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.