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Postcard from Brumleby

Posted in Biographical with tags , , on August 9, 2012 by telescoper

The last few weeks having been a bit chaotic, it’s probably a good idea to mention that I’m currently in the fine city of Copenhagen. This may come as a bit of a surprise to some of you, and it’s a long story how I ended up here at this time. I won’t bore you with the details, except to say I needed to get away for a while and with the help of friends and colleagues here I’m convalescing and trying to get back to doing some research at the Niels Bohr Institute, where I’ve been a visitor on many occasions.

As a matter of fact I’m staying in a very nice part of Copenhagen, called Brumleby, “an enclave of terraced houses” in many ways not dissimilar to Pontcanna, the part of Cardiff where I usually live. Incidentally the -by ending (pronounced “be” in English) which also can be found in many English place names, especially along the East coast, is pronounced more like “bue” in Danish. Footballer Jan Mølby’s name was constantly mispronounced by English commentators…

Brumleby has an interesting history. It was one of a number of social housing developments constructed in the mid-19th century in Copenhagen in response to a cholera outbreak caused by chronic overcrowding and insanitary conditions in the old city. The original name for Brumleby was Lægeforeningens Boliger, which means the “Medical Association’s Buildings” for it was set up by the Danish Medical Association, Den Almindelige Danske Lægeforening. Most of the other similar developments have now been demolished, but Brumleby is now listed and preserved as a conservation area. The apartments are small, but very cosy, and as an added convenience for me only about 5 minutes walk from the Niels Bohr Institute.

Thanks once again for all the kind and concerned emails and other messages I’ve received over the past few days and weeks. I’m definitely on the mend and will start on a `permanent’ programme when I return to Wales. I also apologize yet again to my work colleagues, visitors, students, etc, for being so erratic recently. One day, perhaps, you’ll understand and maybe even forgive.

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Tanks for the Memory

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , , on March 3, 2012 by telescoper

I was walking into work yesterday morning, quietly minding my own business, but when I turned arrived at Queen Street I was suddenly confronted by a scary-looking armoured vehicle.

I’m not really up on this sort of thing, though there’s no doubt someone out there in internetshire who can tell me not only what kind of tank it is but what regiment it belongs to. Anyway, once I realised it wasn’t aiming its gun at me, I calmed down and figured it was probably taking part in some sort of display somewhere in Cardiff rather than heading towards the Senedd to participate in an imminent Coup D’Etat.

Tanks make me uncomfortable. A worse example than this happened when I used to live in Nottingham. Returning by train from somewhere or other I missed the connection at Derby and was stuck there late at night for the best part of an hour waiting for the next train home. As I sat there waiting there was a rumbling in the distance, and locomotive approached very slowly along the track pulling what must have been dozens of tanks perched on flat railway trucks. It was quite an impressive sight, but also a bit alarming. Where were they going? What were they up to? Is it really so unthinkable that one day vehicles like this will be used against civilians, as they have been in, say, the Middle East?

Although the thought of violent repression bothers me a little, it’s not the main reason why tanks make me nervous. Years ago – and I mean 20+ years ago – I was a long-term visitor in Copenhagen and during the course of my stay there was invited to a party in Christiania, a self-proclaimed autonomous region of the city. Things have probably changed a lot since then, but in those days it was quite a wild place and the drug-fuelled party I went to was definitely on the far side of out. Unbeknownst to me, someone spiked my drink with some sort of psychedelic substance (probably acid) and the subsequent trip was one of the worst experiences of my life. Terrified by grotesque hallucinations, I ran out of the house and was confronted in the street by dozens of (imaginary) tanks.

I woke up the next day under a bench in a public park, with no idea of where I was or how I’d got there. Presumably I had thought that the hiding place was so good that the tanks wouldn’t find me. Maybe one day they will…

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“Cosmic Anomalies” Talk, Copenhagen, August 2011

Posted in Art, Books, Talks and Reviews, Cosmic Anomalies, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on August 31, 2011 by telescoper

I think I’m getting the hang of this slideshare malarky so I thought I’d try it out by posting the slides I used for my (short) talk at the workshop in Copenhagen I told you about two or three weeks ago. I’m not sure how useful they will be to anyone, as I suppose it will be quite hard to reconstruct the talk using only the small amount of information I bother to put on the slides..

If you’re wondering about the presence of various apparently random works of art then what can I say? I like paintings!

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DEUS

Posted in Cosmic Anomalies, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on August 12, 2011 by telescoper

Well, I’m back home from Copenhagen after a very interesting and stimulating workshop called “DEUS” (subtitled “Current and Future Challenges of the Dark and Early Universes”). I just thought I’d post a brief message to thank the organizers for inviting me and for arranging such an interesting and varied programme, and especially for giving so many young researchers the chance to give talks (as well as some old farts like me).

Although I’d originally planned to talk about something else, I evenually decided to do a variation on the theme of cosmic anomalies, a topic I’ve blogged about at various times over the past couple of years. In a nutshell this was a quick overview of various features of the observed universe that seem to suggest departures from the standard “Lambda-CDM”  (or LCDM, for short) cosmological model, including the famous WMAP Cold Spot, the Axis of Evil, and various other statistical hints of anomalous behaviour in present-day observations.

To add a bit of audience participation I gave those attending my talk the chance to vote on what they thought about these – I was genuinely interested to see what this particular audience felt about whether the standard model is threatened or not.  I asked specifically about these in order to exclude other niggling worries people might have about LCDM from other astrophysical arguments, such as galaxy formation. Anyway, I thought it might be fun to repeat the poll here, so feel free to add your vote here:

As for the results of the vote during my presentation, I was somewhat surprised to see a roughly equal division between A and B, but there were even a few in C. I had assumed the vast majority would vote “A”….

Anyway, thanks again to the organizers of a fun meeting. That’s three trips to Copenhagen in as many months. I guess it will be a while before I go back again. 😦

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Keep the home fires burning

Posted in Biographical, Finance, Politics with tags , , , , on August 9, 2011 by telescoper

I’m in Copenhagen, yet again, for the third time in as many months, this time for a  workshop arranged by the Dark Cosmology Centre at the Niels Bohr Institute. It’s my talk this morning, in fact, so although I’m up early I haven’t got much time to post. I have to work on my talk to see if there’s a way I can make it all fit in 30 minutes!

Copenhagen is a pretty familiar place to me, but this has to be the most unsettling trip I’ve ever made here. I’m not talking about the long delay at Heathrow airport before we took off; I’ve come to expect that. The airport clearly can’t cope with the level of traffic it is supposed to handle during the summer months, so you have to reckon on at least an hour delay inbound and outbound. Sitting on the tarmac for an hour while being told over and over again that it will be “just a few minutes” really does bring out the grumpy old man in me. Still,  at least I didn’t lose any luggage.

No, the reason this is such an unsettling trip is that back home in Blighty all hell seems to have broken lose, with riots in the streets of, first, London and now apparently Birmingham, Liverpool and Bristol. I was also on the march in 1990 that turned into the Poll Tax riot. I was appalled by the violence that day and got myself and my friends away from trouble as soon as it flared, but it has to be said that it did lead to a change in the law, something Parliament had failed to achieve.

Back to the present, I note that the Tesco at Bethnal Green, where I used to live, has apparently been looted. I hope all my friends in London are keeping themselves safe.

I don’t think there’s anything I can say about these riots that wouldn’t be ill-informed, unhelpful, or even downright stupid. I am however old enough to remember that such things have happened before, in deprived inner-city areas, including Liverpool and Bristol. The circumstances were similar too.  Given the public spending cuts that have hit community programmes extremely hard,  it doesn’t surprise me that some have decided to lash out, especially at the Police,  whose criminal collusion with the media over phone-tapping and draconian tactics in dealing with lawful protests has turned many others against them .

I find it hard to separate these signs of social disintegration from the large-scale economic landscape. The huge level of debt accumulated by banks during the Credit Crunch of 2008 has now been absorbed by governments across the globe, who are attempting to deal with it by cutting public spending rather than raising taxes. Meanwhile the bankers have accepted their bailouts with glee, paying themselves bonuses by the bucketful and no doubt squirreling away the dosh in the Cayman Islands. If the state sanctions greed on that scale, is it surprising that people at the bottom of the heap decide to join in by looting the local supermarket?

The young  have the right to feel particularly disillusioned. The current generation has lived beyond its means for too long and, realising it too late, is trying to pay for it by mortgaging the future. The opportunities our young people, especially those from less affluent  backgrounds, can look forward to, in terms of education and jobs, will be much poorer than my generation.

I’m not usually one to endorse the view of the Daily Telegraph, but I think this piece hits the nail pretty much on the head. As Karl Marx would have said, it’s all about alienation, and I can tell you it’s not just the “underclass” that’s feeling it at the moment.

None of which is to condone the violence: you can be angry with the looters and the arsonists and those engaged in wanton destruction, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to understand why it’s happening.

But I’m very afraid that there’s going to be a lot more of this. The sovereign debt crisis is far from over. In many ways it has only just begun. There will be deeper cuts in public spending, greater inequality, greater social divisions and more upheavals like this. I think we’re in for a rough ride. I’m just glad I’m no longer young.

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The Happiest Place on Earth

Posted in Biographical with tags , on June 7, 2011 by telescoper

Here I am in wonderful Copenhagen. I arrived yesterday afternoon in lovely sunny weather, found my hotel, and then went for an evening stroll. It was so hot, in fact, that I was forced to sit outside drinking cold beer instead of preparing my talk, but then I’m not on until Thursday so there’s still time. Later on, the weather broke in spectacular fashion with a huge thunderstorm brewing up over the city. I sat and watched the son et lumière show out of the hotel window into the early hours, savouring the gorgeous earthy smell that comes with summer rain.

As I’ve mentioned before, Copenhagen is one of my favourite places. I was first invited here while I was a PhD student twenty-odd years ago and have been back at least once a year ever since. Of course, in the summer, especially in June when the days are longest, the city is particularly fine, but I actually like it here all year round. Of course it’s a bit dark and a bit cold in the winter months, but snow doesn’t make things fall apart here like it does in Britain, and Copenhagen takes on an austere beauty at that time of year which endows it with a unique sense of place. And, best of all, the harsh winter seems to make people embrace the summer even more joyfully. It was lovely to see people out enjoying themselves last night in the sunshine without a hint of the violence that blights Britain’s town centres after a day like this. Above all, though, Denmark is just such a civilised place. It’s a very egalitarian society, with excellent public services, virtually no poverty, a strong sense of its own identity, and a robust democracy.

After an early breakfast in my hotel (the slightly odd but very comfortable Hotel 9 Små Hjem where I’ve stayed a number of times in the past), I found this clip on Youtube.

I find it very amusing for a number of reasons. One is the supposition that happiness goes with sunny weather, which I find laughably superficial. I’d hate to live anywhere where the weather was the same every day, even if it were warm. The reporter also seems bemused that Canada appears higher in the table than the USA. It’s no surprise to me: given the choice, I’d much rather live in Canada than America!
Above all, the snide incredulity about “cold, dreary, unspectacular” Denmark is a truly excellent self-parody. It may be cold – sometimes – but, as Billy Connolly once said, “there’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes”. But there’s certainly nothing dreary about Denmark – it has a vibrant culture and a long and fascinating history. It may be “unspectacular”, if by that you mean that it’s not gaudy or pompous or ostentatious. Modesty is a sadly underrated virtue.

I’m not a fan of league tables – and I dread to think what bizarre methodology produced the one referred to in the clip – but as a seasoned visitor it actually comes as no suprise to me that the Danes are in the Premier division for happiness. The point is that happiness isn’t about external things such as the weather. Nor is it about showing off. It’s a frame of mind. The Danes seem to understand that better than most.

P.S. I love Victor Borge! And what’s wrong with herring sandwiches?

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Why can’t Cardiff be like Copenhagen?

Posted in Bute Park, Cardiff, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , on January 28, 2011 by telescoper

Walking into work this morning I was almost run over three different times by three different vehicles. The first was near the car park in Sophia Gardens, where there are signs and road marking clearly indicating that there is a speed limit of 5 mph but where the normal speed of cars is probably more like 35; the guy who nearly killed me was doing about 60.

Next, in Bute Park, a heavy lorry belonging to the Council, engaged in some sort of “tree-management” business, thundered along the footpath past me. These paths used to be marked 5mph too, but the Council removed all the signs when it decided to build a huge road into the Park and encourage more vehicles to drive around inside. The lorry wasn’t going as fast as the Boy Racer of Sophia Gardens, but the size of the truck made it just as scary.

Finally, using a green light at the pedestrian crossing at Park Place I was narrowly missed by another car who had clearly jumped a red light to get onto the dual carriageway (Dumfries Place) leading to Newport Road.

I have to say things like this aren’t at all unusual, but it is the first time I’ve had three close encounters in one day! Although most car drivers behave responsibly, there seems to be a strong concentration of idiots in Cardiff whose antics are exacerbated by the hare-brained Highways Department of the local council. There are many things to enjoy about living in Cardiff, and the quality of life here is very good for a wide range of reasons, but of all the cities I’ve lived in it is by a long way the least friendly to pedestrians and cyclists.

If only Cardiff were like Copenhagen, one of the loveliest and most liveable cities I’ve ever experienced, partly because of traffic policies.

PS. In the interest of balance I should also point out that I was once actually hit on a pedestrian crossing in Cardiff by a bicycle steered by a maniac who went through a red light. In this case, however, I did manage to push him off his bike as he tried to get away, so he ended up more seriously hurt than I was. I was hoping that a friendly car would run over his bike, which was lying in the road, but sadly that didn’t happen.


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Signs of the Times

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 5, 2010 by telescoper

Well, I’m back from sunny Copenhagen to a very muggy Cardiff. I arrived by train just as this afternoon’s rugby match between Wales and South Africa finished so I got caught up in the crowds and had to follow a lengthy diversion to get home. I was a bit tetchy with the heat and feeling a bit tired, but feel a bit mellower now after a nice shower. Apparently it was a cracking game, with Wales losing narrowly to the Springboks in the end. I missed it all.

Not feeling like doing anything more energetic blogwise, I thought I’d just put up a few pictures of the trip before making dinner. I heard while I was in Copenhagen that there are plans to relocate the historic Niels Bohr Institute to new accommodation nearby. I’m very attached to the old place and I think it will be a terrible shame if the original buildings are flogged off or bulldozed. I believe that’s not going to happen but I’m not sure what their fate is going to be. Anyway, I asked one of the locals, Tamara Davis, to take a picture in front of the sign outside the old NORDITA  building, looking grumpy, to show my disapproval. I think she caught the mood perfectly.

Actually, Tamara isn’t really a local because she’s Australian, but she spends a couple of months a year in Denmark at the Dark Cosmology Centre, which is about ten minutes’ walk from the Niels Bohr Institute. I sat next to her at the conference dinner and found out that she’s also an international quality Ultimate Frisbee player. I wish I could pretend I knew what that was, but it sounds impressive. The fact that she’s training for a major event at the moment meant that she wasn’t drinking much wine so, being a gentleman, I drank the surplus on her behalf.

I wonder if there’s such a sport as Penultimate Frisbee?

Here’s another picture in front of the same building, featuring some folks from the workshop.

From left they are Dominik Schwarz (Bielefeld, Germany), Anthony Lasenby (Cambridge, UK), Carlo Burigana (Bologna, Italy),  Sabino Matarrese (Padova, Italy) and Paolo Natoli (Rome, Italy).

Last one shows the view in the evening sun looking down towards the picturesque old harbour area, called Nyhavn. I took this in anticipation of a nice cold beer among the crowds of people out enjoying themselves in the lovely weather. I wasn’t disappointed!

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Discovering Copenhagen

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on June 2, 2010 by telescoper

Here I am, again, in the fine city of Copenhagen in Denmark. It’s a lot warmer here than last time I was here, in January, but I’m here for a short meeting at the Discovery Center which we be held on the premises of the Niels Bohr Institute over the next few days.

It looks like being a funny little meeting, because  nobody is allowed to talk about any Planck results yet so most speakers are talking about extraneous matters, almost like they’ll be talking about their hobbies. Should be fun. I haven’t decided what I’ll talk about yet, but my talk isn’t until tomorrow…

I travelled yesterday from Heathrow Airport with Leonid Grishchuk who I met in the airport. It turns out he had checked in extra-specially early for the the short flight to Copenhagen. The result of this enthusiasm was that his bags didn’t arrive with the plane. After filing a lost luggage report the usually avuncular Leonid turned into grumpy Grishchuk for the short Metro journey downtown. I saw him at breakfast just now and he told me his bag had actually been delivered to the hotel late last night. All’s well that ends well. It sounds like it must have come on the later flight, which probably means it never left Heathrow.

I was worried for a while I was going to miss the flight because my train from Cardiff was late as a result of being stuck in the Swansea area behind a broken-down train. Despite the delay and the fact that only one automatic check-in machine was working at the airport, I still had plenty of time to make the flight. My bag was one of the first out of the carousel.

Our meeting doesn’t start until lunchtime, so I’m going to take a walk around and do a little sightseeing beforehand. I know the city fairly well, but it will be nice to see how things have changed over the years. If memory serves, I think the first time I came here was in 1988. Quite a few of the places I went during that time have now closed but then I’m too old now to go them anyway!

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Returning to Lognormality

Posted in Biographical, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on June 7, 2009 by telescoper

I’m off later today for a short trip to Copenhagen, a place I always enjoy visiting. I particularly remember a very nice time I had there back in 1990 when I was invited by Bernard Jones, who used to work at the Niels Bohr Institute.  I stayed there several weeks over the May/June period which is the best time of year  for Denmark; it’s sufficiently far North that the summer days are very long, and when it’s light until almost midnight it’s very tempting to spend a lot of time out late at night.

As well as being great fun, that little visit also produced my most-cited paper. I’ve never been very good at grabbing citations – I’m more likely to fall off bandwagons rather than jump onto them – but this little paper seems to keep getting citations. It hasn’t got that many by the standards of some papers, but it’s carried on being referred to for almost twenty years, which I’m quite proud of; you can see the citations per year statistics are fairly flat. The model we proposed turned out to be extremely useful in a range of situations, hence the long half-life.

nph-ref_history

I don’t think this is my best paper, but it’s definitely the one I had most fun working on. I remember we had the idea of doing something with lognormal distributions over coffee one day,  and just a few weeks later the paper was  finished. In some ways it’s the most simple-minded paper I’ve ever written – and that’s up against some pretty stiff competition – but there you go.

Picture1

The lognormal seemed an interesting idea to explore because it applies to non-linear processes in much the same way as the normal distribution does to linear ones. What I mean is that if you have a quantity Y which is the sum of n independent effects, Y=X1+X2+…+Xn, then the distribution of Y tends to be normal by virtue of the Central Limit Theorem regardless of what the distribution of the Xi is  If, however, the process is multiplicative so  Y=X1×X2×…×Xn then since log Y = log X1 + log X2 + …+log Xn then the Central Limit Theorem tends to make log Y normal, which is what the lognormal distribution means.

The lognormal is a good distribution for things produced by multiplicative processes, such as hierarchical fragmentation or coagulation processes: the distribution of sizes of the pebbles on Brighton beach  is quite a good example. It also crops up quite often in the theory of turbulence.

I;ll mention one other thing  about this distribution, just because it’s fun. The lognormal distribution is an example of a distribution that’s not completely determined by knowledge of its moments. Most people assume that if you know all the moments of a distribution then that has to specify the distribution uniquely, but it ain’t necessarily so.

If you’re wondering why I mentioned citations, it’s because it looks like they’re going to play a big part in the Research Excellence Framework, yet another new bureaucratical exercise to attempt to measure the quality of research done in UK universities. Unfortunately, using citations isn’t straightforward. Different disciplines have hugely different citation rates, for one thing. Should one count self-citations?. Also how do you aportion citations to multi-author papers? Suppose a paper with a thousand citations has 25 authors. Does each of them get the thousand citations, or should each get 1000/25? Or, put it another way, how does a single-author paper with 100 citations compare to a 50 author paper with 101?

Or perhaps the REF should use the logarithm of the number of citations instead?

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