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Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est

Posted in Biographical, Cricket, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on April 17, 2011 by telescoper

Well, dear readers, I’ve had a lovely day of gardening and watching cricket; the former hacking down the dead half a Forsythia this morning, the latter watching Glamorgan gain their first win of the Championship season by beating Gloucestershire in fine style here in Cardiff. I also managed to catch a bit of the sun, which has left me a bit woozy. I’ll have to buy myself a hat to wear on days like this. With fair skin and blue eyes, I don’t tan – I stroke.

Anyway, tomorrow morning I’ll be heading off up to the fine seaside resort of Llandudno in North Wales for this years National Astronomy Meeting (NAM for short). It starts this evening, in fact, with a wine reception and other festivities, but unfortunately the journey by train from Cardiff takes absolutely ages on a Sunday, so I decided to eschew the delights of the first evening and travel up tomorrow morning. On a weekday it only takes 5 hours from Cardiff to Llandudno….

I’ll probably miss most, and possibly all, of tomorrow’s talks but should get there in good time for the out-of-town meeting of the RAS Dining Club which will be held in the St George’s Hotel in Llandudno and to which a number of illustrious guests have been invited. On Tuesday morning there’s the session I organised on astrostatistics, which I am looking forward to chairing, and then the conference dinner in the evening. The following day I’m chairing a session on astroparticle physics too. There’s no rest for the wicked. Most of the rest of the time I’ll probably be at the numerous cosmology or extragalactic astronomy sessions or, more likely, in the bar. If the weather stays like this, however, I might wander along the beach and, rolling my trousers up and donning a knotted handkerchief, go for a paddle in the sea.

I’m told there will be wireless connectivity in Llandudno throughout NAM 2011 so I hope to post a few brief blogettes about interesting events, but possibly not tomorrow as I might not have time. The excellent RAS Press Office will no doubt be hard at it for the duration, so watch out for a stream of press releases. I’m not sure whether the mass media will be bothered to get off their backsides and travel all that way from their London offices, so we’ll just have to see how much gets onto the main news.

I’m not particularly looking forward to the journey by the slow train tomorrow, but am definitely looking forward to the change of scenery and to catch up not only with the astronomy but also with some old friends.

If anyone I’ve never actually met before who reads this blog is there, do please say hello! You’ll find I’m quite a friendly chap, really…

P.S. The latin quotation I used in the title here isn’t really relevant. I just picked it because it starts with the word “NAM”. If you’re interested, however, it’s by Francis Bacon and it means, roughly speaking, “knowledge is power”.


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Raising the Veil

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , , , , , on April 11, 2011 by telescoper

We’re now into the last week of teaching term here in Cardiff, and I’m feeling like I’m running the final stages of a marathon. I like the idea of fitting all the second semester’s teaching in before the Easter break but I have to admit I’m struggling to make the distance, especially because so many things have to be done this week before we finish. Next week I’m off to the National Astronomy Meeting in Llandudno too. For all these reasons (and a few others) I won’t have much blogging time for a bit, so my posts may be a bit thin on the ground (or whatever it is that the blogosphere rests on).

However, I couldn’t resist using this blog to express my opinion about one of the big news items of the day, the introduction, today, in France, of a ban on women  wearing of the veil in public. I think it’s particularly interesting timing after the discussion of religion and science that arose after I reblogged a post by Andy Lawrence about the Templeton Prize.

Frankly, I think the new French law is monstrous. I’m not a Muslim, but it is  abhorrent to me that the state should seek to prevent individuals expressing their religious beliefs. I obviously don’t think anyone should be forced to wear the veil against their will, but in an open society those who choose to wear it  should be allowed to do so.    And I don’t buy the argument that it’s some sort of identification issue, either. What’s next, a ban on sunglasses and balaclavas? No. In any case there are only about 2,000 women in France who regularly wear the veil. Let’s make no bones about it, this law is specifically intended to pander to anti-Muslim sentiments. It stinks. I like to think we’d never allow such a thing in this country.

But here’s the flip side. I read at the weekend of the case of a candidate for the forthcoming Welsh Assembly Elections. Sion Owens is on the South Wales West Regional List for the British National Party (BNP). At the weekend he was arrested under the Public Order Act after a video emerged in which he was seen to be burning a copy of the Qur’an. Apparently the original charge was dropped today when Mr Owens appeared before the Magistrates Court in Swansea, but investigations are still continuing.

I haven’t seen the video so can’t comment further on what precisely Mr Owens is alleged to have done. I’m not an expert on the Public Order Act(s)  either- or at least not the parts that deal with religiously motivated offences – but some sections are open to extremely broad interpretations, and that’s really what the problem is.

I would say though that I’m the last person to want to support the BNP,  which as far as I’m concerned is an extremist organisation run by right-wing thugs for the benefit of other right-wing thugs.  It seems possible, therefore, and perhaps even likely, that this person did set alight to the Qur’an with the specific intention of  provoking religious tension. If that were the case then it would clearly fall within the law as defined by the Public Order Act.

However, even if that were the case I have to say I do not think that what he did should be a criminal offence. It might be  abusive, uncivilised, and reprehensible – words not infrequently applied to the BNP, I might add – but I don’t think it should be illegal. If we’re going to have a truly  free society we have to get used to the idea that people have the right to do and say things we wouldn’t do or say ourselves. And if people even want to vote for creatures like Mr Owens, they should be allowed to do so….

..although I’ll be hoping he loses his deposit.


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For Charity’s Sake…

Posted in Art, Biographical with tags , , on April 10, 2011 by telescoper

Our beautiful spring continues. It’s another lovely day here in Cardiff so I’m going to get some work done in the garden then catch up with the weekend’s crosswords. I was too busy yesterday to get round to the Saturday Guardian Prize Crossword, so now I’ve got it and the Observer ones to do today.

I went to a posh do last night. The Vale of Glamorgan County Council is renowned for the splendour of its Balls, and last night the Mayor held one of them for Charity. This event took place in a Marquee which had been specially erected in the magnificent setting of Dyffryn Gardens. I’ve never been there before, but am definitely planning togo again, as we didn’t get very much time to see the gardens and no time at all to see the famous arboretum there. Anyway, here’s a shot of us wandering around the (slightly dilapidated) Dyffryn House, which forms the centrepiece of the Dyffryn Estate, with champagne glasses in hand. How very decadent.

The Ball itself was very pleasant. The food was good, and there was plenty of wine to go around. The dance band was a little ropey, in my opinion, but plenty of people were dancing and it was all jolly good fun. Also I was one of the youngest people there, so it was quite nice, for once, not to be one of the oldies.

Since it was a fundraising event for Charity there was the obligatory raffle, followed by an auction. Among the items being sold were two paintings by local artist Charles Byrd. I ended up buying one of them, which happened to have been painted in 1963 – the year of my birth. I’m very pleased with my acquisition, but haven’t figured out where I’m going to hang it yet; here’s a blurry phone picture of it in my study.


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Loose Ends

Posted in Biographical, Education, Finance with tags , , , , , on April 2, 2011 by telescoper

Just a brief post today, I think, in order to tie up a few loose ends from this week.

For reasons that I really don’t understand my blog suddenly became very popular on Thursday (31st March), attracting nearly 5000 hits in a day. That’s nearly four times my current daily average and a couple of thousand more than my previous busiest day. So this week I had my busiest day, last week was my busiest week, and last month was my busiest month. I guess it’s all downhill from here.

I couldn’t figure out what happened to cause all this interest, as not all the hits were on any specific article and no particular search terms were used to find this blog, at least not that I could figure out. I presume that it was my sarcastic take on Wonders of the Universe that was behind it. At any rate that was the post that generated the deluge of abusive comments that my spam filter caught.

Anyway, other items of relevant news are that two new members of Staff joined the School of Physics & Astronomy yesterday (April 1st; no, seriously…) and there are a couple more expected to join soon. It’s nice to have a few new faces around the place, and I’m sure they’ll all be bringing new ideas about research and teaching to the physics side of the School.

A week or so ago I passed on some pretty disappointing news about the funding climate here in Welsh universities. More details emerged this week about what this means for individual institutions; you can find the full list of allocations here (PDF). The figures don’t tally with those in the newspaper article I referred to in the previous post which was presumably inaccurate.

The picture isn’t as bad as I feared but, with a total cut of about 5% (in cash terms) across the sector it could hardly be described as good, especially when inflation is running about 5% on top of that. My employer, Cardiff University, has done slightly better than average, with a cut of only 3% in cash.

However – and it’s really delightful to be able to pass on some good news for once – the School of Physics & Astronomy has just been awarded a pretty large increase in its quota of undergraduate students. This is excellent, as I’ve previously reported that we have had a huge surge in applications this year. We’ll have to work hard to squeeze the extra bodies into laboratories, tutorials and even lecture theatres, but the income they will generate should help us carry out the strategic plans we have developed, perhaps bringing in even more new members of staff.

I’m still a bit grumpy, though, as our teaching terms has another two weeks to run, while some lucky bastards have finished already and are now on their Easter holidays…


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A Tale of Two Balls

Posted in Biographical, Education with tags , , , , on March 26, 2011 by telescoper

This morning was definitely the one after the night before, as Friday was the occasion of the Annual Chaos Society Physics Ball. The Chaos Society organises a number of social events for both staff and students from the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University. This year’s ball was nearly a whole month earlier than last year’s, because we’re not having a term break before Easter this year as Easter is so late. There’s still another three weeks of teaching, in fact, whereas in most years we would stop now and resume after Easter.

Anyway, the do last night started off with a champagne reception at the Parc Thistle Hotel in central Cardiff, followed by dinner and dancing in the function room there. There was a fine band playing a sort of funky soul jazz mix at the start and end of dinner. There were a bit loud to make conversation possible at the beginning, but once the food arrived they took a break and resumed when coffee was served. Instead of attempting to make ourselves heard over the music, I decided to try to set the ball rolling by getting up and dancing with a lady called Tanys, who was a guest of the Head of School Walter Gear. Nobody else joined us, but it was fun anyway.

We then went “informal” so to speak. The DJ got going, but I didn’t reckon much to the music so went and mixed in the bar. Some final-year students celebrating having secured PhD places here and there, so congratulations to them, and there was a beautiful moment when Michael proposed to Matthew. They’re not allowed to be properly married here in the UK, and a proposal of “civil partnership” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but it was one of the highlights of the evening. Matthew accepted, of course.

After that we adjourned to a boutique nightclub called Crystal, an exotic place with peculiar soft furnishings and a bevy of bare chested muscle men in attendance. Around 3am I was poured into a taxi and got home quarter of an hour or so later, reasonably intact. Bad hangover this morning, though.

I’d like to add my personal thanks to the organisers of what was a hugely enjoyable evening, the Chaos Society generally and especially Natasha who did sterling work persuading so many people to come along. This was the third of these bashes I’ve been to, and it was definitely the best.

I’ve worked in a number of universities so far in my career as a jobbing astrophysicist, but the students at Cardiff are by far the friendliest and the most fun of all the groups I’ve had the pleasure to teach. And, yes, it does mean an awful lot to me when people tell me to my face that they enjoy my lectures. Even if they are drunk when they do so!

Anyway, some pictures are floating around on facebook. Here’s a couple, and I may add some more as they emerge from various cameras and phones. Of course it must be some kind of optical defect that makes me look so old in these, or perhaps it’s just because I’m surrounded by people less than half my age?

You’ll notice that I got the old white DJ out. Strictly speaking, UK tradition dictates that these should only be worn when abroad but I like wearing one when the weather is nice as it was yesterday whether it’s consistent with etiquette or not. There were plenty more serious breaches going on last night anyway, chiefly involving gentlemen removing their jackets at the dining table which is extremely poor manners.

You’re probably wondering what the second ball  refers to in the title of this post. Well, it’s just to remark that today in Cardiff  Wales played England at Football  (the “Association” variety, with a round ball, which I believe in some backward countries is called “soccer”). It was good to have an excuse for avoiding the city centre, and I was in a sufficiently vegetative state not to venture out of the house at all until the match was over. England beat Wales comfortably, 2-0.

UPDATE: Here’s a few more pictures, starting with one of me and the lovely Matthew. Well, at least one of us is photogenic…

These two were snapped at the club later on…

Here’s a couple more, one of me and the gorgeous Flo…

..and one last one, which I suspect was taken very late in the proceedings


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That Old “Two Cultures” Thing…

Posted in Art, Biographical, Education with tags , , , , , on March 20, 2011 by telescoper

Just a very brief follow-up to a post earlier this week about the 2nd Bright Club Wales. First, for all of you who refuse to believe I actually did stand-up, here is a picture of me doing it, i.e. standing up. It’s a bit blurred, I’m afraid. The person taking the picture must either have been drunk or was laughing so hysterically that he couldn’t hold the camera still. You can also find a review of the evening here, which is where I got the picture from.

I mentioned in the comments on the earlier posts that one of the other “acts” that evening was a lecturer in Film Studies. In fact that was a chap called Daryl Perrins who works at the University of Glamorgan.

He started his 8 minutes with the comment “I hate science” and followed it up with a number of unfunny remarks that relied on crude stereotypes of what a scientist is. None of that endeared him very much to me, nor, judging by the stony silence did the rest of the audience appreciate it much. I wouldn’t have minded him taking the piss out of scientists at all had it been funny. After all, I do a fair bit of that on here..

Anti-science attitudes are far from unusual amongst the Arts & Humanities fraternity, which I think is a real shame. After all, you’ll have to work very hard to find a scientist who would be prepared to stand up in front of audience and proudly announce “I hate art”. Many of my scientific colleagues have deep passions for the performing arts (especially music and drama) as well as being very well read across a wide range of subjects.  Many also hold strong  (and often idiosyncratic) political opinions and are involved in a huge range of activities outside science.

In short, scientists don’t just sit in their labs and offices torturing small animals. We live in the real world and have as much contact with wider society as anyone else. Imagination, creativity and free thinking can be found in scientists, just as they can in the arts.  Scientists both contribute to and participate in our society’s cultural heritage.Scientists are human beings. Culture belongs to us too.

Coincidentally this week there was an article in the Times Higher with the title “Life depends on science but the arts make it worth living“. I agree with a lot of what is written in the piece, in fact, although it does seem also to contain numerous examples of non sequitur and I think it’s both poorly argued and highly exaggerated. The arts are undoubtedly among the things that make  life worth living, but there are others, such as “ordinary” human relationships and the “simple” enjoyment of the natural world, which academics of all persuasions all too frequently neglect. I am a scientist, however, and I do think that the government should be spending more on science, but I certainly don’t think it should be robbing the arts and humanities which is what its current policies are doing.

You probably think I’m going to go off on a rant about the famous Two Cultures thesis advanced  by C.P. Snow, but I’m not. I think Snow’s analysis is only marginally relevant. I do think that there are “two cultures”, but these are not “science” and “the arts”. One is a creative, thinking culture that encompasses arts, the humanities and science. The other is its antithesis, a “culture” that sees the sole function of education as being to train people  to take their place on the never-ending treadmill of production and consumption.

The way we are heading, it’s not “two cultures” that we should be worried about. It’s no culture at all.


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Bright Club

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on March 14, 2011 by telescoper

Hardly any time to breathe today, never mind post anything. Lectures, and exercise class and a meeting of the lost souls attempting to figure out what we should do to prefer for the Research Excellence Framework.

Now all that’s over I’m going to think about what I should do on stage this evening as I participate in the Second Bright Club Wales, at the Buffalo Bar in Cardiff City Centre. Apparently, this event “blends comedy, science, music and anything else that can happen on stage” which certainly leaves a lot to the imagination.

This evening is part of National Science and Engineering Week. In fact, there’s another event this evening in Cardiff tonight relating to this, comprising a public lecture at the School of Physics & Astronomy followed by an open evening allowing members of the public to use our telescopes. The weather has been lovely today, but clouds are starting to appear. I hope there’s enough clear sky to make it worthwhile.

I’m actually quite nervous about this Bright Club lark,  as I’m not at all sure what to expect, but apparently I’ll be on fairly early in the evening so with a bit of luck the room won’t be too rowdy and I might not get pelted with rotten tomatoes. I don’t really know to what extent I’m expected to play it for laughs either. I sometimes try to tell jokes in lectures, but they usually go down like  lead balloons, so perhaps I’ll just stick to some science and leave the funny stuff to the professional comedians. I’ve only got 8 minutes, but that’s plenty of time to make a fool of myself.

Between you and me, I have actually tried doing stand-up comedy once or twice. In fact, the most terrifying experience of my life was doing an open-mike spot at a Comedy Club in Cambridge Heath Road, when I lived in Bethnal Green. It’s one thing to try to be amusing in a pub or around the dinner table with friends, but quite another when you’re trying to make complete strangers laugh, especially when they’ve paid for it! Anyway, I survived my 3 minutes (just about) and even got a few laughs, but the experience didn’t make me want to quit my day job.

Anyway, I asked for an early shift so I could get home on time to deal with Columbo’s needs so I’ll update this post later on with a review of my performance. Or lack of it.

UPDATE: 10pm. Well, it turned out to be good fun. The audience was friendly and I got a few laughs. Although I didn’t really prepare very much materia,l and I was first one up so didn’t have a chance to see what went down well, I found it quite easy to make it up as I went along, given such a relaxed atmosphere. A couple of pints of Guinness probably helped too. Had to leave after the first half to see to Columbo, but I hope the rest of the evening went well.


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Annual Appraisal

Posted in Biographical with tags , on February 24, 2011 by telescoper

Today’s the day. My annual Staff Appraisal with the Big Boss. I’ve filled in the forms and am ready to go. I expect it will go pretty much like this, except without the beards.


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In February

Posted in Biographical, Poetry with tags , , on February 23, 2011 by telescoper

Another busy day – mainly filled with form-filling but also including a tutorial and a meeting of our cosmology discussion group – and tonight, for the second week running, I’m off to a lecture at Cardiff Scientific Society. This time it’s by our own Haley Gomez entitled Smoking Supernovae. And here am I trying to give up!

Anyway, I’m going to do what I usually do when I haven’t got time for a proper post and that is put up a bit of poetry. Appropriate for the time of year, in hopeful anticipation of the forthcoming spring, I offer you this (from a poem entitled In February written by Alice Meynell).

Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn,
Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers,
And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers;
A poet’s face asleep in this grey morn.
Now in the midst of the old world forlorn
A mystic child is set in these still hours.
I keep this time, even before the flowers,
Sacred to all the young and the unborn


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An Englishman in New York

Posted in Biographical, Literature, Music with tags , , , on February 20, 2011 by telescoper

Yesterday’s post about Bayesian statistics has generated over a thousand hits in just a day – highly unusual for a Saturday posting at In the Dark. I guess that proves that there’s a lot of interest out there in such matters, so I’ll return to the theme as soon as I have both the time and the energy, which might take a while because those are conjugate variables!

After yesterday’s exertions I felt like relaxing this morning, and I did so by transferring some of my old vinyl (and even shellac!) records into digital format using a USB turntable. I’m a bit frustrated by the fact that some of my favourite classic old jazz records aren’t available on Youtube and am thinking of correcting that at some point myself, despite my latent technophobia.

However, in the course of rooting about in my record collection I found a vinyl single of this record by Sting, the Ben Liebrand remix to be precise. It is, of course, a homage to the late Quentin Crisp whose book The Naked Civil Servant I read after seeing the wonderful film starring John Hurt, which was broadcast on the BBC in 1975, when I was 12. I found inspiration in both, for reasons I probably don’t need to spell out. Crisp emigrated to the United States in 1981 and lived the last years of his life in a dingy one-room apartment in New York City.

There’s another quasi-biographical connection with this record. When I was a little kid living in Benwell, my Dad used to play the drums with local jazz bands. At the time Sting (or plain Gordon Sumner as he was then known) was working as a supply teacher in the area and he played the double-bass with local groups too, including the Phoenix Jazz Band and the River City Jazz Band; the latter was certainly a band my father played with from time to time. My Dad once told me that he had played with Sting on a number of occasions, and he’d even practised in our garage, but I’m not sure how much of that is actually true.

Incidentally, in case you didn’t know, Sting got his nickname playing with jazz bands in the North-East. He always refused to wear the band uniforms but instead tended to turn up for gigs wearing a black and yellow hooped jumper which made him look a bit like a bee, hence the name.

This isn’t a jazz record, of course, but it does feature Branford Marsalis (brother of the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis) on soprano saxophone. I bought a soprano saxophone some time ago and tried to play along with the track just now – the chords aren’t very complicated so it shouldn’t have been too difficult even for an incompetent like me. However, I’m finding the soprano sax quite a recalcitrant beast which is very difficult to play in tune. I’m not sure why. I manage all right with its bigger brother the tenor sax. Perhaps it’s my embouchure? Or, as jazz musicians say, I haven’t got the chops?

I’ll just quote one particularly telling  verse from the lyrics:

Takes more than combat gear to make a man
Takes more than a license for a gun
Confront your enemies, avoid them when you can
A gentleman will walk but never run


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