• Brian Cox at TED, 2008

Think of it this way: in the early days of the Internet there were relatively few websites about the things you wanted to know about  – news, opinions, articles and so on – so it was possible to visit a few websites one after another, and many people still do that. With the explosion of content a few years ago – especially audio, images, and video – it took the elegant simplicity of RSS to sort all that information into a few feeds you could put into one reader or homepage.

But sometimes you want to hear ‘what’s going on’, rather than having full-blown articles, or you want to be forwarded articles that are relevant to you. This is where Twitter comes in, and people have been using the service in this way for personal information since it was launched three years ago. An increasingly, people are using to stay updated in technical fields. Think of Twitter as a continuous RSS of little bits of extra information: it’s a bit like overhearing someone’s conversation, which sometimes it actually is.

I work on particle accelerators and on new methods of generating nuclear power, so of course I’m interested in these areas. Here’s my round-up of nuclear and physics-related Twitter feeds, possibly UK-biased. I’ve tried to just include the ones that give genuinely useful information, whilst not bombarding you with thousands of updates that dilute all the others (like, say, the BBC News does).

General and Particle Physics:

• Institute of Physics
• The John Adams Institute
• AIP Publishing
• Argonne National Lab
• Brian Cox
• Brookhaven National Lab
• CERN
• DIAMOND Light Source
• Lord Drayson (UK Science Minister)
• Fermilab Today
• Roger Highfield (at New Scientist)
• KEK
• National Physical Laboratory
• Research Fortnight
• The Royal Society
• SLAC
• Tevatron

Nuclear Physics and Nuclear Energy:

• Alstom Power
• Westinghouse AP1000
• AREVA
• Atomic Rod
• Clean Energy Insight
• Cool Hand Nuke
• IAEA
• JustNukeIt
• Nuclear Energy Institute
• The Nuclear N-Former
• Nuclear Street
• Sandia National Laboratory
• Kirk Sorensen, the thorium energy advocate
• World Nuclear News

Yesterday in Warrington town centre, I went into town and parked in a completely empty car park – I mean, completely empty. Just me. I sauntered up to a space, if sauntering is possible on four wheels, and pulled in. While I was faffing about getting my jacket from the back seat, a woman in a Volvo came up to the same car park level, and proceeded to park right up against my side of the car – so close that I could not open my door. There was no particular reason for her to do this, as I was nowhere near any exit.

I had to move my own car to get out! Of course, this woman looked at me askance as I moved my vehicle away from hers, like I was the idiot. Her inevitably cow-like expression led me to believe there was no hope in engaging her in debate about her future driving choices, so I comforted myself in pigeon-holing her as a typical Volvo driver.

But this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Oh no. This happens to me a lot, so much so that I’m beginning to wonder if it’s an epidemic, and whether I should consider being inoculated in case I catch this syndrome myself; although I must say that the idea of a cull is more appealing. The best (or worst) example is when Donna and I were visiting Knock Shrine in County Mayo, in Ireland – no, I’m not a card-carrying Catholic, and yes it is a very interesting place for lots of reasons. More on that some other time maybe. We turned up early on a damp weekday, so the car park was empty. I should point out here that whilst Knock is a small village of about 40 houses, the car park will take what looks like 10,000 cars and is about 3 times bigger than the vilage (see Knock from space in Google Earth if you don’t believe me).

So there we are in this vast car park, trundling in to a random space. As I pulled up, I noticed a dot in the far tarmac distance. Quickly exiting our vehicle to prevent being trapped again – I am getting wise to this -  we followed the second car circling in, like a vulture descending onto its prey. After a two minute waltz with an invisible vehicular partner, the Volvo (as it inevitably was) slowed to a crawl, apparently unsure where exactly to cause the most annoyance. And of course, the driver halted right up against the driver’s side door of my car. Only this time, I couldn’t move the car as I was no longer in it. We left this scene of psychological bombing, and returned after our visit to the famous zillion-foot high Knock cross (and of course the blank wall next to it): as you will have guessed, I had to climb across the gearstick to make it behind the steering wheel, an unpleasant experience.

Why is it that women (and it is always women) choose to park right next to me in car parks?

Ok, so that’s a bit mad, but a lot of people think that words in German are on average longer than those in English. But is it really true? I have wondered about this for a long time, but it’s actually quite hard to get sensible data on this sort of subject. I mean, who wants to search through a dictionary counting all the letters?

Well, actually, now it’s possible to do just that, and really easily. I just got the latest version of Mathematica – Version 7 – which includes a whole host of curated data not available in previous versions. One of the new datasets is a German dictionary to go with the English one we’ve had since Version 6. To see what languages are available, we just type:

In: DictionaryLookup[All]

which gives:

Out: {“Arabic”, “BrazilianPortuguese”, “Breton”, “BritishEnglish”, \
“Catalan”, “Croatian”, “Danish”, “Dutch”, “English”, “Esperanto”, \
“Faroese”, “Finnish”, “French”, “Galician”, “German”, “Hebrew”, \
“Hindi”, “Hungarian”, “IrishGaelic”, “Italian”, “Latin”, “Polish”, \
“Portuguese”, “Russian”, “ScottishGaelic”, “Spanish”, “Swedish”}

It’s also easy to look up how many words are in each dictionary. For example, to see how many words are in the German dictionary, we just type:

In: DictionaryLookup[{"German", "*"}] // Length

Out: 76155

which looks like a sensible number of words to do a comparison. The English dictionary has 92,518 words, by the way. Breton (yes, really!) has only 32,733 words… I’d never thought of Breton people as being particularly concise.

Anyway, the built-in functions in Mathematica mean that the question that has bugged me for ages can now be answered in two lines of code:

In: Mean[StringLength[DictionaryLookup[{"English", "*"}]]] // N

Out: 8.39372

In: Mean[StringLength[DictionaryLookup[{"German", "*"}]]] // N

Out: 11.6281

So there you have it: quantitative evidence that German words are longer than English ones, on average over 3 letters longer, which is quite a lot if you ask me! Some of the words are much longer, as you can see from the accompanying plot. If you think my methodology is flawed, please let me know with your quantitative results!

English versus German

Fingerprinting of children is growing at an astonishing rate in England’s schools. Touting fingerprinting as a way to make access to library books simpler (just put your thumb on the reader), Micro Librarian Systems for example sell a fingerprint recogniser for primary schoolchildren. On their website, they use the following enticements as to why it’s a good idea to buy and use such as system in the school library:

No more lost or damaged reader cards!

No more lending of ID cards between borrowers!

No more bar codes being washed or tumble dried!

In other words, spend about £20,000 on a fingerprint system, fingerprint all the children in the school, and it will make it slightly easier to control the ditzy little b*stards reading habits. After all, it’s too hard to write down what books they’ve borrowed in something as simple as a book, and the children need their fingerprints scanned so the teacher can remember what their names are.

Sounds unconvincing said like that, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, plenty of schools have been taken in by the technobabble the companies spout about convenience, and about 2 million children have now had their fingerprints recorded, mostly without the knowledge, and therefore without the consent, of parents. And it’s not just for library books; such systems are also being used to keep track of lunch payments, again with the vague notion of improving efficiency, however that is defined.

Of course, the companies that sell these systems claim that the fingerprint data is secure, but having seen the entire Child Benefit database disappear on a CD a few months ago, I don’t believe that for a moment, and neither should you. And neither did Fionna Elliot, who has campaigned for parents to be informed that the security of their childrens’ identity is being compromised. As a surprisingly well-informed Daily Mail article points out, schools are even worse than governments in taking care of personal data, and most teachers are unaware that a scrapped fingerprint computer would be very handy for ID thieves. Once your fingerprints are copied by someone, you cna’t use them to identity yourself any more. Think it’s hard to copy a fingerprint? Actually, it’s quite easy, and can be done with a few simple ingredients.

LTKA has more information on all of this, but the message is pretty simple: tell your kids that if their teacher asks them for their fingerprints, say no. This message, and the fact that fingerprinting children is anyway illegal (it’s a breach of human rights, goes against the Data Protection Act, and can breach the 2002 Education Act), is finally getting through to some people, and councils are starting to distance themselves from possible litigation.

What does central Government have to do with fingerprinting in schools? UK.Gov is subsidising fingerprinting technology formerly through the DFES curriculum online project, and now through Harnessing Technology funds. This is seen by a number of people as softening up our younger population to accept intrusive identity checks as a normal part of life, in preparation for the dreaded Identity Cards.

By the way, it’s not just kids that are being asked to present their thumbs to identify themselves. Parents at a nursery in Kent are also being asked, as are those at a nursery in Swansea. Whatever happened to using your eyes and brain to identify the person coming through that front door? And anyway, as anyone who has used a security gate knows, you can just tailgate behind someone who is authorised to get in. Totally pointless.

The new MacBook Pro

So, after much hype and rumour, the new MacBooks are finally out, and many of the ‘wishlist’ items are there in reality. You can see the whole announcement at Apple, including the usual Steve Jobs bit, and a quirky missive from Jonathan Ive, who is clearly enjoying being able to make new components. In particular, the following new things are included:

• Unibody construction, i.e. machined from block aluminium. This is supposed to confer increased rigidity and reduce the weight.
• Large, glass trackpad with additional gestures, including a 4-finger gesture for Expose and application selection. There is no button any more, and left- and right-button clicking is available through software.
• LED backlighting, which is becoming an industry standard to replace previous cold-cathode backlights. It’s supposed to increase battery life, but the quoted life on the MacBook Pro is 5 hours with the slower Nvidia graphics running.
• SSD option. This is expensive, but is now available at 128 Gb.
• Nvidia graphics. The Pros come with two chips, where you can choose which graphics chip you wish to run with – not sure how that is done yet.
• Mini DisplayPort is to be the standard across the product line.
• No more Firewire 400 sockets. I don’t like this myself. Firewire 800 is there instead, with 400 via a cable.

The main ‘missing’ item is the much hoped-for touchscreen, which I guess will come at some time in the future. Another thing, which won’t be missed, is the lack of Blu-Ray on the drives. Don’t all Mac owners pirate their HD video anyway? In terms of product line-up, Apple isn’t offering a Netbook yet; they seem to be sticking to premium-priced products, which enables them to maintain innovation I suppose.

There are two interesting things about the new products are the unibody construction and the graphics chip. The unibody construction seems to be the same thing as the secret ‘Brick’ project, and is where Apple are machining the main frame and lower case in a single piece from aluminium block to save assembly costs. They say it’s more environmentally friendly because they recycle the swarf, but the quoted wastage is 90% – a 2.5 pound block becomes a 0.25 pound frame according to Steve. I’m sure the wastage on stamping is less than this. It now looks like the MacBook Air was a 1st-generation niche product to see how a unibody construction could be used. It’s now entering the main Apple product line.

The second interesting thing – for scientists at least – is the use of the Nvidia 9400M and 9600M GT parts in the same laptop, which contain 16 and 32 cores respectively. If you’re interested in stream processing, then this could be an interesting product.

Of course, there are other products in the announcement. The 13-inch MacBook is now just a mini MacBook Pro rather than a differentiated line. There is also a 24-inch LED-lit display (available in November), and I think they’ve missed a trick here by having a rather clunky 3-plug connector cable rather than a dock or single plug design.

All in all, not a bad upgrade to the line. It would be nice to have a full touchscreen, but I shudder at what that would cost…

Phew. It’s been a long couple of weeks, but I’m pretty much moved in now.

So, I’m apparently a lecturer in physics at Manchester University, and no longer employed by HM Govt. It’s been a busy couple of weeks to say the least, as I’ve been out of the university arena for some years. I’ve joined the Particle Physics Group (also confusingly called HEP – High Energy Physics), and am a couple of doors down from fellow group member Brian Cox (whose site is much better looking than mine). It’s been a steep learning curve getting ready for the teaching load, but being given the nuclear physics lab is kind of nice, as I think I understand it. I’ll let you know after tomorrow’s first day! Universities are a lot more lively than when I was an undergraduate, and there is a real buzz about the place. It’s a bit like being in a hospital – everyone else seems to know what they’re doing and where they’re supposed to go, but there are few signs about. The ones that are there can be confusing (see picture!). Bit by bit I’m picking up what I’m supposed to be doing, which is teaching and research basically…

Fortunately, my office in Schuster is with the other physicists, and not in the old Rutherford Building, which is part of the older quad of buildings on Oxford Road, and I think now occupied by psychologists. People have commented on a possible link between the deaths of five people who all worked in the building, but given the very low levels of radiation so far measured (it’s been a hundred years guys) I’m betting it will turn out to be another leukemia cluster. In other words, it will be a random clustering of events that people call attention to because they are looking for a specific, well-identified cause. There is a lot of psychology in that activity – maybe the building occupants will look into that!

Hopefully unconnected with my arrival is the rather amusing decision by the Student Union to re-classify the toilets from men/women to with/without urinals (in the words of Al Murray, ‘I was never confused’). Transgender students have perhaps correctly pointed out that there is an uncomfortable choice to be made about whether to have abuse thrown at them by either women or men, depending on which door they go through. In typical student fashion, there is a backlash from more conservative student groups who wish to maintain a clear gender divide for their own comfort. The union representative on that there TV (who had surprisingly green hair which made me forget her name) seemed a bit non-plussed at the media attention, but gamely held her own on the rights of all to choose. Good on her. For me, the amusing part of the story is that anyone would want to use any of the toilets in that building. They are after all rather dingy.

The latest Nokia

Some of the older ones around here remember the collective media and public laughter at London bankers who were some of the early adopters of mobile telephones. I recall the original phones in the mid-80s, which were huge and sometimes had to be physically connected to a car (hence the name Carphone Warehouse, of course). ‘Why would anyone want one of those?’, they said; ‘why not just use the phone you have at home?.’ Even the notion that a phone number referred to a person rather than a location was difficult to grasp. By the way, am I the only person who thought these phones looked a lot like the radios the police had in the French Connection (the film, not the clothes shop)?

But now of course, nearly all of us have these wonderful gadgets in our pockets, and therefore don’t refer to them as gadgets any more, even though they possess a huge array of functionality that most people rarely use, such as mobile internet, calendaring, document reading, and so on. Similarly the iPod, where I recall a similar cry of ‘why not just listen to your CDs individually?’. Of course, nowadays most of us use them not just for music, but for TV programmes and movies, and crucially for the growing phenomenon of podcasting, which few people thought of when these devices were introduced – especially people like John McCain, who by all accounts doesn’t know how to use a computer. I wonder what he would make of the iPhone 3G, which is a combination of the above two things, and is a Satnav too. I guess he would say that his fondness of military spending would support the satellite developments that gave us GPS. Actually, maybe he would be right there! Anyway, there are a lot of people like McCain who decry technological developments while early adopters are eagerly consuming them. I am reminded of a notable physicist at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory who is well-known locally for never touching a computer himself, and employs a secretary (of sorts) to perform his programming; this man will remain nameless.

And then there are those who think that more development is not worthwhile. Sir David King has achieved a rapid notoriety for his disparaging comments about the LHC, which of course did not destroy the Earth last week when it was switched on; why would it, when the collisions which will make those pesky black holes are scheduled to occur some weeks from now? Anyway, Sir David intimated that 4.4 billion quid on solving the mysteries of the universe is a waste of money, a notion that has unfortunately gained traction in some of the science press (for example Research Fortnight). Brian Cox (who I now live next door to at Manchester, girls) said exactly the right thing, and completely demolished Sir David. After all, we are presently chucking a lot more money than that at dodgy banks, and to put it into context we need to be building a great many power stations in this country over the next few years, each of which has a similar price tag to the LHC. Brian rightly pointed out that there are a lot of us (me included) who work on machines not just for particle physicists play with, but which also have a lot of practical uses, nuclear power, X-ray production and radiotherapy being just three insigificant ones.

Sir David’s comments smack a great deal of a mythical quote by US patent commissioner Charles Duell at the end of the 19th Century, who supposedly declared that ‘Everything that can be invented, has been invented’. It’s only a short step to fundamentalism and the rejection of novelty in all its forms. ‘What more do we need to know? Don’t we know enough already?’

I prefer Mark Twain, who said perceptively: ‘The man with a new idea is a crank, until the idea succeeds’. Cue Edison, of course…

Senator McCain having trouble texting

So, back to John McCain. Less well-reported is that a group of scientists have posed a set of key questions on science policy to both Obama and McCain. Their replies are interesting, being prepared comments from their likely policy. Much of the response of both candidates is the usual generic fluff, and Senator McCain in particular likes to make reference to his time in the army (and the navy, apparently), and also gets an oblique reference to his invention of the Blackberry whilst on ‘that committee’. Amongst all that, there are a couple of things worth pointing out. Firstly, Obama is clearly less keen on space and NASA than McCain is (no surprise there).

‘…work toward a 21st century vision of space that constantly pushes the envelope on new technologies as it pursues a balanced national portfolio that expands our reach into the heavens and improves life here on Earth.’ (Obama)

‘…Ensure that space exploration is top priority and that the U.S. remains a leader (against China).’ (McCain)

Second, McCain comes out with very clear targets for new-build nuclear power, whilst Obama is more circumspect:

‘As President, I will put the country on track to building 45 new reactors by 2030 so that we can meet our growing energy demand and reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases.  Nuclear power is a proven, domestic, zero-emission source of energy and it is time to recommit to advancing our use of nuclear energy.’ (McCain)

‘A new generation of nuclear electric technologies that address cost, safety, waste disposal, and proliferation risks.’ (Obama)

Finally, the issue of stem cells expose the typical Republican/Democratic split in the US:

‘I oppose the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes and I voted to ban the practice of “fetal farming,” making it a federal crime for researchers to use cells or fetal tissue from an embryo created for research purposes.’ (McCain)

‘As president, I will lift the current administration’s ban on federal funding of research on embryonic stem cell lines created after August 9, 2001 through executive order, and I will ensure that all research on stem cells is conducted ethically and with rigorous oversight’ (Obama)

It will be an interesting autumn for science, and for physics in particular.

The SRS: now just so much junk

Today was a rather surreal experience.

Now that the SRS has finally shut, and before the men with spanners start to dismantle the accelerator – some parts of which are over 40 years old – the site has been opened to staff (and the many ex-staff) for a full Sunday. It was a strange experience to come as a tourist to my own place of work, and even stranger that for the event the lab has decided to include a funfair, classic car rally, and birds of prey exhibition. I’m not really sure what any of that has to do with synchrotron science, but maybe it brings in the punters. Unfortunately, the bouncy castle and ‘megaslide’ (whatever that is) were both stolen last night, so the funfair consisted solely of rides next to our decrepit site stores building. I’m not quite sure why it’s best to put playing children near to piles of scrap metal, but there you go.

The celebratory aspect of the day seemed a bit misplaced to me, since there is nothing really to replace the facility, and more than a few people are being made redundant. It was doubly poignant for me as I’m leaving the lab myself in a week’s time, and I worked closely on the SRS for some years.

Oh well…

Of course, the open day was timed to come just after the last SR user meeting to be held at Daresbury. Besides the expected eulogies to the varied research that was done on the SRS, there was an interesting presentation by Jon Marangos, project leader of the ‘New Light Source‘ (what a terrible committee name that is). The science case has been completed, and is available in draft form for comment before final submissiong for funding for the design stage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it calls for a high-repetition rate X-ray FEL suite (i.e. above 1 kHz), albeit without much technical definition that ties the experimental needs to hard accelerator parameters – the lack of which may or may not come back to bite as it did on 4GLS. Maybe it will get sorted out during the design phase.

Those ‘in the know’ realise that high repetition rate basically means superconducting cavities, since normal-conducting ones can only operate in pulsed mode under 1 kHz. And there are plenty of accelerators being built around the world that will do that – so won’t get funded in the UK. A superconducting design would be kind of nice, since I published a design for one of those a few months ago. Ok, so my design is based on ideas from a number of other people (WiFEL, LBNL etc.), but I think it’s quite good. Maybe they’ll ask me to carry on working on it even though I’m leaving.