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

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

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 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.

The US is basically pulling out of ITER. As often happens at this time, he’s keeping the accountants going at the expense of real work:

‘What we’re going to do is to keep the ITER project office’ (at ORNL)

We won’t do any physics, but will keep the typing pool. Great.

To those of you working at FERMILAB, he said:

‘…we preserved the Tevatron run. And in order to do that, the B-factory had to be shut down early at SLAC‘

In other words, be thankful you’re in a slightly more Republican part of the country. We stuffed those hippies on the West coast to save you.

And to the ILC people, he had this to say:

‘ I think now the high-energy physics community understands how Congress feels…. You don’t have to convince me. You don’t have to convince the president. It’s there. Now we’re talking about the American people.’

He’s saying that ILC hasn’t sold itself enough to the American people. Which is true.

Like many pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-scientific arguments I have seen, Cruise makes use of similar kinds of general statements to those of conventional religious systems – ‘helping people’, ‘solving problems’, ‘linking cultures’ – but without ever going into specifics, or getting into the sort of detail that’s actually quite crucial to understanding the basis of their beliefs. Now, this video could have been edited to make Tom Cruise look foolish, but I believe that it’s been put together like this deliberately by Scientology film-makers.

Why make general statements like this? It’s because people like simple answers to problems., and headlines let us make snap judgements without having to bother about actually learning about an issue. This is why politics works. For example, Ian Pearson – the Science Minister – recently said ‘we have put up investment in UK physics by 13.6%’; it takes a little digging to work out that it’s all eaten up by complications such as FEC, VAT, fixed international subscription limits and so on. But voters care about headlines.

Similarly, when we think about religion it’s easy to pigeonhole people based on headlines about them. Scientology gives more traditional religious beliefs a bad name, because it plays on the headline-grabbing psychology which is hard-wired into our busy, subject-hopping brains. But consider this: if religious and philosophical belief were simple enough to work out in 5 minutes, then people wouldn’t have been arguing about it for thousands of years, which of course they have.

Ask yourself another question. Which book has undeniably had more influence on human history than any other? Obviously, it’s the Bible (or maybe you don’t believe that – but think about what other book has had such an impact). Now, whether or not you believe it’s all claptrap or think it’s good or bad, have you actually read any of it? Before you come to a premature judgement, read up on the subject, so you can make your own mind without headlines. But what do I know? I’m a Virgo and it’s well-known that Virgos don’t believe in astrology.

I’ll leave you with Tom in all his glory in edited highlights below. The full video is here.

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Of course! It was Susan Alexander, BBC journalist and presenter extraordinaire, telling us how to talk to the media! How cool was that? And she was very impressive, and not a little intimidating. I no longer have a disdain for arts graduates – this one really knew what she was talking about, and was sharp as a tack. No bullshitting possible here. The reason I didn’t make the connection before then is that all of us compartmentalise our lives, and don’t expect to see things or people out of context: I would have had the same trouble if I had gone to sit down on the sofa in my living room and found the Queen sitting there.

But then I realised something else that had subconsciously stopped me from making the link from radio to reality: every previous time I had heard Susan’s voice I had been naked. Naked, because when I listen to Radio 4 at the right time in the morning I’m nearly always in the shower. I didn’t mention the naked thing to Ms. Alexander though: I thought she might find it weird.

Brings a tear to my eye (sniff)…

You can just imagine a call centre at DOE: ‘You are thirteenth in the list. Please continue to hold. Your project is very important to us. We are sorry for the continued delay in funding your project.’

You can read the updated interim report here. It’s interesting to see the order of priority they’ve put the accelerator projects in:

1. LCLS – under construction, so not surprising it’s at the top.
2. Rare Isotope Accelerator – not yet being built
3. CEBAF upgrade – been on the cards for a while, and to be built by our good friends at JLab.
4. ILC
5. SNS power upgrade (What an amazing machine that is – the target chamber is something else).
6. SNS second target station
7. RHIC II
8. NSLS upgrade
9. Super Neutrinos
10. ALS upgrade
11. APS upgrade
12. eRHIC/eLIC

The perceptive among you will notice that ‘multi-user’ facilities feature highly (i.e. those facilities where multiple experiments may happen simultaneously); well over half are facilities of this sort.