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William Smith and the First National Geological Map

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 13, 2015 by telescoper

Friday was the last day of teaching term here at the University of Sussex. Aided by the general winding down of things I managed the unusual feat of geting up to London in time to catch some of the monthly discussion meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society, which was on A Critical Assessment of Cluster Cosmology. Usually I only just manage to get there in time for some of the Ordinary Meeting which follows the specialist meetings at 4pm. And sometimes I only get there in time for the drinks reception at Burlington House followed by the RAS Club dinner at the Athenaeum!

I may write something about Cluster Cosmology if I get time before Christmas, but I thought I’d post an item now inspired by one of the talks in the Ordinary Meeting by Tom Sharpe of Lyme Regis Museum and Cardiff University. This talk was timed to mark the 200th anniversary of the publication of the first ever geological map of England and Wales in 1815. To make it even more topical, the talk was given in the lecture theatre of the Geological Society of London where an original print of the Map is on permanent display:

William Smith Map

The person responsible for this map, which was the first to show nationwide geological strata, was a chap called William Smith who surveyed England and Wales on foot and on horseback, travelling over 10,000 miles to make it. It was a remarkable achievement which, among many other things, led the way to great changes in the understanding of geological time. Unfortunately his work didn’t have much impact when it was first published. Smith, who was evidently not a very astute businessman, eventually went bankrupt and spent some time in a debtor’s prison.

The map itself is extremely beautiful as well as very clever in the way it uses colours and shading to represent three-dimensional information on a two dimensional surface.

Anyway, there is a book  entitled  The Map that Changed the World  written by Simon Winchester which tells the story of William Smith and his map. I haven’t read it but I’m told it’s excellent. I’ll probably buy a copy with the book tokens I inevitably get for Christmas!

 

 

 

 

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Forbrydelsen

Posted in Television with tags , , , , on December 12, 2015 by telescoper

Over the past week or so I’ve been watching the original TV series The Killing (in Danish with English subtitles). This was actually first broadcast in Denmark in 2007 but apparently achieved a bit of a cult following in the United Kingdom in 2011 when it was shown on BBC4. That was round about the time that I basically gave up watching television so I missed it then. However, I saw the DVD box set at a drastically reduced price a few weeks ago and decided to buy it. I’m very glad I did.

Forbrydelsen,_DVD

I’ve been to Copenhagen many times in my life but this is the first time I’ve seen some familiar locations on the small screen, which added a personal dimension for me, but my main reason for doing a blog about it is just to salute it for being exceptionally good.  The Killing (in Danish Forbrydelsen: “The Crime”) is often quoted as an example of Nordic or Scandinavian Noir but that term is generally reserved for crime fiction novels rather than movies or television programmes.  The Killing definitely retains some elements in common with classic  Film Noir – a strong central female character and low-key visual style to name but two – but I’m not sure I would categorize it as “noir“. On the other hand some classic examples of film noir don’t display many of the characteristics associated with the genre either. Categories don’t really matter that much anyway, even when they are easily defined which is not the case with Noir.

The plot of The Killing revolves around the police investigation into a terrible crime: the brutal rape and murder of a young woman, Nanna Birk Larsen, who disappears after a Halloween party. Each of the twenty 50-minute long episodes depicts one day; the series has to be that long to accommodate all the twists, red herrings and false dawns, but it never loses pace or tension. That everything happens in a Nordic November means short days of grey skies and long wintry nights, establishing an appropriatelt sombre visual mood.

The complexity of the plot and the Copenhagen setting are not the most compelling things about this as a piece of TV drama, however. What stood out for me was the excellence of the acting not only from Sofie Gråbøl as lead investigator Sarah Lund but from the entire cast. The effect on the Birk Larsen family of the loss of their daughter in such cruel circumstances is portrayed most movingly, especially by Bjarne Henriksen as the father, Theis Birk Larsen.

I am so late writing about this that I don’t suppose I would spoil it for too many people if I revealed who did it, but I’ll refrain from doing it. What I will say, however, is that I was pretty confident that I knew who the perpetrator was right from Episode 1 and I proved to be right. That doesn’t mean that I’d make a great detective, just that I’ve had enough experience of detective stories to know some of the tricks writers use to throw the reader (or viewer) off the scent.

If you haven’t seen The Killing, I thoroughly recommend it. I gather there’s a second series too. I must watch that sometime…

 

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The student left’s broken moral compass

Posted in Politics on December 12, 2015 by telescoper

I’m taking the liberty of reblogging this post about the dire state of student politics – and of the far left generally. The problems described within the post are not confined to Goldsmiths College, nor indeed to Islamists, but I’d encourage you to watch the video here, which shows the disruption of the talk referred to in this post and which gives you an idea of the contempt some people have for the idea of free speech. Goldsmiths Student Union have asked for the video to be taken down. I hope it stays.

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Sussex in Pseuds Corner

Posted in Uncategorized on December 11, 2015 by telescoper

Travelling up to London for the last Royal Astronomical Society meeting and Club Dinner of the year, I noticed that the University of Sussex has rounded off a good year with a coveted place in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner.

image

I am sure this achievement will be an inspiration to all my colleagues and spur us all on to even greater heights next year..

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The Optic Glass

Posted in Cute Problems, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 10, 2015 by telescoper

I thought you might be interested in this video demonstrating an interesting possible effect of refraction:

It’s not a trick, but it did take me quite a long time to reproduce the result. Can you figure out what’s going on?

 

 

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Where Two Tribes Go To Roar…

Posted in Uncategorized on December 10, 2015 by telescoper

It seems that my former colleague from Nottingham days, Professor Philip Moriarty, has decided to leave Twitter.

I have to say my own experiences of Twitter haven’t been as bad as Philip’s. In fact I still find it rather fun,  but then I just tend to ignore or block people who irritate me rather than try to enter into pointless and frustrating dialogues…

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Variations on the Theme of Northern Lights

Posted in Art, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on December 9, 2015 by telescoper

This morning I woke up as usual to BBC Radio 3. Unusually however this morning’s breakfast programme was broadcast live from the picturesque town of Tromsø in Norway, which is well inside the Actic Circle so is dark all day at this time of year. The broadcast from Norway part of a three-week extravaganza called Northern Lights, which focusses on the music and culture North of 60° latitude.

Anyway, this prompted me to do a brief post about a couple of related matters connected by the theme of Northern Lights.

The first is to draw your attention to the fact that, to coincide with this Nobel Prize Week in Stockholm, the artist Olafur Eliasson has set up a temporary public artwork in Stockholm called Your Star, which involves putting an artificial star into the sky over Stockholm. I gather it has been quite difficult to get the star to behave in the windy conditions, but in any case you can use the website to view six short videos and even create your own star..

The second is this wonderful video of the  Aurora Borealis? If you haven’t seen this before then take a look. It’s not a fake. This is what it’s really like.

I stood under a show like this once, in Tromsø in fact, and I can tell you ever the word “awesome” applied to anything, this is it. The curious thing is that I had the definite feeling that there was a booming and whooshing sound to go with the light show. I wasn’t the only one there who thought they could hear it as well as see it. And I wasn’t drunk either. Well, not very.

I’m reliably informed however that there is no physical mechanism that could produce sound waves of sufficient power to reach ground level from the altitude at which the light is generated. It must have been psychological, as if the brain wants to add a backing track when it sees something as spectacular as this. Any views on this phenomenon would be welcome via the comments box..

 

UPDATE: here’s an interesting take on the Auroral Sounds issue.

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In the Waitrose of My Mind

Posted in Biographical, Mental Health with tags , , on December 8, 2015 by telescoper

I’m not sure why, but the distressing events at Leytonstone at the weekend seem to have triggered a need to do one of those weird confessional posts that I seem to be prone to posting from time to time. So here goes.

A couple of weeks ago I visited Waitrose in Western Road, Hove. Nothing particularly unusual about that, you might think, although it isn’t actually a very convenient supermarket for me as I live on the other side of town. I’m not sure why I suddenly decided to go there, except that I had been avoiding it for such a long time. In fact I hadn’t set foot in that store for the best part of thirty years. The last time I went there was a few weeks after I had been beaten up on Brighton seafront. I had more-or-less recovered from the physical effects of that late-night encounter with four yobs, but I hadn’t quite got over the anxiety of going out, even in daylight. Little did I know that things were about to get a lot worse.

I only went in to buy a couple of things so it wasn’t long before I was waiting in the queue at the checkout. Suddenly I was gripped by  a deep feeling of apprehension or dread. I began to sweat and tremble, my heart was racing. I became aware of strange shapes moving unpredictably through the corner of my eye. Rapidly the shapes intensified and became threatening, monstrously distorted faces began to swirl around me uttering all kinds of threats and abuse. Terrible sounds reverberated in my ears. I couldn’t take it any more and ran from the store.

Unfortunately I was still carrying a pint of milk and some coffee so, not unreasonably, the security man jumped to the conclusion that I was  shoplifter. I made it as far as the street before he tackled me. By then I was completely incoherent, sobbing and struggling to escape, still beset by all kinds of scary visions. Someone must have called the Police, or maybe they were just passing, and I was soon bundled into a patrol car.

Thereafter it is all a bit of a blur. I was taken to a Police station and spent some time in a cell. I don’t remember how long. A person – presumably a psychiatrist – appeared and tried to talk to me but I don’t think I was making much sense. Pretty soon after that I was informed that I was being detained under then fairly new  Mental Health Act (1983). In other words I was sectioned. I think the idea that I was a shoplifter was abandoned at this point. I was taken to a psychiatric institution some way outside Brighton which looked like something out of a Gothic horror novel and was held there, for assessment.

Fortunately the worst effects of the panic attack I had experienced disappeared fairly quickly, and I was transferred to a (slightly) friendlier-looking hospital nearer home. After a couple of weeks I was discharged with a renewable prescription of heavy-duty antidepressants which seemed to work at preventing further episodes but at the cost of some quite unpleasant side-effects. I returned to work, making up a story to cover my absence. After six months I gave up taking the drugs.

Over the years since then I’ve experienced panic attacks of this type on an intermittent basis, usually much milder but sometimes not. I have been told that there isn’t really a treatment that will banish them for ever, so for the past few years  I have been controlling them using a different type of drug which seems to have fewer and less serious side-effects. I don’t like having to take medication every day, but have come to accept that’s just the way things are.

Anyway, you can now probably understand why I have avoided Waitrose in Western Road. It’s a place of painful memories for me. In a sense I went there a couple of weeks ago to attempt to exorcise a ghost.

When I walked into the shop, however, it was completely unrecognisable. The layout had changed. So had the colour scheme, the staff uniforms, the lighting, the lot.  Expecting to be overwhelmed by dread, I instead felt nothing. Relieved, I actually did some shopping. No ghosts. No swirling shapes. No terrifying noises. The only scary things there  were the prices…

 

 

 

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The Top 10 Jazz Artists

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , on December 8, 2015 by telescoper

Back from a short break I thought I’d mention that BBC Radio 3 recently announced the results of a poll for the top Jazz artist of all time. The result was:

  1. Miles Davis
  2. Louis Armstrong
  3. Duke Ellington
  4. John Coltrane
  5. Ella Fitzgerald
  6. Charlie Parker
  7. Billie Holiday
  8. Thelonious Monk (8=)
  9. Bill Evans (8=)
  10. Oscar Peterson

Although my ordering would have been a little different, I was quite surprised that the top 10 corresponded so closely with my own selection. In fact 8 of the above list would have made it into mine: Miles Davis; Louis Armstrong; John Coltrane; Charlie Parker; Billie Holiday; Thelonious Monk; and Bill Evans.

The only differences were that (a) I couldn’t possibly have had Billie Holiday without having Lester Young and (b) I simply had to have Ornette Coleman in there. To accommodate Messrs Young and Coleman I would have displaced Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson. The latter are great artists, of course, but I wouldn’t say either influenced the development of Jazz as much as the others I mentioned, and that’s one of the criteria I applied.

miles-davis

No surprise that Miles Davis (above) came top. He changed musical direction so many times that he should actually count as four or five different musicians. It’s no coincidence that Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans all appeared on Kind of Blue, which is arguably the greatest jazz record of all time. I don’t think any serious Jazz enthusiast could have left out Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk either. And of course, Louis Armstrong just had to be there too. It’s hard to imagine what Jazz would have been without Satchmo. The same goes for the great Duke Ellington.

Anyway, it’s all a matter of personal choice. There are dozens of great jazz artists who didn’t make it into the top ten. Among my near misses were Coleman Hawkins, Sidney Bechet, Eric Dolphy and Dizzy Gillespie.

Who else would you have picked?

 

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Bayes’ Theorem or Price’s Theorem?

Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on December 4, 2015 by telescoper

Richard_Price_West

I’m indebted to a fellow blogger for drawing my attention to the person shown in the above picture, Dr Richard Price who has been described as “the most original thinker ever born in Wales”, and who has a Society named after him.

Price was a moral philosopher, nonconformist preacher and also a mathematician of some note. Of particular interest to this blog is the role he played in the development of what is now known as Bayes’ Theorem, after the Reverend Thomas Bayes.

However, the paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society that contains the first published form of this theorem was not published until 1763, over a year after Bayes’ death and, as you can see if you follow the link, is attributed jointly to “Mr Bayes and Mr Price”.  It appears that there was an original manuscript written by Bayes around about 1755  which was communicated to Price when Bayes died in 1761 and then presented for publication over a year later; Price had been asked to act as “literary executor” of Bayes’ estate.

Unfortunately the original manuscript has never been found and it is therefore impossible to say for sure how much Price contributed to the final version. However, a relatively recent and very interesting article  raises this question, and argues (reasonably convincingly to my mind) that Bayes’ part stops at page 14 of 32 pages. It is therefore quite possible that Price wrote over half the paper himself although most historical discussions of this matter simple state that Price “edited” Bayes’ work.

It has to be said that the paper is not exactly a model of clarity and pertains only to a particular case of the full theorem. The form in general use today was first published by Laplace in 1812, so it should really be called Laplace’s Theorem, but Laplace did give generous credit to the work of Bayes which is no doubt why the name stuck.

I don’t suppose we will know for sure exactly how much Price contributed to the development of Bayes’ theorem, but this may be yet another example of the law that any result in science or mathematics that has a person’s name attached to it has the wrong name attached to it!

Finally, I will mention that the Richard Price Society has started a petition to the Welsh government. I’m taking the liberty of copying the purpose of this petition here:

We call on the Welsh government to acknowledge the important contribution of Dr Richard Price not only to the eighteenth century Enlightenment, but also to the making of the modern world that we live in today, and develop his birthplace and childhood home into a visitor information centre where people of all nationalities and ages can discover how his significant contributions to theology, mathematics and philosophy have shaped the modern world.

Tynton Farm in Llangeinor, the birthplace and childhood home of Dr Richard Price is for sale. Once derelict, the farm has been sensitively restored and almost all of the original features have been preserved. The Richard Price Society is aware that the house attracts visitors from all corners of the globe and this is attested by the previous owner’s Visitors Book that was signed by visitors to the farm. The position of the farm and its provenance would make it an ideal learning centre where people can find out just what an important person he was and remains. This is an opportunity to buy the property at market value and help celebrate the achievements of Wales’ intellectual giant and apostle of liberty.

 

I have signed it, and hope you will consider doing likewise!

 

 

 

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