prospered under their own steam. Labour and Conservatives, do-gooders and moralisers. The face of Britain has now changed beyond all recognition and the old battle lines have dissapeared. Voting Labour does not mean getting an ideologically consistent package of ideas in the way it used to.

What frustrates me is that I agree with party x on some issues and with party y on other issues but I do not agree with any party on all issues. How should I vote? Prioritise issues? We now have the ridiculous situation where most people don't vote and the ones that do vote get mostly ignored. Iraq stirred up a huge well of public opinion which was ignored. The party political system is the number one enemy of democracy in British politics today.

How can this be fixed? Get rid of political parties. For each issue (schools, prisons, police, NHS, immigration, economy etc) vote for one person every three years based on their proposed policies for each particular aspect of their department. If they fail, boot them out. A bit like the mayor of London. Local MPs could then be responsible for making sure the head of each major department did their job according to the especial preferences of their local constituency. Party and personality politics have destroyed democracy in this country and the electorate have switched off, bored and disillusioned by Thatcherite "tough medicine" and the squandered promise and spin of New Labour.

US foreign policy

"We have to fight the terrorists over there, so we don't have to fight them over here" George Bush

That's right. If you have to make an omelette it might as well be with Iraqi eggs. The defence of the success of the the troop surge in the US congress has pretty much said 'it's bad for Iraqis but it's the best thing for the safety of US citizens'. On the radio yesterday a former US diplomat was asked why they support Pakistani military dictator Colonel Musharraf. His answer was that the safety of US citizens was more important than the democratic rights of the Pakistani people. Cue the longest pause ever heard on the pm programme as presenter Eddie Mair was shocked into silence by the abrupt answer.

Radiohead LP7

For those of us who wait with baited breath for the next Radiohead album there is some good news. The latest album has been officially confirmed as completed, 4 years after the last one. Quite why it took so long will emerge in pre-release interviews, I assume. The new album probably won't be released until next year. Exactly when is anyones guess. The band have fulfilled their contract with EMI and they now have to negotiate with potential suitors to see which record company will give them the best all round deal. Then there is the marketing. Early next year is the earliest optimistic estimate for a release. Boo.

On a lighter note, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and the BBC composer in residence has done another film score. The last one, for the film Bodysong, was amazing. I'm really looking forward to seeing 'There will be blood'. Question is do I listen to the score first and then see how the film fits to it or do I watch the film first and have the music forever associated with the images on screen? It's a tough one, fit the music to my imagination or listen to it with the intended visual accompaniment?

Schools PFI

A programme to spend £45bn on rebuilding many schools took its first major step today. A new state of the art school has just opened in Bristol and it looks stunning. It came in on time and on budget. Other PFI initiatives across the public sector haven't worked so well. Like the classic case of the two hospitals in Coventry that needed refurbishing at a cost of £30 million pounds. To attract PFI money this plan was scrapped and a single new hospital was built at a final cost of £410 million pounds. The NHS trust is now in debt and owes the private sector partners loads of money. So Coventry swapped two hospitals for one that has less money and less beds and nurses and doctors for a total saving of -£380 million. By the same scale up of costs the schools rebuilding programme will cost £615bn, a debt that will have to be paid in future generations. Gordon Brown loves PFI because he doesn't have to raise taxes to get public service investment andhe passes the debt forward to a time when he won't be in power. Read Captive State by George Monbiot or talk to anyone who works for a privatised company or a joint venture or PFI initiative and share in the horror of what is to happen to our schools.

Darkness Falls

This weekend I watched a few episodes from season 1 of the X-Files for the first time since I was a young teenager. One episode caught my eye. Mulder and Scully go into the woods to investigate the dissappearance of some loggers. It turns out the loggers cut down some really old trees in which there were some dormant insects, a bit like small fireflies. These attacked the loggers, drained them of all usefull bodily fluids and cocooned them. Except not during daytime or under lights. It turns out that the bugs don't work under light. Cue tense scenes in the log cabin with the petrol for the generator running low. One thing struck me when I rewatched this episode; why didn't they just light a fire? When they made a run for it why not carry burning logs? They were in a forest full of wood, why not use some of it? I also listened to a 1992 interview with Douglas Adams this weekend. He said he didn't like the fact that the rational skeptic was always derided on the X-Files and always turned out to be wrong. I still love the show but some of the conpiracy episodes now look just dumb. The standalone episodes were great, movie quality, well written and filmed and these are the ones that will endure. Even Darkness Falls.

YouTube

Is it just me or has YouTube got really slow and boring?

Academic Literature

Science is a collective effort in which we build on and expand the work of others. One of the most fundamental steps in the scientific process is the literature survey. If a scientist has an idea for an experiment or a theory they go and check all the published scientific work to see if anyone else has tried it. Keeping up with the literature is crucial because it can generate new ideas for work; so-and-so has some evidence for this but they need more proof using a different type of experiment or 'I wonder if they measured this or that'. Having access to the body of scientific journals is, therefore, crucial. In the olden days paper copies of each volume of all the journals would be kept in the library or academics would send off for copies of articles the library didn't have.

Now things have changed. The library here at York is getting rid of a lot of its journal volumes. They don't need the space. York has just had a second huge library built next to the existing one. They claim it is because no one loans the journals out. This is ridiculous. Of course no-one borrows the journals. They just photocopy the one article they need then put it back on the shelf. But why is this a problem? Aren't the journals available online now I hear you ask? No. We only have access to articles from 1995 in some of the main journals. We here in the surface science department only have access to articles in the journal Surface Science from the last 12 years even though there are important articles in that journal from way back. OK we have paper copies in the library but the process of thinning out resources means that for some articles there is no overlap and we have to send away for copies. This used to be free. Now they are to charge £2 per article. That's £2 of public money for a photocopy of a few A4 pages. The upshot of all this is that academics might be tempted to stick with the journals they have easy access to . Hard to obtain articles will only be brought in when the author is certain of their use. Important work or ideas might be ignored or not noticed and the well could dry up.

Lee Hughes

Football player Lee Hughes killed a man and severely injured another in an RTA in which he was drunk and driving recklessly. In court he showed no remorse and behaved with total arrogance. After 3 years in prison he is now out and has immediately been signed to play for Oldham athletic. How has he been able to stay football sharp whilst in jail? Should he have been allowed to continue his football career upon release? Should the inevitable abuse he will suffer from away fans be quietly applauded or has the guy been punished enough? The question is the same one that we had to think about when the guy who stabbed Phillip Lawrence was released earlier this month; did the punishment fit the crime and should the offender be granted their full rights as a free man upon release? For starters Lee Hughes should have a lifetime driving ban. And a percentage of his earnings should go to his victims and their families. He should also be allowed to continue his football career.

In other motoring news a banned driver who led police on a high speed pursuit risking lives was caught and the judge gave him.... a driving ban. Sigh.

My iPod and Linux

This weekend I had a go at getting my iPod working under my Ubuntu Linux OS. The first problem was that I couldn't write or delete anything on the ipod, even as root. So I had to visit my brother to use his Windows XP laptop to wipe the ipod and reset it to factory settings. This helped with the write problems.

So far so good. Next I tried to write my music library to the ipod via the Amarok interface I use (which is, for every other use, superb). The files write OK but only in short batches. If I try and write more than, say, 10gb then something falls over and the whole thing crashes. The files are present on the ipod but the contents database isn't there (Amarok must write this after it writes the music files). The end result is that the music is there but the ipod clickwheel menu system doesn't show it as present. I need to read into this a bit more. My current workaround is to use Amarok to manage my music collection and gtkpod to do all the to and fro business with the ipod. Not ideal.

This is how things are with Linux in my experience. Lots of fiddling around to get things working. I don't mind this though because a) everything is free and b) when things do get working they are superb in terms of reliability and functionality. However, I must admit that at times this weekend I've felt like buying a Mac.

Crime Crazy

The whole of the UK is frothing at the mouth at the moment about crime. An 11 year old boy was shot in the back of the neck whilst playing football and he sadly later died from the loss of blood. This horrible tragedy is another item in the catalogue of shootings, stabbings, school fights filmed and put on YouTube and the general antisocial behaviour that seems to plague our consequence free liberal society.

The left have come out with the usual watering down arguments. August is a slow news month because the politicians are on holiday like everyone else. The Guardian said that this slow news effect is why we always hear about youth crime in August. Erm. No. It's because the kids are off schools that they can be the victims/perpertrators of crime.

The right have suggested National Service for all those who do not find work on leaving school, hard labour in prison, punishment for parents of unruly kids, removal of financial incentives in the welfare system that make a single mother better off than a couple who stay together to raise their children, a 2 year time limit on benefits for unemployment, tougher hands on policing/regular patrols and on and on.

The one person who has made sensible comment is Ian Duncan Smith, former head of the Conservative party. He said a many facetted approach is needed. Identifying problem families early and giving parenting support together with tough methods in crime fighting. Carrot and strong stick.

I worry that the media, by making it look like crime is the norm, encourage more crime and copycat crime. The broken window theory. If a house has a broken window already why not smash a second one? And why weren't the street gangs filmed in Liverpool yesterday wielding machetes for the camera arrested? Why was a TV film crew stoned as they drove past without the police intervening? The final insult came from the home secretary who said all this was OK because it is happening in a few tightly controlled areas - ie poor areas. But this isn't true. There have been many innocent middle class victims in recent months. Like Rhys Jones.

Emigration

Last year nearly 200'000 British citizens officially emgrated, a record number. The main causes are attributed to;

1. Expensive housing
2. Fears over crime
3. Cost of living
4. Lack of jobs outside service industries
5. Poor weather

I can understand all of these reasons apart from the last one. This summer has been cold and wet but people emigrating last year didn't know this. Methinks there has been a bit of editorialising there. In general, the past few winters have been mild and the past few summers quite pleasant.

Learco Chindamo

The man who murdered a school headmaster outside the school gates when he was 15 years old is about to be released from prison after serving 12 years. Learco Chindamo is an Italian citizen who moved here when he was 4 years old. There are now calls to deport him upon his release. Learco does not speak Italian and all of his family live in this country. I do not think he should be deported. What would be the purpose of this? Further punishment? I accept that we should not send out the signal that one way to gain UK citizenship is to murder a UK citizen. But this man has served his punishment and is now, by all accounts, rehabilitated and making a positive contribution to society by educating children who might get involved in gang/knife crime. If we believe he is still a risk to the public we should not release him from prison and we certainly shouldn't send him to Italy. What Learco Chindamo did was truly evil, but we can't just sweep him under the carpet now he has been through our legal system. From the sort of comments I have heard in the papers and on the web I think some people would prefer that we had executed Learco for his crime and got him out of the way.

We Don't Need No Education

Professor Dylan Wiliam, an expert on exams and testing from the Institute of Education, has suggested that GCSE students (14-16 years old) are being taught in a mechanical, parrot fashion way just that material that will help them pass the test and maintain the position of the school in the league tables. He suggests that pupils should be taught to think and critically analyse just as much as they are loaded up with acquired knowledge. I agree with this is the sense that league tables should be scrapped. If a school is failing miserably then the government, which has access to the figures in private, could step in.

Professor Guy Claxton from the University of Bristol goes one step further. He suggests that 'everyone knows that the kind of performance required is about accurate retention and regurgitation. But the demand for those skills is now pretty low in the marketplace.' He suggests children should be taught how to use their initiative and ask 'good questions', skills which will be more useful to employers.

There are two issues here. The first is whether school should act to prepare children for work. If we are to mentally fatten children up for the marketplace like this then why not do it properly; teach them how to use powerpoint, how to fill in expenses claim forms, how to handle factory floor banter and how to stay awake on the production line. It is the birthright of every person to spend their formative years learning about themselves and the wider world around them. They need space to breathe and grow. They should not be prepared to be an employee.

Now the second issue. Critical analysis skills are important and so is initiative but knowledge and experience come first. In science we spend many years learning to speak the language before we attempt to debate with the native speakers. Many years spent learning all the key principles of Physics have not been to waste. Later in my undergraduate and doctoral years I have learned to critically evaluate the scientific literature and to judge whether an experiment presents a fair and accurate test or not. Only the latter was taught to me at GCSE level (in a very dilute form) and the former would have been beyond my reach.

I feel that the same must be true of other subjects. How can a history student write an essay on the role of women in the second world war without first learning all the important facts about that conflict? The best history lessons at school were the ones where I was told a fascinating story and we later went on to look at all the sources of evidence to support or refute that story. The worst lessons were where studied the theories of primary, secondary and tertiary evidence and then applied these to some small corner of history without a feeling for the events and the time.

Religion

A woman from the ancient pre-Islamic Yazidi sect in Iraq was stoned to death because she wanted to convert to Islam. Footage of the stoning emerged and the result was that three trucks full of explosives and one full of petrol were driven into the centre of the Yazidi settlement and detonated, killing hundreds. Acts like this reinforce my belief that religion is the major force for evil in the world today and throughout human history. I don't understand those who think that mass murder will make their god happy. People use religion as an excuse to treat others badly. All this is done in the name of a supernatural being that they believe to exist. I'll finish with a quote from Bertrand Russell

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

A-Level Pass Rate

Once again the A-Level pre-University exam pass rate has gone up. It is really difficult for Universities to distinguish students. A warden from the University of Oxford made an interesting point on the radio this morning. The universities want to know which students are the best so they prefer it if the students are graded relative to one another; the top 10% get an A for example. The schools want to be fair to the students and give them an absolute mark that isn't based on how well they fared against others ; they might be in a year of kids who are smarter than in an average year. The Oxford warden suggested this; give the kids a percentage mark. This way they can be both compared against other students and they also get a grading based purely on how well they did. Good idea. Problems might arise when kids miss out on a place by 1%. There might be a deluge of appeals for remarking of papers. But it has to be better than the current system of choosing between 100 kids, all with the same grade B or whatever.

The next problem to fix will be the creeping up of grades, year on year. Are the students getting smarter? Are teaching methods and schools improving each year? Unlikely. A sure way to test if the papers are getting easier would be to take a representative sample of the kids from this year and make them sit a paper from 5 years ago. Of course, it should be easy to look at a paper and see if the questions are easier than a few years ago. When I was at University I looked at past papers and the older papers always seemed to be harder. Older papers seemed to set really challenging problems that tested not just knowledge but understanding too. The more recent papers seemed to be an act of guided regurgitation.

India and Pakistan

Why is everyone in the UK media making such a fuss of the 60th anniversary of the independence of India and Pakistan? I don't remember the more prestigious 50th anniversary celebrations receiving this much coverage. I hope that the fact that India is now considered a 'superpower' hasn't got anything to do with it. Sucking up to a country when they get rich is bad enough but to then point out in every media report how many severely poor people in India aren't getting a share of that new wealth amounts to jealous sniping.

A64 Motorway safety

The A64 motorway that encircles the city of York is notoriously dangerous. It is a dual carriageway with a 60 mph speed limit, many short exit entry slips roads and it is used by extremely slow moving agricultural traffic. Despite this a third of the traffic on the road travels at speeds of 80 mph and over. The mix of two lanes and traffic moving at many different speeds is a recipe for disaster. A similar two lane road near Cambridge was put under continual speed camera surveillance and the calming effect on the traffic is amazing (even though it feels like being on prozac).

The exit off the A64 I use is terrible. There are two lanes on the slip road, one to go into York and one to go away. Queues into York form at peak times and the left slip road backs up onto the motorway. Naturally, drivers use the right lane to jump the queue which backs the traffic up even more. I asked North Yorkshire police why they don't enforce the lane discipline more and I got this response;

Many thanks for your enquiry re the roundabouts at Fulfrod

I can understand your frustration at motorists using the free flow lane to shorten their wait but there is no offence in undertaking this manoeuvre however annoying it maybe.

Unfortunately it is not possible to use the stinger under these circumstances.

We are in conversation with the Highways Agency and the City of York Council over the queuing of traffic on the A64 off slip road and they are monitoring the situation at the moment to see what if any action can be taken for a long term solution.

Thank you for your enquiry

regards

Martin hemenway

Endings

I just finished the final Harry Potter book. I won't spoil the ending but the book is a great read, the ending is well executed and I'm very happy with the way Rowling has finished off my decade of reading.

I have also got round to reading the final book in the Hitchikers guide to the galaxy series of five books. I enjoyed the book but it is a very dour way to end the series and a lot of the characters from the first four books do not feature and are brushed aside. Douglas Adams admitted that he wrote the book during a bad year for him and it shows. If he hadn't died suddenly I'm sure he would have rounded his story off a bit better with another volume.

Health and Safety

The largest free music festival in Europe has been cancelled on health and safety grounds. The event, centered around the Beatles weekend in Liverpool has been run ever since 1993 and has been growing in popularity. The council have decided to ban all of the outdoor events because the large amount of building work in the city might be dangerous. There have been construction sites in Liverpool for a few years now and no one has ever been hurt at the Matthews Street festival. Might I suggest that the council is trying to save money by cancelling the event. Road closures, extra policing and litter collection are all expensive for such a large event and the council should just be honest and say it does not want to foot the bill.

In a related story kids in Bournemouth are not allowed to borrow arm bands when using swimming pools. The official line is that germs will be spread as people inflate them. As one parent said 'they would rather let the kids drown than have them catch a cold.' Methinks the real reason is cost. They don't want to have to buy spare armbands for people who forget theirs and they don't want to be sued if a kid drowns because of faulty armbands that they have supplied.

Targets in Academia

Target driven culture has had negative effects in hospitals, schools, with the police force and most other places. Physics academics are primarily measured by the number of papers they publish and how prestigious the journals in which their articles appear are. One way to play the system is to publish the same piece of work several times. I have seen some research groups take the results of the same research project and publish them with slight differences a year apart. Or even the same work published in two journals at the same time; one short article in a better journal and another lengthier explanatory article in a lesser journal. Surely this does not aid scientific communication and wastes the time of everyone involved?

The BBC

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the BBC is far too left wing liberal and over represents women and minority groups. I am told (by a woman with left wing liberal politics) that there a small number of bigots who always say this about the BBC and that people in the US say the same thing about CNN. Well, I'm not saying that I disagree with equality and that my politics aren't liberal (in places). I'm saying that the BBC should be upfront about its agenda or it should be politically neutral and objective. Take BBC breakfast news as an example. On the show today they had features about daycare centres that offer others services such as dry cleaning, a report into the best ways to keep children occupied during long summer car journeys and an examination of why most primary school teachers are women. I don't have a problem with this content but it is not news and should not be labelled as such. Thank god I have BBC radio 4 when I leave the house.

Orange gigs'n'tours

Orange have a new offer to their customers. You get to reserve concert tickets 48 hours before they go on sale. Sounds great from an Orange customer perspective but any band that is willing to treat fans like this isn't worth watching. The argument can be made that most live events are more accessible to those who pay more; corporate boxes in football and snooker etc. But this Orange thingy is pure queue jumping which is a very non-British thing to do. I don't know why I'm bothered; the acts that are in partnership with Orange aren't the type of acts I'd like to see anyway. Shed Seven anyone? Lily Allen (*shudders like Homer when thinking of Patty and Selma*)? Amy Winehouse ('I'm on drugs, aren't I kewl)? The Streets (geezer, music once OK, now reported lost somewhere in celeb land)?

New Interpol Album

The first two Interpol albums were great and I've been looking forward to the new one. Having listened to it I must say I'm underwhelmed. There is a review over at Pitchfork who normally get it right. The main problems are this; the drums and bass have been subdued, the deep Paul Banks vocals have been lifted too much, the songs are bloated and uneconomical and there aren't many tunes in there. One or two tracks are OK. I disagree with Pitchfork in that I like the opening track. The best track is Heinrich Maneuver and it is here that Interpol keep all the elements of their dynamic that worked on previous albums. The overall problem is that the band, in "seeking to freshen its damp atmospherics", has overstretched itself. They aren't capable of opening up their sound in the same way Joy Division did with Closer or Radiohead did with OK Computer. And the cover of this record really sucks.

Tesco Beware

Tesco is the giant of UK consumer retail. 1 in 8 pounds spent on the high street goes to Tesco. I have been a Tesco customer for many years now and I like the range of goods, the low prices, the clean bright stores and, most of all, the loyalty clubcard. However, I have noticed that things are starting to slip. The fresh food is, to put it plainly, awful. The quality of the fresh meat has dipped considerably and the fruit and vegetables are always low on stock and the only options seem to be multipacks whereas I want to pick my own. I now shop elsewhere and I'm prepared to pay more for the extra quality. I've heard grumbles from others too and Tesco should be careful. If all of their customers feel fed up and start to leave in droves it will be very hard to coax them back. Food is why people enter your supermarkets. Don't take your eye off the ball because it might be more than just this one loyal customer that you loose.

Stupid Humans

The human race is bloody stupid and, therefore, doomed. Yesterday, during a 15 minute TV programme designed to summarise all the important recent events in the Universe the newsreader spent a minute describing which man had managed to most efficiently try and get little plastic balls into holes in the ground by hitting them with metal sticks. I will never understand the appeal of playing golf, let alone watching the silly 'sport'.

The Simpsons Movie

The Simpsons is undoubtably one of the all time great TV shows. During seasons 4-8, the 'golden run', it was untouchable. It jumped the shark in season 9 and in later seasons the great gags were diluted and it became too self aware. There was nowhere left for it to go but more and more over the top. Now there is a long mooted movie. I've not seen it and I'm not sure how good it will be. Some cartoons make the transition to the big screen OK. South Park the movie was superb. But The Simpsons was all about riffing; small side gags based around pop culture refererences or the large cast of characters. The movie will live or die by how it manages to balance the overarching plot with the small gags and nods. I'll post after I've seen it. Matt Groening assures us it is brilliant. But he still thinks the show is as good as ever and methinks he is a little too $ obsessed to be objective. A trip to the cinema will tell.

Nintendo Wii

I treated myself to a Nintendo Wii games console. It is superb. I've never been much of a fan of games consoles in the past but this is so much fun. Everything is much easier and more intuitive. A game of bowling is very much like the real thing. It is really easy to suspend your disbelief and really get into a game of tennis. I can't wait to try out some more games. I do hope that Nintendo keep supporting this console and making games for it.

Away on an experiment

So I've been away from home for the last six weeks doing an experiment (with a week in Germany for a conference, see earlier post). The experiment was done in a room the size of a sports hall and we were sat in a little shed on stilts. Outside the shed was a big ion source that makes a noise like a jumbo jet taking off. The job of the ion source was to make a beam of hydrogen atoms. As these entered the shed we directed them onto a crystal we had made and from the way the ions bounced off the crystal we could work out the crystal structure. All very good in principle but in practice there is a lot of waiting around. A piece of kit so big is ripe for problems. If it wasn't the beam going down it was the detectors not working right (counting atoms that weren't there) and if these two both worked then our crystal preparation recipe hadn't worked. Out of the five weeks in the lab we got about a week and a half where things were good and we worked all day to get as much data as possible. Now I have to analyse the data and see if we got anything good and try and work out if we managed to make anything new and interesting.

Notes from the underground

The coal mining industry was the lifeblood of South Yorkshire. People were encouraged not to seek further education and to get a job in the local heavy industries. This was yanked away in the 1980's and the place really suffered. The jobs have recently been replaced with factories and service jobs. This has meant that a lot of EU workers have moved into the area and they are very welcome and make a valuable contribution to the economy.

This isn't strictly true. I have heard many shocking facts from people who work alongside the visiting workers. A guy with a family who has been waiting for council housing has been bypassed on the waiting list by visiting workers. When he challenged the authorities they said that the visiting workers had 'different circumstances'. The factory owners benefit from the cheap immigrant labour. They provide accomodation for their workers and pay reduced wages, very little of which go into the local economy because the visitors save it all up and take it back home. The most shocking fact is that they are allowed to claim child benefits for children back in Poland and Portugal. Surely this is wrong?

Retail Therapy

I had to do some shopping yesterday at the mall. This is the same mall that was devastated by floods recently. We were led to believe that all services were back to normal. They aren't. The place is a disaster still. The only food place open downstairs is McDonalds but, like the cockroaches, they would even survive a nuclear war.

The one shop that always irritates me is Debenhams. They arrange the clothes by designer and not by item. This means if I want a pair of trousers I have to look around the clothes for every designer. Ugh. I don't think to myself 'I'm going to buy a so-and-so t-shirt today'. I shop by item and it would be nice to have all the t-shirts in one place to choose from. This is why I never spend money in Debenhams.

Charlie Brooker on fashion

I don't like to quote other blogs because it feels a bit lazy but the Charlie Brooker blog on fashion is so good it should be in the Penguin book of quotes or something;

"It's a mystery to me. If the whole point of fashion is to distinguish yourself from the herd, why queue up to be part of it?"

"As far as I can tell, fashion is nothing more than a handy visual system that gives people with no personality some palpable criteria to judge each other by."

"I hate shopping for clothes so much, I wear things until they fall apart. Right now, the soles of my shoes have worn so thin I can stand on a penny and tell if it's heads or tails."

The football association (again)

The FA really burn my waffles. There is huge controversy at the moment because one team got relegated from the premier league costing them £60 million ($120 million). The team that didn't get relegated survived because their star player almost single handedly saved them. But that player was fielded illegaly because the team did not declare that he was owned by a third party, which is illegal in the UK. The team in question were fined £5 million but were not deducted points as the rules state and they survived relegation. Cue uproar. The FA could have fixed this. When a club wishes to field a player they should sign a piece of paper that states who owns that player. The small pring should say "I declare all this information to be correct and if it is later found to be incorrect then we accept a 10 point deduction." Problem solved. But the FA didn't do this and only later found out that West Ham had witheld paperwork (lied). West Ham are quite a historic and prestigious club and many ex players are powerful within the game. The FA now has to face allegations of bending the rules to save one of the special kids in the class from being expelled.

Live Earth

Live Earth was supposed to raise awareness for green issues and climate change. Madonna urged the audience to jump up and down to change the world. This from a woman with investments in some of the most polluting companies in the US. I have a real problem with wealthy musicians telling me to fly/drive less and recycle more. A touring band generates a vast amount of CO2 and waste. The concert has not been well received. TV viewing figures were very low in the UK and there were complaints about the sound quality in the stadium and the clips that were shown on TV attracted more complaints for the songs that weren't shown than the swearing. I'm glad I didn't go. It seemed to be about neither music nor the environment.

Practical joke

Here's a good one. Put a can of shave foam in some liquid nitrogen. After about 30mins take it out and peel off the can. Put the frozen block of shave foam in the back seat of a car before the journey starts. As the foam heats it will expand and fill the whole of the car and scare the driver witless. He he. In many ways I'm quite a small minded person.

Floods

South Yorkshire has been devastated by flash floods and there are many dead and homeless people. Worst of all I heard speculation that the environment agency sacrificied the village of Toll Bar to spare Doncaster Town centre. No-one lives on the ground floor in Doncaster town centre. Oh well, I'm sure the insurance companies see it as the lesser (cheaper) of two evils.

Well that's cleared that up then

From Wikipedia;

"A real or complex Hilbert space is a real or complex inner product space that is a complete normed space (Banach space) under the norm defined by the inner product."

Great. Er, what does it mean? Mathematicians are crap at explaining things in laymans terms. This definition is OK if you already understand the thing. Wikipedia should be there to inform everyone and have several layers of explanation; beginner, middle, expert. Mathematicians seem to write in this dense way just to impress other Mathematicians with how succinct they can be.

Germany

I'm back from my conference visit to Dresden in Germany. It was fantastic. We were shown great hospitality and everything ran very smoothly. Dresden airport was closed on the way in but it didn't cause the sort of chaos we would expect in the UK (on the way in and out the UK airports were hell. At Gatwick we were just making a transfer but they made us go out through security and then back in again! Why? We had our fingerprints taken and our shoes were scanned even though we had just come off an internal European flight. Dumb.). In Germany our train journey from Berlin to Dresden was superb. The train arrived on time, there were seats and luggage space, we had air conditioning and best of all the journey was smooth and silent, like floating on air. Why can't the UK get these things right? We had excellent meals for about 10 Euros (£7 or $14). Back in the UK we called into a service station on the motorway and were met with inedible and expensive choices of food. On the way out we spotted a car being broken into by two kids right across from the transport police offices where I spotted several cops sitting having a cup of tea as we drove past. The good thing about travel is it makes you realise how much better things are elsewhere.

Av It

News from the front line

There is no news. We've been at a major UK science facility for two weeks now but we have done no experiments and have yielded no data due to technical issues. C'est la vie. I wish I could give more details but I might say the wrong thing.

Tessa Jowell has said that the cost of the Olympics has not trebled to £9 billion. It has increased from £2 billion to £3 billion because of unforseen costs in the construction of the Olympic village. The other £6 billion is to be spent upon regeneration projects in London. Are these not associated with the Olympics? Should they not be included in the total cost figures? Would these areas have been regenerated regardless of the successfull Olympic bid? I smell another Millenium Dome. And that logo is ugly.

In other news the chain of Track records stores is to close. This is a crying shame because track records was all about music and variety; they never gave 50% of their stores over to DVDs like HMV and Virgin and cut down the music range to high volume items like Coldplay and the Kaiser chiefs. HMV is in financial trouble too. Of course, the internet will be blamed which is just crap. If HMV continued to sell things that people could not get on torrent sites then people might be more inclined to continue shopping there. Take this weekend. I was shopping for the 'I Am Kurious Oranj' album by The Fall and the Trojan Records Dub box set. I could find neither item in one of the largest shopping malls in the country. I could find crappy reggae compilations and overpriced Fall boxed sets but not the particular items I wanted. The space was taken up by piles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Batman Begins DVDs.

The Fall - Mr. Pharmacist

I'm away doing an experiment at the moment. I'll post from the front line when we get up and running and try and give you a flavour of what scientific research is like. In the meantime, please enjoy mark e. smith singing his mr. pharmacist song which is reyt good.

Remember A Day

Do you remember when the television had to be left to warm up for ten minutes when it was first switched on? Do you remember when programmes didn't start until 9 or 10 in the morning? Remember when it was News at 10, a film and then the national anthem. Remember just four channels? Remember five or ten buttons on the front of the TV, a volume and contrast/brightness/colour knobs and no remote? Remember getting in from school and watching kids TV whilst mum made dinner and you waited for dad to come home? How 2, Grange Hill, Count Duckula, Thundercats, Bagpuss, Byker Grove, Knightmare. Do you remember when childrens TV presenters had to press the buttons to start the next cartoon and fade it out at the end?

All gone. None of this any more. I saw a show on BBC 4 last night about the history of childrens TV. The BBC asked Oliver Postgate how he mananged to get the sound of Ivan the Engine being emptied of coal. His answer; I just got some coal in a bucket and poured it into another bucket. Do you remember when TV was made on a smaller scale without focus groups and PC?

Fed Up with my ISP

I'm fed up with my broadband provider. I signed up for this package on promises of a good and reliable connection with excellent customer support. More fool me. I never get anywhere close the connection speeds advertised. 101 kb/s is the most I ever get (at about 5am). I paid for the package up to 2MB but my local phone network is nowhere near good enough because I live in a satellite village of a larger town. The broadband company could have very easily checked local availability and offered me a price based on the speed they could genuinely offer. But no. I went for the package with the slightly higher speeds and tied myself into an 18 month contract to pay for something I'm not getting. And they know this.

The connection is unreliable too. I noticed that after a day or two of heavy downloading the bandwidth dips artificially to a rigid 20 kb/s. Again, I bought the package because it was advertised as having unlimited downloads and uploads but it seems an artificial cap is being applied if I use the service too much. The final straw comes with my personal webspace. This page, which has a paltry amount of space allocated has to be regularly updated to stay valid; if you don't change things regularly then they freeze the site because of 'inactivity' even though my visit tracker shows that the people who I set up this static page of information for visit it consistently in a steady trickle. Boo. When I call them I get diverted to a non-UK call centre where I have trouble understanding the operative and they have trouble understanding my accent. I know these people aren't stupid and they do their best but it doesn't work. I asked them for help setting up my free modem with linux and the line went quiet, they asked their supervisor and then said they weren't sure what I meant, a computer is Windows isn't it? Sheesh. As soon as my contract expires I'm going to pay extra to get what I pay for and before I switch I'm going to read every review and comparison of ISPs I can find. Hopefully by then I'll also have moved house to an area with cable internet. If anyone reading this has a suggestion that isn't spam then please recommend me do.

Hoaxed

Hetracil is a hoax. I couldn't find Shetty Pharmaceuticals but didn't dig any further. Anyway, an eagle eyed reader got suspicious about the number of prescriptions and googled it.

So I got caught by a very well done hoax. Utterly believable which is a bit scary because it means either (a) I have a low opinion of American medicine/ethics or (b) American medicine/ethics could stoop to something like this and I wouldn't be surprised just outraged.

And this all leads nicely into the new Michael Moore film about the US health system, 'Sicko', which is about to get a Cannes premiere after the master tapes were successfully smuggled out of the US.

'Thank' God For Hetracil

Wonder drug hetracil has been prescribed to 54 million people. The 'disease' that it treats is described on the hetracil website, and I quote;

"More than 80 million Americans suffer from some type of Homosexuality, and one in eight persons need treatment for Homosexuality during his or her lifetime. Homosexuality is not a character flaw; it is neither a "mood" nor a personal weakness that you can change at will or by "pulling yourself together."

Many healthy men can identify with having some of the symptoms of homosexuality, such as experiencing sexual fantasies about other men; But Homosxuality is diagnosed only when these activities take at least an hour a day, are very distressing, and interfere with daily life.

We encourage you to Learn more specifics about homosexuality from your doctor- The more you know about the illness itself, the more you can do to manage and recover from it.

Hetracil is the world's most widely prescribed anti-effeminate; it has been prescribed for more than 54 million people worldwide. Chances are, someone you know is getting better because of it. Learn more about how Hetracil works to make you better, so that you can know what to expect while you work toward your recovery."

What do you think about Hetracil, the people that make it and the 'disease' it is used to 'treat'? I am offering no personal opinions on this one because I think the quote speaks for itself.

Harriett Harman and Madeleine McCann

Harriett Harman, the unflushable underachieving turd of the labour party has made her bid to be deputy PM. Her main selling point is that she feels there should be a woman at the top of government. Excuse me? You think you're the best person to help run the country, to take charge when Gordon goes on holiday because of your physiology? We should positively discriminate and give you the job even though you have been a dismal failure in the past just because of the configuration of your genitalia? Go away, step aside and let the best person get the job.

On another note an interesting point was raised today on Question Time about the Madeleine McCann abduction case. Her parents are both doctors. If they were unemployed would their two children have been taken into care because of their negligence? Many children go missing every day. MPs never wear ribbons for black kids that go missing in Peckham. A complete double standard because of the media attention and the location of the abduction (and our ability to sneer at local Portugese investigative techniques) and the status of the parents. Why people buy Rupert Murdochs mouthpieces I will never know. I guess it's to read in their white vans and on the train.

Tony Blairs legacy to me

1. Impossible housing market
2. Student debt
3. Pensions crisis
4. Failing NHS
5. Roads clogged with lorries

The Emperor Has No Clothes

Gilbert & George, artists based in East London since the mid 1960's have been exhibited at Tate Modern and last night the BBC did a show about them. One thing struck me; they are an intriguing and original pair of people, their artwork is provocative and they have stuck at it and defied all the odds but.... their work isn't any good. It's just all reaction and no content. They have been pretty much ignored all these years but now Tate has decided to exhibit them, the first British artists to have an exhibit (normally British artists exhibit at Tate Britain). And why? Just because they seem to have decided they are now trendy. But when I take a proper look at their work, past the reactionary, provocative content and just at the work I just feel that the Emperor Has No Clothes.

Fight the Power

My bank charged me £23 because one of my accounts accidently went a few pounds overdrawn even though there was more than enough money in my other account to cover it. I asked them to give me the £23 back, they said no. I then said I was going to go through the official complaints procedure to get my money back and that I would switch to their rival first thing tuesday morning after the bank holiday. They called me back and said that as a gesture of goodwill they would repay me the money.

The banks are in mess over charges they make. Interest charged on mortgages and loans is much higher than interest paid on savings and the banks make a killing (see my earlier post about banking and its profitability). The other way they make money is by overcharging people for going briefly overdrawn. The banks fold as soon as you show willingness to contest these charges officially. They don't want to go to court because a ruling against them would bring down their whole system of robbing money out of the cashflow situation of the poor working people of this country. So if they charge you unfairly complain and go through official complaints. I know loads of people who have won back money. Fight the power.

UK Elections

Nearly 40 million people got the chance to vote yesterday in local elections. I didn't vote. Not because I'm lazy. I have received no information about any of the candidates, no visits to my door and I have seen nothing on the web or in the local press. I don't know what any of the candidates would do for my village or for the city as a whole. I decided not to vote along party lines because I'm not interested in sending a message to No. 10 because that will be ignored or spun. I despair. My local council seems to be run for the benefit of the councillors and their business friends. In my village most people pay no local council tax so the ones who do pay tax pay more than people who live in equivalent properties in other areas. I would have liked a say about how my village and the wider city is run but I was denied a chance by inept and lazy campaigning.

On a lighter note soldiers in Iraq have been wearing t-shirts that bear the slogan "I'm Harry!" in a Spartacus like show of solidarity.

News Roundup

Last night the BBC Horizon science programme was fantastic. It was about the Large Hadron Collider, a $6 billion machine built underground to look for the Higgs particle, which is responsible for some particles having mass and others (like light particles) being zero mass. The content was superb, the explanations clear and interesting and the usual overegging of the CG effects was toned down. Great TV. Why don't horizon do programmes like this all the time (see my earlier posts about skyscraper fire safety and what if the dinosaurs were alive today).

I was at the Crucible yesterday to watch a quarter final session of the World Snooker Championships between Shaun Murphy and Matthew Stevens. I saw two century breaks and a comeback from 3-0 down. The BBC has an article up today describing what a visit to the crucible is like. Seeing snooker live is an absolute joy.

If English football fans are attacked tonight in Italy then Italian teams should be evicted from Europe for a few seasons. There is no excuse. AC Milan shouldn't be in the Champions League this season anyway after all the corruption last year. Travelling English fans have been warned not to use the subway, not to speak English in public and not to wear England flags or Man Utd shirts. I do hope the Italian police do their job and that they have some English speakers amongst their number this time. We shall see...

Atoms and surfaces

Think about it; every time you touch something solid you touch the surface. Any time something like light wants to penetrate a material it has to first get past the surface. This picture shows atoms on a surface of silicon. It was taken using a scanning tunneling microscope. This works by putting a sharp metal tip near the surface. A small voltage between the tip and the surface makes a current flow across the tip-surface gap. This current depends very sensitively upon the tip-surface distance. As the tip is moved across the surface it might hit a bump - an atom and the current goes up slightly. By recording where the tip has been and what the current was we can build up a contour map of the atoms on a surface.

We use our STM to look at how materials grow on semiconductor surfaces. This is important because metals grown on semiconductors are found in the little circuit boards in most electronic devices. When electricity passes from the metal to the semiconductor the interface region might have an effect on the current. Knowing how well materials grow on surfaces helps to clarify this. This is just one corner of surface science, whose influence stretches far and wide and whose applications involve multi billion $ industries.

BBC Horizon

The flagship BBC science documentary program Horizon last night broadcast a program about fire safety in skyscrapers.

Enough said.

Final Approval?

radiohead starts up again having finally caught up on some sleep next week
i have a cd of what we;'ve been up to...
and you haven't.
yet.
(sorry)

i must listen to it, after taking an ear break
that always makes me nervous
hope you're well

yours

Thom

The Time Of The Locust

Venture capitalists have decided to go for high street brands. Boots the chemist is next.

The locusts have no king, yet go they forth all of them by bands.

Bible: Proverbs 30:27

Football gossip

Rat faced England football captain John Terry hired top chef Marco Pierre White to cook a meal at a cost of thousands of pounds. What did he ask for? Steak and Prawn Cocktail! This proves that a) John Terry has more money than taste and b) that Marco Pierre White is a pretentious git for complaining that his skills were being wasted.

In other news the BBC have positively discriminated against shrieking football commentator Jacqui Oatley by fast tracking her to become a commentator for Match of The Day. This is PC hell. I've heard her commentate and she is just rubbish. Not because she is a woman, not because I fear change just because she is really bad and has an annoying voice. Gabby Logan is great as a presenter, a good journalist and belongs in football. Not Jacqui Oatley. There are some good commentators (Mark Lawrenson always spots things before I do) and some bad ones (droning sit on the fence man John Motson) and some compete dead ends (Mark Bright and David Pleat) and I think Jacqui Oatley belongs with the latter based on her Radio 5 performances. Shame on the BBC and credibility points deducted.

Virginia Tech

I'm amazed at how debate about gun control has been stifled in the US. A person with known mental problems was able to get a gun by simply ticking a box to declare he had no mental problems. Is it not one sign of mental illness that a person thinks they are sound and everyone else has a problem? The guy who sold him the gun said that if the students had been armed they would have been able to defend themselves. Can you imagine a world where a campus of 25'000 students each carry a gun like this? It's very simple; make guns freely available and people who are unhinged will make use of them and we will continue to see terrible events like Columbine, Virginia Tech, the Amish village and so on. Thank the stars guns are not so freely available in the UK outside of some small pockets of big city criminality.

Life, The Universe and Everything

When you think about it the Universe is a pretty odd place. I mean, here we are, stuck on this rock for no paricular reason completely at the mercy of any passing asteroids or black holes. We have little or no idea how the whole Universe thing is put together or how it works and if there is anything looking in from somewhere else and having a giggle at our stupidity. Chances are that it is all meaningless. This thought loop is so depressing that most people choose not to think about it most of the time and just get on with the being alive part or they make stuff up without proof to make them feel better and give them something to do on a weekend. The being alive part consists of breathing, food, drink, sleep, sex, house, job, car, sport, shopping, TV and pyramid teabags. Instead of getting together and working out how to pass things around evenly so we all have it half good the system is rigged so that some people get rich and powerfull and never have to worry about anything other than how to stay rich and powerfull and most of the rest of the world are just slaves of one form or another. The world gets by and keeps itself busy by having wars and terrorism and arguments over territory like two neighbours coming to blows over the height of a hedge. And the number one reason to fight is over which theory of it all based on no evidence is right which surely proves that we are just slightly smarter than chimps and confirms that it is all just meaningless evolution from some gunk in a puddle with no higher purpose. Still, you've got to laugh.

Goodbye XP

Microsoft has announced it will stop selling Windows XP from Jan 2008. They want everyone who buys a new PC from then on to move to Vista and existing users to upgrade. I wonder how long it will be before they stop looking after XP users? I will never buy a computer with Vista on or upgrade from XP. My next PC will be a Mac or a build with gentoo or Ubuntu or Debian on it. As soon as they stop supporting XP they will lose my custom forever. Judging by the response to Vista they might lose a few more customers too. If the stranglehold MS have on office PCs also starts to slip then maybe, just maybe the giant will start to wobble.

David James looks like Denzil

Portsmouth goalkeeper David James and his new beard look like Denzil from TV show Only Fools and Horses. Portsmouth beat Man Utd 2 -1 over the weekend but Man Utd beat Roma 7 - 1 last night in the best Champions League game since Liverpool came back from 3 - 0 down. Denzil used to carry around a ghetto blaster on his shoulder. The modern form is kids who play music from their mobile phones on the bus and in Meadowhall and the Trafford Centre. It's really annoying and doesn't make them look cool because a) they have poor taste in music and b) a discreet iPod is way cooler.

University of York money gouging

I have just found out that my employer, the University of York, is to charge me £154 to park my car outside my place of work. Each member of staff is charged a percentage of their salary for this right and it must add up to a fortune in revenue, much more than the cost of maintaining the tarmac. The aim is to encourage people to use public transport to get to work. Sorry. Tried this for six months. I live 35 miles from York and my daily round trip by bus train and bus takes 3 hours and costs me £71 per week. Absolute misery and a severe reduction in my quality of life. My only option is to move to York but they don't pay me enough to be able to afford this and I'm not paying £150'000 for a terraced house without parking or central heating or double glazing. My current house is clean and warm and has space. And they know all this. Which is why they can profiteer by raking money from their staff. It's not our fault the Universities are all in debt.

Internet baddies

Don't come too close. My computer has been infected by a nasty. I managed to get rid of most of it by cleaning the infected files from my registry and system32 folder and running sweeps with every manner of anti virus/spyware/malware tool. Why do people make these nasties? It's just pure vandalism. One theory is that these things are made by the people who then sell the cure. Or fraudsters looking for personal details. Anyway, I have got rid of the nasties but to be sure I now have to do a full backup and then shred my harddrive and reinstall Windows. On Easter weekend. What I wouldn't give to meet the swine who made the spyware/trojan/malware that got me.

Girls in Science

There are fewer girls studying Physics than boys. Is this a problem? Everyone seems to think so. Cue lots of silly suggestions like lowering the A-Level grades required of girls for admission to University Physics courses. This issue is very similar to the attempts to increase the number of people from working class backgrounds at Oxbridge. Barriers should be removed but positive discrimination should not occur. It should not be a case of 'it's OK that you went to a poor school and didn't learn much because we are going to let you in anyway because we think that if you went to a good school you would have got great grades in your exams'. Then what is the point of exams if subjective judgements and leftish social ironing are going to overrule them? The same applies to girls in science. Don't positively discriminate. Just remove the barriers. Like the notion that Maths and Physics are boys subjects. And Maths teachers who ignore the girls. Physics and Maths are hard subjects and they require a person with a specific set of skills. If a group of people are not studying the subject then so what? Just because there are few men doing womens studies or sociology doesn't mean that there fundamentally should be.

England football and the FA

People go mad over the England football team, especially when a big tournament is on even though they never do anything. In international terms we are the equivalent of Newcastle United - always a chance but never any silverware. What really gets me mad is how the FA sell the rights to show the England games on TV. It should be the right of everyone in England to watch their national team at no extra charge. But the FA cup and England games have just been sold to sky and ITV (which is full of adverts and crap commentary). The FA is a business. They change the shirts every so often not to freshen up the look and give the team a different identity at each tournament but to increase their profits. It makes me sick that the proposed youth training academy at Burton has been scrapped through lack of funds. What is £5 million to the FA?

Sven Goran Eriksson is still being paid £7000 per week. Why didn't they give him a contract that stopped after the World Cup? Wasn't it obvious what was going to happen when we got knocked out? Sven tried to make England play like an Italian team, which was never going to work. McLaren has us trying to play like Middlesborough. We have the best defence in world football and some excellent strikers at the minute. It's the midfield that sucks. The wide players aren't really doing their job. In the middle we have Gerrard who is good as an individual but who doesn't work well with the vastly overrated Lampard. OK he gets 20 goals a season for Chelsea but that's not hard with the quality they have. He shoots far too often. His passing is nothing like that of a Gerrard or a Beckham. We have trouble getting it into the box either as a through ball or a cross. We should have Gerrard and an ankle biter in the midfield. All the great squads had a fancy player and a tidier in the middle; Keane and Cantona, Zidane and Makelele and so on. So McLaren should play Hargreaves who is such a hard worker. And he should stop smiling and saying everything is OK. You're going to ruin it again you second choice incompetent sod. The truth is that the national side are rubbish and international football is too tight. Congratulations to Doncaster Rovers on their 3-2 win in the JP Trophy at Cardiff today. Saw the match on Sky and it was excellent.

Seventh Radiohead Album

Radiohead have announced that they have started mixing their new album. This is very exciting news. The last album came in 2003 and was the last in a cycle of 3 post OK Computer albums that had a very similar sound and aura. There has been a lot of speculation about how LP7 will sound. Will it mark a radical new direction with large-scale orchestration, will it be more computer effects and beats or will it be three minute rock songs? The band have been tight lipped and so far there have been no leaks of unmixed tracks. Likely new songs can be found on fansites like atease and greenplastic and mp3's of live versions of works in progress can be found on finefinemusic. Plank, the bands very down to earth guitar/instrument tech and general fixer has a lovely little blog which is very tight lipped about the band but very informative and good fun.

The band have been cryptically keeping fans up to date via their Dead Air Space blog which contains a Hodiau Direkton section (Japanese; 'todays direction') where the new ideas for the artwork are previewed. All the stuff to date can be found collected on this fan blog. As for a release date? Who knows. The band have no record contract so that could delay things. And a title? No idea. Probably something seemingly random with a cute hidden meaning as usual. 'Down Is The New Up' is a possible but this is a song name so.. And touring? Earns the band loads of cash and breathes new life into the songs that are on record (the Kid A stuff sounds just as good live even though entirely different). But... Thom is a Friends Of The Earth frontman and has been heavily criticised for his carbon debt from the massively polluting tours the band do.

At the next election I will base my vote on these issues

The Iraq war
Trident
Effective privatisation of NHS dentistry
The price of petrol
Road pricing and commuter charges
Green taxes and their use/flight price hikes
Target/table culture in the police/NHS/Schools
Funding and policy for scientific research and education
Road safety/traffic police/drink driving policing
Bus lanes/transport and congestion policy
Council tax and refuse collection (local issues but local councils are failing on this and Whitehall needs to step in)

and I'm sure I'll think of more

Funny (with sound)

Slave Trade Reparations

There has been some call this week for reparations to be paid to those whose ancestors suffered during the slave trade. This is an admirable sentiment but it changes nothing. The most we can do is to freely admit to what our ancestors did in order to build the British Empire and make sure we never do anything like this again. Handing out cash will not help. And anyway, the slave trade existed before British involvement. African kings were involved in the capture and sale of their own people. Should poor African nations be forced to pay reparations also?

A woman on BBC news this morning seemed to suggest that all modern social ills and deprivations that the black community suffer can be directly traced back to the legacy of the status of black people as being slaves. That is cod socialism. This lady must be doing an A-Level in sociology at evening school. Kids in London are not shooting and stabbing each other because they still feel social pressure from the slave trade. The idea of reparations is just like the idea of official pardons for those shot at dawn for cowardice during the first world war. It doesn't change anything or make it better for anyone. Those shot at dawn should stay labelled as cowards to make us feel eternally guilty for the horrible things done in our name over the years, from the World Wars to the days of empire building and concentration camps and genocide in Africa and back further to the days of slavery and conquest.

Football: the powers that be

Three interesting stories have emerged recently about the organisations that govern football. Manchester United were fined £6300 because of violent and improper conduct by their fans in the Champions league game against Lille. Lille were fined £42000 for improper security and organisation. What really happened was that the section of the stadium alloted to United fans was only half opened. A fence was left closed so that the fans were squashed into an area half the safe size. Some fans climbed the fence to stop being squashed and were hit with batons by the police who thought a pitch invasion was occuring. UEFA don't seem to know what really happened that night and their information seems to have been provided by Lille football club, who felt bitter about the manner of their defeat that night. A fine for United seems bizarre.

My home team Rotherham got into financial difficulties last year and the FA punished them by deducting 10 points. The people who got the club into trouble have since left and the legacy is a struggling club doing its best to survive. The team have had a good season and were mid table at one point despite the ten point handicap. Things have since proved too much and the team has slowly sunk down the table. They now sit at the bottom of the table and look certain to be relegated. Why has the FA done this? With those 10 points Rotherham would survive the drop and would not suffer further hardship by being relegated. The fans and players are being punished for something the money men did in the backroom.

The other story was the plan by the FA to settle score draws in the league by a penalty shoot out. All commentators on the game have derided this ludicrous suggestion. A drawn game is often more exciting than a win. Small clubs would play negative against the big clubs to try and get to penalties. Silly FA.

The colour coded budget

I'm sure you noticed the way the PM and the chancellor were colour coded yesterday. For every colour Brown was wearing Blair was wearing the equivalent but more subdued and pastel coloured. Brown had a vibrant red tie, Blair had a gentle pink tie. Brown had a crisp navy blue jacket, Blair had a nice greyish blazer. All deliberately done of course to promote the image of Brown as the fresh vibrant replacement for our PM. Shame he won't be elected by the people like Blair. As for the budget, meh. It was just shuffling piles of money from A to B with no net gains. The £1.5 bn in green taxes was interesting. I would very much like to see how this will be spent. Will the money be put back into green initiatives like wind farms? Or will petrol duty be reduced to compensate? What do you think?

Uplifting Songs

Scott Walker - On Your Own Again
Sibelius - Karelia Suite (Intermezzo)
Talking Heads - Heaven (Stop Making Sense version)
The Velvet Underground - I'll be your mirror
Dave & Ansel Collins - Double Barrel (This one gets a special *)
The Smiths - There is a light that never goes out
Radiohead - Lucky
R.E.M. - Electrolite
The Beta Band - Dry The Rain
The Beatles - Every Little Thing
Blur - Tender
The Delgados - No Danger
Keane - Bedshaped
Strauss - The Blue Danube
Philip Glass - The Grid

I know there are many more. Let me know what you think!

PhD viva success

In my oral exam today I successfully defended my PhD thesis which means I will be able to start calling myself Dr. as soon as it is formally confirmed. I would like to thank my external examiner Prof. Woodruff and my internal examiner Prof. Godby. Even more so I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my supervisors Steve and Matt and the other members of our group who have helped me so much along the way. Also big thanks to my family and friends for keeping me sane. There is one person who has done the most. During this past year my fiancee Nicola has been my stable foundation and I hope to repay her support over many years of marriage. That sounds like a car loan or something doesn't it... Erm I mean I'm glad I had you around Nic to share my highs and lows.

The Beta Band and Arcade Fire

The Beta Band were a great little band these past few years. 'Dry The Rain' is one of the most uplifting songs ever and Hot Shots II was a superb album in places and could have gone through the stratosphere. But it didn't quite have that anthemic zeitgeist enveloping quality. Eventually, mental illness and poverty broke the band up. Shame. Now the band have partially reformed as The Aliens and a new album is out


I had a listen and sorry guys but, meh. It's nothing special. God bless you for trying but as a commercial venture you stand alongside Gomez and the Super Furry Animals. A decent band at times but there are surer ways for the record buying public to Get Their Ya Ya's off.

At the moment The Arcade Fire are electioneering trying to shift copies of their new album Neon Bible. They are a decent band who put music first. The lead singer is an American rich kid who is married to the main instrumentalist in the band. Alas, every time he opens his mouth in interviews he comes across as a complete t***er. He tries to be appeal to some mystical wistfull ideal of the musician. The article in the Observer Music Monthly is not very flattering in this respect. What is funny is that the article is trying to build up his mystique. But, being written by the worst music journalist ever, Pretentious Paul Morley, the article could never succeed. This guy really is a drivel merchant. In the past he has attached himself to Joy Division and New Order and the stuff he has written there makes me cringe. An example of his style, describing Lou Reed watching Arcade Fire live;

'For song after song the infinitely impassive Lou doesn't move a muscle. He doesn't even seem to blink. He never taps his feet or shakes his head, and when a song crashes to a glowing climax he doesn't applaud. Perhaps he's working out what the trick is, if it can save him from the grave.'

*Retches* And his paragraph description of the band

'The group came from nowhere, like they were born yesterday, sonic sweethearts, a scholarly post-punk gospel choir merrily identifying the menace of the world, and it was a surprise. How they sounded, how they looked, the throbbing innocence, the way they swapped roles and instruments, hugged each other, hit each other, broke for cover, jumped for joy and swore on the Bible, the way they sang their hearts out whether there was a microphone near them or not, the way that Win sang, like a soft-hearted iron man, with dashing, rustic serenity, as if he still believed rock music and songs had the power to change the world, to burn down to reality, as if they could obliterate darkness with light and fury'

*Dashes for the bathroom*

I can't believe I ate the whole thing

My PhD viva exam is approaching and I'm hard at work preparing. My hair is getting long and I need a shave. At the moment I most resemble Homer in his highschool yearbook. During the exam on Tuesday I get quizzed at length about my work over the last four years. I have to convince the examiners that I wrote the 200 page thesis and that I have a good enough overall knowledge of Physics and my field to merit the qualification. Eek. See you on the other side.

Bus lanes and traffic chaos

Many cities are now setting up bus lanes. These are a good idea if they encourage people to get on the bus and not drive into busy city centres. One problem is when they hit traffic lights. Buses are given priority here and the main traffic stream is stopped. This is a bit annoying but what makes it supremely frustrating is when taxi drivers use the bus lane and the priority at the lights. A taxi is a commercial vehicle just like a delivery truck. They should not choke the main traffic stream up by using the bus lanes and turning the lights red. And taxis aren't green either; they often contain just one driver and a passenger.

While I'm at it another thing that really burns my waffles is when people park illegally (in my city often on a dual carriageway on double yellow lines) with their hazard warning lights on. Like that makes it OK. There is nothing more annoying than queuing to get round someone who is pretending to be broken down while they pop into a takeaway.

As you can probably tell I'm fed up with traffic. It's bad enough the roads are busy without sneaky or lazy motorists playing the system. The city of Doncaster has just moved its bus station on top of the train station and under a busy shopping centre. This has created CHAOS. The main road that feeds the train station is now severely choked and to make matters worse it has five sets of traffic lights in the space of a quarter mile. The problem here is that the buses don't go down the bus lane into the bus station. They go into the town centre to drop people off then cut into the main road to get into the station. Result; traffic lights going red every twenty seconds and the main road through Doncaster choked.

Doncaster has horrendous traffic problems. There is really only one way in or out and to get from one side of town to the other involves a trip into the town centre. There are partial ring roads but they aren't enough. One such road is unfinished and it will link two major traffic hotspots (the football stadium is in this area) and bypass the town centre, providing major relief. The reason this hasn't been completed and opened up is that the Asda supermarket nearby have objected on the grounds that customers will have easy access to the nearby Tesco and they will lose trade. How dare a supermarket dictate traffic planning and road building.