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The Fall of the House of Usher

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on December 17, 2011 by telescoper

It’s a strange tradition that the Christmas season tends to bring with it an appetite for ghost  stories and other tales of supernatural horror. It’s probably a reflection of a much earlier age when the winter was a harsh and dangerous time, during which food was scarce and survival through the winter meant huddling around a fire trying to stay warm. It seems natural to me that the kind of stories that would be told in such an environment would be of fear and foreboding. It’s not really a Christian tradition, therefore, but the legacy of a much older pagan one. Like Christmas itself, as a matter of fact.

Anyway, a few days ago at our little cosmology group Christmas night out the subject of horror films came up.  I’ve never been a particular aficianado of this genre, and I’m afraid most modern horror films are so formulaic that they bore me to tears. I do enjoy the classics enormously, however. James Whale’s 1931 Frankenstein, for example,  has to my mind never been bettered; a great film turned into a masterpiece by an unforgettably moving  performance by Boris Karloff. I think that’s a wonderful film, but I have to say I never found it particularly frightening, even as a child.

The first film I remember seeing that really terrified me was Roger Corman’s The Fall of the House of Usher starring the inimitable Vincent Price, a film based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. When I was around 8 or 9 I was once  left home alone on a Friday night by my parents. In those days the BBC used to show horror films late at night on Fridays and, against parental guidance, I decided to watch this one. It scared me witless and when my parents got home they found me a gibbering wreck. I don’t really know why I found it so scary – younger people reared on a diet of slasher movies probably find it very tame, as you don’t actually see anything particularly shocking – but the whole atmosphere of it really got to me. Here’s an example.

This reminds me that I need to get some replastering done in the new year….

Anyway, I’d be interested in hearing other suggestions for the most scariest film through the Comments box…

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Bye Bye Blackbird

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on December 16, 2011 by telescoper

I’ve posted about Albert Ayler before, but the excuse for posting this remarkable track is that it is preceded by a rare recording  of him talking. It dates back to January 1963 and was recorded in Copenhagen; Ayler had relocated to Sweden in 1962 in the hope that he would find a freer artistic environment than was available in the USA at the time. In the spoken segment, he comes across as a very quiet and thoughtful young man and gives little hint of his troubled character, but his life was a constant struggle against depressive illness and critical disdain for his music. Especially moving is the phrase he utters at the end “One day, everything will be as it should be”. Sadly that wasn’t to be the case for him, and in 1970 he took his own life. The track is a standard tune, Bye Bye Blackbird, on which he uses his extraordinary saxophone tone to give voice to some of the pain he obviously couldn’t express in words.

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The Last Words of Sherlock Holmes

Posted in Literature, Television with tags , , on December 16, 2011 by telescoper

Being bombarded with advertising for a new Sherlock Holmes film I thought I’d remind myself of the greatest Holmes of all, Jeremy Brett. I have a complete collection on DVD of all the episodes produced by Granada TV between 1984 and 1994. I chose a couple at random to watch last night and it turned out that the pair included the very last one in the last series, based on the dark and disturbing story The Adventure of the Cardboard Box from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

Brett was gravely ill during the filming of the last series, largely owing to side-effects of the medication he had to take to deal with a severe depressive illness which plagued him for most of his life.  It didn’t help that he had become almost obsessive about the character of Holmes, putting all his energy into doing the best possible job. It obviously took a lot out of him. He looks so much older in the last series than in the first, although it was only ten years after he made the first episodes. Jeremy Brett passed away in 1995, just a year after the last episode was filmed, but his Sherlock Holmes will live forever.

The last words spoken by Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes are at the end (from 8.55 onwards) of the  following clip, a piece of film so poignant that I find it almost unbearable to watch.

What is the meaning of it, Watson? What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must have a purpose, or our universe has no meaning, and that  is unthinkable. But what purpose? That  is humanity’s great problem, to which reason so far, has no answer.

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O Helga Natt

Posted in Music with tags , on December 15, 2011 by telescoper

I’m struggling to get into the festive spirit this year, but this should help. Here’s a Christmas song that even Ebenezer Scrooge himself would find hard to resist. It’s the old carol “O Holy Night” sung in magnificent style (and in Swedish) by the wondrous Swedish tenor, Jussi Björling.

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The Day After…

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on December 14, 2011 by telescoper

Yesterday was a memorable day for more reasons than the outbreak of Higgs-teria I blogged about. The main event was in fact the PhD examination of my student Jo Short. Being the supervisor, I didn’t actually attend the examination in person but did get to have lunch with the Chair and other examiners, including external examiner Andrew Jaffe from Imperial College, who blogs at Leaves on the Line.

After lunch the Examiners, Chair and candidate disappeared into the special room we keep for such occasions (complete with thumbscrews, etc) and I went back to my office to wait it out while Jo was grilled. I always feel a bit protective towards my PhD students, and a viva voce examination always brings back painful memories of the similar ordeal I went through twenty-odd years ago. Although I had every confidence in Jo, I was a bit nervous sitting in my office wondering how it was going. However, this is something a PhD candidate has to go through on their own, a sort of rite of passage during which the supervisor has to stand aside and let them stand up for their own work.

About 90 minutes after the viva started I remembered that I had to pick up some medication from a chemist, so braved the inclement weather to do that.  Yesterday, incidentally, threw an extraordinary range of weather at us: hail, thunder, gales and dark apocalyptic clouds. When I returned the examination was already over; Jo passed with minimal corrections to be made. My nerves clearly weren’t justified. Congratulations Dr Short!

Caught on the hop by the fact that the viva finished in just over 2 hours, I then had to mobilize the obligatory champagne which was chilling in a fridge belonging to the Astronomy Instrumentation Group. Worse, a team of PhD students which had been dispatched to buy celebratory gifts hadn’t returned with the goodies by the time we opened the bubbly. Nevertheless, an appropriate celebration was eventually held in the department, followed – so I’m told – by an evening of revelry in the town. I didn’t go to the latter, as I’m far too old for that sort of thing.

By the way, Jo’s thesis is partly about the analysis of the pattern of temperature variations in the cosmic microwave background and partly about modelling galaxy clustering revealed by the Herschel Space Observatory and she’s staying on at Cardiff on a research fellowship.

P.S. Our genial external was last seen getting into a taxi to get to the station and thence back to London. I assume he got home safely…

P.P.S. For the sake of complete disclosure I should admit that I wrote this blog post while chairing another viva…

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Higgs-mania Day

Posted in Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on December 13, 2011 by telescoper

I woke up this morning to the BBC Radio News at 7am announcing that scientists at CERN were going to report “hints” of the discovery of the Higgs Boson at the Large Hadron Collider;  you can find a longer discussion by the BBC here. This was later accompanied by articles tackling the important questions of the day such as whether the discovery of the Higgs would justify the enormous expense of Brian Cox the LHC.

Prize for the most  inaccurate science report goes to  the Daily Fail:

‘God’ particle found:

Atom smasher reveals Higgs boson, the key to the universe

Evidence soon emerged however that this particular squib might be of the damp variety. Consistent with previous blogospheric pronouncements, a paper on the arXiv this morning suggested no convincing detection of the Higgs had actually been made by the ATLAS experiment.

I then had to make an important choice between watching the live webcast of the CERN seminar at which detailed information on the Higgs searches was to be presented or to accept a free lunch with the examiners of a PhD candidate. I chose the latter.

Catching up on events after lunch confirmed the underwhelming nature of the Higgs “detection”, but with some intriguing evidence an excess signal at around 126 GeV at the 2.3 sigma level, in the frequentist parlance favoured by particle physicists and others who don’t know how to do statistics properly. In the words of the late John Bahcall:  “half of all three-sigma detections are false“. Of course if they used proper Bayesian language, scientists wouldn’t make so many nonsensical statements. Personally, I just don’t do sigmas.

My attention then switched to the CMS experiment. As a point of information you should be aware that CMS stands for Compact Muon Solenoid, where “compact” is a word used by particle physicists to mean “fucking enormous”. CMS makes  pictures like this:

Anyway, it seems from the CMS part of the presentation that they find a bit of a peak at a similar mass ~ 125 GeV but spread out over a larger range, this time at a level of – sigh – 2.6 sigma.

All in all, it’s a definite maybe. Putting the results together in the way only a frequentist can the result is a 2.4 sigma detection. In other words,  nothing any serious scientist would call convincing.

It’s interesting how certain these particle physicists are that the Higgs actually exists. It might, of course, and I think these results may be pointing the way to more convincing evidence based on more data. However,  I still think we should bear in mind the words of Alfred North Whitehead:

There is no more common error than to assume that, because prolonged and accurate mathematical calculations have been made, the application of the result to some fact of nature is absolutely certain.

If there is a Higgs boson with a mass of 125 GeV then that would of course be an exciting discovery, but if there isn’t one at all wouldn’t that be even more exciting?

Final word from the Director of CERN:

We have not found it yet, we have not excluded it yet, stay tuned for next year.

Thunder and hail descended on Cardiff just as the webcast finished, which is clearly not a coincidence although I couldn’t say how many sigmas were involved.

And a final, final word from the Chief Executive of the Science & Technology Facilities Council, John Womersley:

There is still some way to go before the existence of the Higgs boson can be confirmed or not, but excitement is mounting. UK physicists and engineers have played a significant role in securing today’s results, and will continue to be at the forefront of exploring the new frontiers of knowledge opened by the results coming from the LHC. This is an incredibly exciting time to be involved in physics!

Brian Cox is 43.

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Before an Examination

Posted in Poetry with tags , on December 12, 2011 by telescoper

The little letters dance across the page,
Flaunt and retire, and trick the tired eyes;
Sick of the strain, the glaring light, I rise
Yawning and stretching, full of empty rage
At the dull maunderings of a long dead sage,
Fling up the windows, fling aside his lies;
Choosing to breathe, not stifle and be wise,
And let the air pour in upon my cage.

The breeze blows cool and there are stars and stars
Beyond the dark, soft masses of the elms
That whisper things in windy tones and light.
They seem to wheel for dim, celestial wars;
And I — I hear the clash of silver helms
Ring icy-clear from the far deeps of night.

by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)

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Citation-weighted Wordles

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , on December 12, 2011 by telescoper

Someone who clearly has too much time on his hands emailed me this morning with the results of an in-depth investigation into trends in the titles of highly cited astronomy papers from the past 30 years, and how this reflects the changing ‘hot-topics’.

The procedure adopted was to query ADS for the top 100 cited papers in three ten-year intervals: 1980-1990, 1990-2000, and 2000-2010. He then took all the words from the titles of these papers and weighted them according to the sum of the number of citations of all the articles that word appears in… so if the word ‘galaxy’ appears in two papers with citations of 100 and 300, it gets a weighting of 400, and so-on.

After getting these lists, he used the online ‘Wordle‘ tool
to generate word-clouds of these words, using those citation weightings in the word-sizing calculation. Common words, numbers, etc. are excluded. There may be some cases where non-astronomy papers have crept in, but as much as possible is done to keep these to a minimum.

There’s probably some bias, since older papers have longer to accumulate citations, but the changing hot-topics on ~10 year time-scales take care of this I think.

Anyway, here are the rather interesting results. First is 1980-1990

Followed by 1990-2000

and, lastly, we have 2000-2010

It’s especially interesting to see the extent to which cosmology has elbowed all the other less interesting stuff out of the way…and how the word “observations” has come to the fore in the last decade.

ps. Here’s the last one again with the WMAP papers taken out:

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School for Scandal

Posted in Education with tags , , , , on December 10, 2011 by telescoper

One of the biggest news stories this week derived from an investigation by the Daily Telegraph into the behaviour of officials connected with the Welsh examination board WJEC who, it appears, have been passing on tips about the content of their examination papers to teachers who have paid to attend their seminars. Of course this reflects very badly on Wales – especially coming so soon after the University of Wales scandals – but it is symptomatic of a much wider malaise;  this  episode  undermines not just the examination process  but  the entire education system in the United Kingdom. The sad thing is that that there’s not really anything new in this story.  It’s been obvious for some time that the whole framework  has become corrupted by the profit motive. There have been previous warnings about how the examination boards compete for customers (and cash) by dumbing down examination papers, but nothing seems to have been done.

The problem is particularly acute for A-level examinations, which universities use to select applicants for admission onto courses. In my own subject, Physics, the A-level course being taught in schools are clearly not fit for this purpose – the syllabuses have been filleted of any challenging material and there’s no correlation that I can discern between high grades at A-level and good performance at undergraduate level. In fact,some of our very best students at Cardiff – who are as good as any I’ve come across anywhere –  came in with very modest A-level grades but have performed brilliantly on the course. Relying only on A-levels might have led to us closing the door on these folks. Actually, I don’t know why we bother making offers based on A-level results at all!

Anyway, it’s clearly time to sort out the examinations system properly. The Exam Boards won’t fix the problem themselves because they are doing very nicely out of the status quo, so what should be done?

I like the suggestion is that the Examination Boards should be scrapped and the business of setting examinations should be carried out by one organization: no competition means no temptation to cheat. I’d also add that, at least for A-levels, the people who set and mark the examinations should be based in universities. I’d envisage a series of national subject panels with representatives from a number of institutions. A single Exam Board with members based in the university sector would also help simplify the process of university admissions, perhaps even streamlining it enough to allow  for post-examination applications without having to have earlier examinations. Above all it would ensure that A-level courses are relevant to university entrance requirements, which they are not at the moment.

Another possibility – which also like but which is probably politically a non-starter – is to scrap our tarnished A-levels altogether and adopt the International Baccalaureate as the UK’s educational gold-standard. The reason this wouldn’t be acceptable to our Lords and Masters in Whitehall is that it would immediately dispel the comforting myth that  standards in British schools are  rising;  I’d bet my bottom dollar that, relative to the rest of the world, they are not and adopting the IB would demonstrate that as it would allow comparisons to be made which can’t be made with A-levels.

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The Business End

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on December 9, 2011 by telescoper

Over a year ago I blogged about an event I attended, along with some students and staff from the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University, at Cardiff Business Club. Iwas reminded of it earlier today and found that some pictures of the evening have been posted so thought I’d include them here for a laugh.

First, here’s me (on the right) next to Welsh rugby legend Gerald Davies and the speaker for the evening, Dr Lyndon Evans.

Here, all looking very glamorous, are (left to right) Dr Carole Tucker, Sarah Gossan, Flo Liggins and Patricia Murphy:

The chaps are three from the School – Dr Ken Wood, Matthew McCreadie, and Matthew Barcia Gomes – and Gareth Hall.

And – oh dear – this is me giving my little speech:

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