Alice in Galaxyland

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2012-02-04T17:57:00.004Z

Scientific surveys are distrusted by many people and organisations. Sadly, due to the fact that surveys are not always particularly well written, this is not entirely without reason.

Many years ago, when working for a health and safety consultancy, I was shown a newspaper article about the enforced closure of a care home after they had failed an inspection on safety grounds, such as their banisters being a couple of millimetres too wide apart. "These people aren't interested in whether or not you've got a loving home," one of the very upset care workers was quoted as saying, "they're only interested in ticking little boxes."

More recently, the IT firm Atos has been the recipient of the outsourcing of decisions on sick and disabled people's welfare, taking these decisions out of the hands of GPs and others who know the welfare recipients, and placing it in the hands of a survey for which you have to score points to be declared unfit for work. LatentExistence describes it in more detail here, and this is one of the results of this procedure. (By the way, if I say anything too critical of this company, my entire blog may be shut down - this happened to CarerWatch and it took a lot of fighting and correspondence to find out that the entire forum, which is a pillar of sanity and support for many exhausted, poor and desperate people, was closed due to a link someone had posted many months previously. But I recommend Margaret McCartney's writings on them, too - sadly the BMJ article I had in mind, and which I believe is linked to here, no longer seems to be available.)

In other words, a badly thought out survey can have horrific - and fatal - results. It can of course also be fairly hilarious to those who have the time and ability to pick it apart, as bloggers did to the BCA's "plethora of evidence" about chiropractic being effective back in 2009.

I'm currently earning my pennies by doing some scientific data entry, which involves a bit of database testing. I'm actually finding it both fun and fascinating, and also discovering just how much thought has to go into writing a survey and its results. A simple "N/A" in a box where an integer is required means that query after query gets generated, multiplying the poor data manager's work. When you create a survey, study, or report, you have to allow for various responses.

The problem a lot of people cite (in my experience, anyway) with surveys is that they "don't give a holistic picture", "ignore the real person", "don't treat anyone as an individual", "reduce important things to tick boxes" and so on. The trouble with this is that a really large survey can't treat everybody, or anybody, as an individual, except for case studies. You need to state exactly what you want to find out, and how much. No survey can find out everything about everybody! And if what people say isn't representative of what's really going on, or the results don't make any sense - that's when you've got a problem.

If your tick boxes make people feel like that, this doesn't mean that surveys involving tick boxes are the problem, it means that the wrong questions are being asked - or, if it's multiple choice, that the wrong range of answers are being offered.

It's a pretty good idea, I'd say, to do a trial run of a survey, and find out where these errors are coming from. No planning can possibly think of everything that will go wrong. So do a practice run, change what you need to, and then have another go. (This is much better than, say, adding a new question halfway through what you are doing - this makes the whole thing a mess.)

Still, I would have thought that even a mobile phone company would have had the imagination to forecast the problems they created themselves with the survey they just sent me. I won't name the mobile company, but they've just offered me a new contract. I've accepted it, because it's a lot better than my current one, and also there isn't a minimum time on it. Let me make clear that they telephoned me while I was at work and I asked if they could call me back another time, which they did, exactly when they said they would - and they did not much underestimate the time the call would take, which was a big bonus. Anyway, next day I got the following message as follows:

MOBILE: "From [X]: You recently spoke to us on [Day X] and we'd like to ask you 6 quick questions about your experience. All your feedback is free."

MOBILE: "Question 1: Was this the first time we've spoken about a specific problem or query? Reply with Y for yes and N for no."

So far so good . . .

ME: "Y".

MOBILE: "Question 2 of 6: Is your query or problem now resolved? Reply with Y for yes and N for no."

ME: "Y."

First problem. I thought I'd better add to that . . .

ME: "Except I didn't have a problem/query. [MOBILE COMPANY] did."

MOBILE: "Error: We were unable to recognise your response. Please enter a number between 0 and 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excellent'."

MOBILE: "Question 3 of 6: That's good to hear. Overall how would you rate our advisor on a scale of 0 to 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excellent'?"

I know a few people who work for these companies and know that if you answer anything other than the top number, they get a bollocking and lose their commission. (Mobile companies are not always kind to their staff - I recommend a read of this experience Dean had with a different one.) So although it was annoying being rung up and I had to listen to the standard waffle, the guy was a good listener and answered - even anticipated - all my questions. So I decided to be generous.

ME: "9."

MOBILE: "Question 4 of 6. How would you rate the time it took before you spoke to an advisor where 0 is poor and 9 is excellent?"

I think by now it's clear that they have started off this survey by making a very specific assumption which needed clearing up before questions and answers could helpfully continue.

ME: "N/A. I didn't call you."

MOBILE: "Error: We were unable to recognise your response. Please enter a number between 0 and 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excelent'."

ME: "'Excellent' is spelled with two 'L's. Please take a literacy course."

MOBILE: "Unfortunately we are unable to recognize the response in your message. Please try again at another time."

By not allowing for a few very simple different situations, or employing a proofreader, or even allowing a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to be used in designing error messages, this company has messed up its own surveying ability and wasted its own time and money as well as mine.

And this is why it's important to learn how to design a survey before you do one.

And another Skeptics in the Pub. Welcome Hackney!

2012-01-22T22:33:00.007Z

Because obviously I haven't got enough to do at the moment, what with a course and a zoo and a bunch of talks coming up, last autumn I let myself be dragged into co-founding Hackney Skeptics in the Pub.

There are already two Skeptics in the Pub in London: London and Westminster. But there are over seven million people too, and James Robson, who works with exotic animals at the Horniman Museum and runs Science in the Pub with Paolo Viscardi, thought there was room for more. In other words, you can blame James for all this . . .

Westminster is the place that focusses on media, law, policy, etc. So we thought we'd be "the Skeptics with a science slant". Like Science in the Pub, we hope to run the odd silly experiment during the interval (when I gave a talk there, for instance, people were invited to taste different wines to see if we could tell which were old, which were new, which were cheap and which expensive. I forget the overall result, but I certainly couldn't). We also differ from other places in another way, by being based at the Hackney Attic rather than in a pub. I personally love pubs (the kind with pool tables and room for conversation, anyway), but this is where we are, and a damn glamorous venue it is too.

It's the fifth floor of the Hackney Picturehouse on Mare Street, opposite the Town Hall and Hackney Empire and, as you see, in a street containing rather a lot of pretty lights. It's a fantastic venue for gigs etc and has a bar and comfortable chairs, and they serve food and can bring it upstairs - so that covers all the necessaries for Skeptics in the Pub without it strictly being a pub. Maybe that'll expand our audience. Maybe it won't make any difference at all. We'll have to see.

Let me digress into exactly what "Skeptics in the Pub" and "Skepticism" is, for anybody new coming along. It is not cynicism or pessimism, or people yelling "I don't believe you". There are various definitions of what Skepticsim is, and useful articles about where it's needed in the face of misleading claims, but a beautiful one was recently shown to me by Tannice, who runs Guildford Skeptics. It's by DJ Groethe, and he says:

"To me, the word is best understood by looking at its roots: it comes from the Greek word 'skeptikos', which just means to inquire or to find out. We say that skepticism is the best way of finding out the truth and is precisely the opposite way of just saying 'no' to others' beliefs . . . Critical thinking is continuous with skepticism – and with science, for that matter. It is simply thinking critically about claims and issues . . . Some people think the skeptic’s work is trivial, but we think beliefs matter very much. If the majority of people believe in the claimed supernatural ability of a TV preacher to heal their illnesses, there are real-world effects: the believers won’t go to real medical doctors."

From here - the whole thing is very well worth a read!

The Greek word may be why we call ourselves "skeptics" rather than "sceptics", although for many of us I guess it is just a habit, a joke, a special sense of belonging. Quite a few of us feel we don't belong among many others - with severities ranging from when all the people in the office are going on about how marvellous such and such a psychic is, to being the only atheist in your family and being constantly told you're going to Hell.

But the nights at almost all the places I've been to are cheerful and bonding. I used to co-run Cardiff Skeptics with Dean Burnett, which was an incredibly happy year - I lived in Wales just long enough to be there for our first birthday party before moving here to London and having to leave. I've given talks at half a dozen or so places, and all the events felt happy and full of learning. Granted, at the Questions & Answers there's occasionally the odd smartypants or shouter, but the evenings are carefully watched by the people running it (and the pub staff!) and I've never yet been to one where I didn't end up in several great conversations.

We're launching our first event of 2012 on Monday 30th January. The speaker is David Allen Green, better known as Jack of Kent. I thought he'd probably be talking about libel law or some other bad law, but he's decided to be more interesting - for that, read "stirrer" (in a smiling way). As we're "the sciencey place", his title is "Scientists do not have a monopoly on assessing evidence". In other words, while the scientific method is one of mankind's foolproof - yet counterintuitive - inventions, and has driven our progress for the last few centuries, history and law (and perhaps other things as well?) can be equally evidence-obsessed. He'll be talking to us about that.

We've got more events on the way - Ben Hardwidge to talk about "The Sharks Don't Get Cancer" myth in February, Alok Jha for an unconfirmed topic in March, Deborah Hyde on the origins of zombies in April (her talk was my introduction to Skeptics in the Pub!), and we have some cool plans for May and June too . . .

The challenge I've got this time that I didn't have in Cardiff is local advertising. My experience with this is limited to going round local businesses in Pembrokeshire and asking them if they'll have petitions to save Withybush hospital (the only hospital with an A&E in the whole of Pembrokeshire!), so I may make a complete hash of this. There is a Facebook group for "SITP Organisers" where I asked about advertising and was absolutely pelted with encouragement, ideas and advice. I'll be getting a day free this week - do get in touch if you even vaguely know me or plan to come to Hackney Skeptics and would like to accompany me on some poster-posting!

I hope to see you on Monday 30th!

Headless chicken

2012-01-16T23:48:00.005Z

Don't start me off on how busy I am at the moment - as soon as I have the energy I will write a post introducing Hackney Skeptics in the Pub - but it just occurred to me the other day that I appear to be giving five astronomy talks in the next month!

Just in case you'd like to come to any of them, they are as follows:

Wednesday 18th January: Guildford Skeptics

Thursday 19th January: Queen Mary university (general Galaxy Zoo talk to my coursemates) -> Now rearranged to 7th February.

Wednesday 1st February: Reading Skeptics

Wednesday 8th February: Birmingham Skeptics

Monday 13th February: Astronomers in the Pub

Never mind, keeps me out of mischief. The talks will, surprise surprise, be about Galaxy Zoo, citizen science, and the new concept of open science hopefully becoming part of society. The Skeptics ones will be more education/people orientated, while the Queen Mary and Astronomers in the Pub ones will be more Galaxy Zoo/astronomy focussed. I like both sides! Now to go and either get some sleep or finish off those galaxy-speckled Powerpoints . . .

36 Symptoms of Science Geekery

2011-12-23T19:54:00.008Z

Science geekery is a deadly disease, not least because it makes you so happy you never want to give it up.

These are 36 of the symptoms I've encountered - and I don't think this is all. Most are mine; a few are other people's. What are yours?

1. You look for constellations in freckles and moles on your skin. And your boyfriend's/girlfriend's - and point them out when you find them. They may be a little disturbed, which is saddening because you mean it as a compliment.

2. One of the most upsetting and bewildering things you can hear is the sentiment that science takes the beauty or poetry out of something.

3. You start quoting Tom Lehrer at length when drunk. Or, indeed, sober and having a good time.

4. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot makes you well up.

5. You have a mental list of all the science things you didn't understand in school. If you're organised you read up on them. If you're not, you just feel annoyed about them and keep planning to read up on them some day.

6. You have your own mental list of what you would put on the science curriculum, if given dictatorial powers!

7. Bookshops are incredibly dangerous places to enter. (For your bank account, not your physical self - unless you do your back in, of course, or indeed sit on the floor and get so absorbed reading something that somebody trips over you.)

8. Once shy and lonely, you suddenly become a very talkative and enthusiastic person!

9. Other people's responses to this vary. They might remark, "You get all animated!" or "You light up when you talk about . . .". However, more commonly they'll object to "these things you just blurt out" as if you've said something exceedingly offensive. Other remarks may include: "You're very passionate about . . ." in a telling-off sort of voice; "You're obviously really shy. Only shy people talk that much all in one go" and "You really remind me of my autistic relative/friend X" or gently take it upon themselves to diagnose autism or Aspergers. You tell them that is very interesting.

10. Fellow geeks are always to be cherished.

11. Your Facebook wall shows rather a lot of links to APOD pictures. You can't help but hope that some of the desperately boring people you can't acceptably unfriend will be even a little inspired. They aren't.

12. Stories such as the idea of "open science" (1st chapter here!) or the children's bumblebee paper put a silly grin on your face for hours.

13. You sneak onto a geeky website, or at least Twitter, when clothes, make-up, alcohol and X-factor become a topic of intense and opinionated discussion in the workplace. Or, if forced to participate, you come out with all the conversation-stoppers.

14. This makes perfect sense!

15. When your friends discuss the inevitabilities of nuclear war or the futility of trying to feed the starving or combat corruption, or treat as completely reasonable the idea of no country agreeing to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions until everyone else does (because it would be bad for their economy), science seems the obvious solution. For example, putting more money into science will drive our renewable energy, and then when everyone else runs out of fossil fuels we'll be in the lead. "Yes," they shrug, meaning "If only", or less.

16. Seeing the cruelty and stupidity of a lot of the world is, every so often, a horrific shock - because you've been concentrating on science, which is so beautiful and makes you so happy.

17. Indeed you feel that more science for everyone would make the world a much happier place.

18. Glow-in-the-dark stars are a very good idea.

19. Remarks such as "But we didn't know how electricity worked for ages, but we still used it" and "We used to think the world was flat" (usually said as excuses for thinking something unscientific and being too lazy to listen to reason) drive you up the wall.

20. When someone claims that some alternative remedy works just fine, you immediately prepare a firestorm of questions about studies, evidence, the placebo effect, and the mechanism (sadly, that usually has to remain inside your head - unless you're a lot braver and more patient than I am).

21. It deeply upsets you to see an inaccurate scientific article.

22. The best clothes and other accessories are those containing an excellent science slogan/joke/diagram.

23. After years, when young, of being personally desperately committed to all your arguments, you grow a virtue of detaching yourself from your scientific work, in order to look at it properly. That ties in with the dry, detached language of scientific journals - although you can't help agreeing they would be much more accessible if written in more ordinary language. (Now if only there was a job requiring that type of translation . . .)

24. You look back on the times you weren't doing science and ask yourself, "What was I doing all that time?"

25. The world becomes full of toys. Clouds change shape before your eyes, whiteboards invite you to write a science joke, broken machinery is there to be pulled apart, Lego is perfectly acceptable at all ages, and your glasses (if you wear them) turn the edges of everything red and blue. And when you arrive early for a meeting, and are conveniently there to help pour the coffee, you first arrange all the polystyrene cups (which you disapprove of, because they're not recyclable, although you wonder if you ought to check that is still true - but cool mugs are still better) into the shapes of a barred spiral, an unbarred spiral and an elliptical.

26. You then excuse yourself by explaining that, now you are into science, the world is suddenly full of toys, and everyone around you grins and nods, because they all feel the same way!

27. You see galaxies in your coffee. And everyday objects in galaxies. And point them out.

28. You can't help but check for flawed methodology in every claim and every study you see. And you see a lot.

29. Organisations or groups whose principles support sometimes see you as the enemy when you point out the flaws in their methods or reasoning. This is tragic, because you want them to produce the best data and arguments.

30. You are occasionally reminded that you have forgotten to do something important, such as turning off the oven, because you were so busy thinking about supernovae or similar.

31. When you suddenly understand a concept or equation you began struggling with a long time ago, it's difficult not to jump or dance. You have to settle for texting your geeky friends or blogging about it later.

32. Sooner or later, you will come across someone who feels that there is something childish about facts and being "right or wrong". This is a lot to do with their own maturity and having learnt to compromise and respect everyone's opinion. You think about this and go through a long thought process concluding that your own maturity about knowledge has passed various stages. As a child, for instance, you might have thought in black and white, and that is what this person usually thinks you are doing. As a teenager, you learnt to think like them (and some people never get beyond that stage). As a science geek, the maturity is error bars, acknowledged uncertainties, and a healthy respect for facts which you know can never be entirely proved, only disproved - who knows how or when?

33. When people ask you to recommend Christmas presents, you give them a list of science books. You genuinely found them funny and delightful.

34. You tell your beloved to paste this equation into Google: (sqrt(cos(x))*cos(200*x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(9-x^2), -sqrt(9-x^2)

35. A science lecture, a Skeptics in the Pub night or a stargazing/telescope session is a much better night out than getting pissed.

36. You use the word "geek" as a compliment. Other people think you're putting yourself down. This needs explaining.

The train tracks

2011-12-07T00:22:00.011Z

Before you read this post (or choose not to), please bear in mind it might be distressing or triggering - that is, bring horrible memories to the forefront of your mind. It's not something I would have intended to blog about before this happened, but now it has, I think it's important - hopefully, you'll see why. There's some help sites at the bottom of the page.

It's the 11th week of a 12 week term in my postgraduate course. My blogging has gone out of the window, as has a lot of my attention on other projects such as Galaxy Zoo. I'm stressed about getting work to support myself and about my not-easily-cured lack of mathematical knowledge. I love the course but I'm just exhausted now and want to sleep, but I have to get off the train to wait for the next one because the line is branching.

It's freezing out. I was having a fascinating e-mail conversation earlier and completely forgot to change into warmer clothes before leaving the house. The platform's shiny black with rain and I think about latent heat and how it can be both raining and so cold. I walk up the platform to try and get warm, my bag batting on my back. I turn back and - what?

There were two men on the train tracks. They appeared to embrace briefly, and then walk slowly and carefully back across to the platform opposite. Something stopped inside me, as if I was watching a film that had suddenly gone silent, the screen shrunk, my breathing switched off. What if a train came? They were standing on the rails - would they be electrocuted? A bunch of people had gathered at the edge and held out their hands to pull them up again. I took this to be a prank, or one of them having dropped something. I was quite far away but wandered nearer, suddenly nosy.

One of the men was holding his hands up, as if the others were pointing a gun. There was some jostling and pathetic wails of "leave me alone". It was then that I realised what was happening. Would they calm him down? Talking helps usually, doesn't it? There were a few moments of rising jostling and then calm. And then the man broke away and ran. Towards me. I was just wondering if there would be any point jumping onto the tracks myself when another man ran after him, caught him up, grabbed him, and was joined by two others who held him tight. They ended up on the ground. The man was howling now. He wanted them so much to get off so he could . . . do it again.

I looked around me. Most people were standing still, staring. No, I didn't see anyone obviously calling the emergency services. Suddenly it occurred to me that the men holding him couldn't, there were no staff around, and nobody was in charge. Nobody was going to come along and make everything all right. How could they? British Transport Police. What was their number? There were signs everywhere normally saying "If you see a train being vandalised, call . . ." I couldn't find one. Right. Can't waste any more time. You might have seconds. Action stations.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket. For some reason, dialling 999 - the first time I've ever done that - made me feel very foolish and embarrassed. Also I had started to shake wildly and it affected my voice.

"Emergency services," came a recording. Then silence.

Then "What emergency service do you require?"

"Police please."

Ring, ring. Oh, a long ring, ring. "Police, what is your emergency?"

I almost said "Hello, good evening," on autopilot. The guys still had the man held down, against the wall. His howls were just incoherent howls, like a baby crying. I couldn't even see him. I was right opposite them now, just those two horrifying railway tracks in between.

It was a very clear-voiced, calm lady. I told her which Tube station I was at and that someone had tried to throw himself onto the tracks. She asked if he was still on the tracks and I said no. I described as best I could what was going on. She asked me what he looked like. I had to be honest and say it had all happened so fast and I couldn't see him any more, I couldn't be sure. My mind was suddenly full of a list of features David Allen Green explains here: "Sex, height, hair colour, build, jacket, bottoms, trainers, fabrics, colours of clothes." (I could remember most of those, not all, and managed to come up with height, hair colour, jacket, colours of clothes. I won't repeat them because I don't want this poor guy to be identified this way.) She asked me the most obvious, race.

"What platform is he on?" Oh God. I couldn't see. I paced about trying to find the sign. I told her that he was "on the one in the middle". I found out I was on Platform 3 and told her, adding that he was opposite me, but she thought I meant he was on Platform 3. I was later able to interrupt her and say Platform 2 - I had walked to the right place and was able to see a tiny sign. She clarified with me that there were people holding him. I said there were but I thought he might well do it again if they let him go. All this while people were standing rooted to the spot. A few were on their phones but it seemed to be to friends. I really couldn't tell. None of them seemed to be aware I was calling the cops. I can't remember what she asked that prompted me to respond at one point that he basically just seemed terribly upset and needed some looking after. I still felt really silly and apologised for wasting their time if they'd received other calls about this. She said "No, no," and really sounded like she meant it. "The police are on their way," she told me after a surprisingly short time, "and an ambulance, too, just in case."

She asked me if I wanted a reference number. I told her I couldn't write it down but if it was short I could try and memorise it. I think I have! She asked for my name, but no further details. She thanked me for calling and we hung up.

I longed to yell across to the struggling guys that I had called for help but I knew my feeble, shaking voice wouldn't get to them and it would hardly impress the guy they were holding. I was contemplating finding my way to that platform but it proved unnecessary: within a wonderfully short time several policemen arrived. Slowly they seemed to be taking over the holding down, and doing some talking. The guy stayed on the floor. I couldn't make out what the police were saying but at one point one asked, "And have you taken anything with that?" I noticed a girl had her arm around him - did she know him? I got the impression nobody else did. At one point the police told people brusquely to move away, apparently including the folks who'd held him down. But in general it was all very politely executed.

It had to be ten or fifteen minutes since I'd seen the two men on the rails - of course it's so hard to tell - but it did occur to me that no trains had come, though mine had been due for a long time. Although I hadn't seen any staff, they must have been stopped. I was sort of loathe to get onto mine when it did arrive. I wanted to stay and see what happened. But it wasn't as if anything I did, or knew about, would help him now. Calling the police had been in my hands: now everything was out of them. I went home.

* * *

I was shaking a lot as I got onto the train and sat between people who had no idea what had happened. It seemed very odd that none of the dozens of folks watching had exchanged any communication. I guess it was because it wouldn't have helped. What was passing through the minds of those who hadn't pinned the guy down, hadn't called 999? Had they been appalled at the thought of him dying or was it just something to watch? Had they seen me call 999 and did they think I was doing the right thing? It didn't matter, of course. It's just that . . . well, this hadn't seemed how people are, usually. The number of times someone's spontaneously helped me drag a suitcase upstairs, or even spotted me looking lost and come to see where I was going. Or just happily begun a chat. Yes, in London.

I walked home fast, as always. It was still cold, but my own shaking had I think warmed me up. This kind of thing lets loose all kinds of emotions. I wanted to call my parents, but as they're doctors and saving lives is routine to them, I was afraid they wouldn't be impressed. I hoped that guy would be taken to hospital and get what he needed. And, of course, I wondered what the hell he'd gone through.

He must have been out of his mind to do something so publicly. Did that mean it was just attention-seeking (a cry for help), or that he was so far gone that he wasn't thinking, or that he honestly didn't think anyone would stop him? Four years ago, during that teaching course, I had three detailed suicide plans and all of them involved ensuring I was alone and, if anybody turned up, they wouldn't have time to stop me.

I certainly didn't begin this blog expecting that I would reveal anything so personal, but what the heck - once something's public anyone trying to use it against me would look bloody silly. (And if you are for example an employer who'd turn me down for a job because I've once felt suicidal, I don't want to work for you anyway.) Suicide does happen, it does affect people, and there is no point in not talking about it.

At the time, it seemed that nothing was within my control, and it was only going to get worse. I was far away from home with no real friends anywhere remotely near me, and no time to contact those who mattered. There were so many documents being demanded of me that were intrusive and personal and gave people with power too many more weapons. The reasons I wanted to teach were just the things the teaching profession seemed to wish to attack - in fact my very self as well as my dreams seemed to be their target. That and really obvious bullying, such as criticising me loudly in front of the pupils, teachers and teaching students, or the technicians keeping me waiting for 45 minutes and, while I was still standing there, greeting the other student enthusiastically and helping her immediately when she came in without an appointment. And a teacher, knowing this had happened, charging me with booking equipment that he knew I knew the technicians would refuse to provide. I reported all this and was told "oh, how sad" by the course director. My mentor and his colleagues blamed me, informing me that either this had not happened or that it was my fault it had, and upped their vigilance and destructive criticism of my teaching. I knew that nothing I did would make them pass me - that everything I did I would have to write about and that they would state that it was a failure. In short, I was dependent entirely on the judgment of other people. Home was no respite; I was sharing a very cold grubby house with a girl who among other things almost constantly played music so loud that my body and furniture shook, and screamed her head off if I asked her to turn it down. I was the only person on the course without a car and a nice place to live, and one of only two without a family or partner living in the same house being a constant support. No rest, no control, no hope, no alliance, and a weird sort of grief - that's not a combination you can easily solve.

It's a pretty basic feeling, desperation, and a pretty basic factor that stopped me. I wrote a goodbye letter to my family - at which point I saw my mother's face with an expression of knowing what I was going to do. I couldn't do it. Simple as that. In fact, I decided if I was willing to destroy my own life, I might just as well cripple myself financially, so I moved house. That did improve things. It only delayed the inevitable as far as the teaching went - but it was very uplifting to realise how very easy it was to make a major change.

There was a massive shift in my thinking. I realised this a year later when I finally found a sympathetic doctor. He asked me if I was suicidal. I said no, and meant it, but mentioned that I had been a year previously. He asked me what I would do and I told him. It occurred to me that I had absolutely no idea then (I had moved back home by then) what I would do. If I ask myself now, I have no idea.

If you're feeling like that, it does end. And no, you're not the only one. I have read of, and been told of and confided in, too many similar situations to feel that posting this is somehow going to expose me as a freak. There are so many hopeless situations, so much cowardice and bullying, so many power games in this world. And of course there are so many other reasons other people have for feeling like that; I doubt my case is remotely unique, but nor do I think it a descriptor for other people.

It does pass.

I wonder what happened to that guy. I worried all the way home that he would do the same thing again tomorrow. Can he be helped? Do we have the resources to do so? Will the right people be in the right place at the right time? Can he make a drastic change to his life - is he in a position to do it? I don't know. I would love to know if he's OK but I guess I'll never find out.

Suicide has been much in the news lately - this is written not long after the death of Gary Speed. Comments on Facebook and other such treasure troves of wisdom ask: "How could he have been so ungrateful? He had a family, didn't he realise he had any responsibility to them?" A frequent response, which is probably true, is that he was no longer in a position to think in that rational way - perhaps he felt, if anything, that they'd be better off without him. Prior to 1961, suicide was illegal - a book I read in my early teens, "Tell Alice" I think it was called, included a family which had lived in permanent shame because a daughter had attempted it.

Stigma and shame solve absolutely nothing. Same with disability and mental illness. Making an act shameful will not prevent someone from falling victim to circumstances that will make them carry out that act - and stigma and shame includes responses such as "he was irresponsible to do that to his family". Yes, a person in full happiness and control would be, but the very point is that that person has lost such happiness and control and needs to get that back before such things can be expected of them. This page sums it up perfectly: the unbearableness has outweighed the ability to cope.

At this point I know I'm treading on very thin ground, being utterly inexpert in such matters, and I don't want to go and put out any misinformation or distress anyone for no good reason. So I won't attempt to analyse any further.

The other thing that prompted me to write this honest and soul-bearing post (although frankly what happened to me could happen to anyone, so it's not even as personal as all that) is the deluge of positive and honest reactions I got on Twitter when, still shaking, I got home and shared this story.

Several sent me virtual hugs and sympathy for having seen something so awful. A few sent me blogposts linking to their and their friends' stories, about how someone's suicide or attempted suicide had affected them, and what happened - they were frightening and painful, but life-affirming: we are all people, most of us care very much about each other, including complete strangers. So many congratulated me for calling 999, which was a little embarrassing as the heroes in the story were surely the blokes who reacted so fast and held him and particularly the one who got down on the tracks. So many expressed sorrow and empathy for the man who wanted to die. And so very many told me, publicly and privately, that I was right to bring up suicide and that it affects so many people and should be talked about more. It chokes me up just how many people have come closer, much closer, to ending their lives than I did.

If you are feeling that way, or you know someone who is, please take other options first. Talk to someone about it, contact an organisation. Don't worry about wasting their time. Don't think your needs are less than others who call them. They're there for you as well as for other people. If you feel guilty, just acknowledge that you do.

These are a list of organisations I've come across, heard of, been sent - please add to them in the comments if you wish.

Metanoia - "If you are thinking about suicide, read this first"

The Samaritans - you can phone them, write to them or walk in

Mind - information for families and friends as well as individuals

Suicide Forum

NHS Choices has a range of phone numbers and websites, including some listed here. They also suggest seeing your GP. Other places suggest going to Accident and Emergency.

The Calm Zone, specifically this page

And, if it's already too late, Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide

And a bit more lighthearted, Questionable Content. Yes, really. This arc in the story starts here (five pages earlier) and Jeph Jacques, the author, recommends an American site, Suidology.

By the way, obviously, I am sorry but I almost certainly cannot help you myself - as I've said, I'm no expert. If you're a friend of mine, I'll do what a friend can do; if you want to talk to me, or post a comment, I'll listen and I'll care very much; but that may well be about it. I'm a bit nervous about actually putting out these links and stuff on a blogpost in case someone decides to ask me for help and I can't provide it - kind of like being sued for doing your best at first aid and failing - but I bet it's fears like that that is one reason people keep quieter than they should. <- Update. I've fiddled around with this paragraph so many times and still feel bad about it. I was genuinely afraid someone would ask me for a miracle and I wouldn't have one. But then I found this list of things you can do if you get a suicidal phone call and none of them involve performing a miracle. That's good news for both parties: the main thing is to talk and to listen. So it's much simpler than you think to ask for help, as well as to give it.

If my distressing evening and my witnessing what that man did leads to one person reading this who will pick up the phone when they need help, then that's all I can possibly want. Back to astronomy at some point - honest!

Space's Explosive Candles

2011-10-24T16:55:00.010+01:00

This blog post is an adaptation from this Object of the Day, which is an adaptation from my course at Queen Mary. Here will go back a lot further into the history of the violent events in space that prove vital to astronomy: the standard candle.

A hundred or so years ago, a computer went every weekday to Harvard College Observatory's plate stacks, and compared plate after plate of glass. That computer was a determinedly selfless lady named Henrietta Leavitt; "computer" was the job title of one who analysed astronomers' results, from plates to notebooks to calculations. "Plates" in this case were sheets of glass onto which projections from telescopes had been collected by a light-sensitive silver nitrate solution, capturing the patterns of stars. This meant both greater accuracy in measurements, and a permanent record. (Today, Harvard College Observatory holds thousands, although obviously they are no longer used for observing.)

A "positive" and "negative" plate could be taken of any sky area - white stars or black stars - and laid upon each other. These average out - if the two plates are exactly the same. But if anything has changed in that area of the sky, the object in question will leap out, starkly black or white against the grey.

In fact, this is pretty much the same technique as Ice Hunters uses; more on that in this post from June.

Women were not at that time permitted to use the telescopes themselves. However, as she worked - at first, without pay - on the thousands of plates, Leavitt spotted many variable stars. (Variable stars are stars that change in brightness; they had been objects of interest for some time, but regarded with as something amateurs rather than professionals studied.) The discovery she made that earned her a nomination for the Nobel Prize - but only three years after she died, by someone who was not aware that she was dead - was Cepheid variable stars, a type of star whose brightness rises and falls in direct correlation with its mass.

Stellar mass is directly proportional to its luminosity, and as light's intensity falls in direct proportion to its distance - the inverse square law - it is possible to tell how far away a star is. There are three factors, and if you know two, you can deduce the third. There's a brilliant explanation here at Hyperphysics about how the inverse square law of light (and gravity) works:

Leavitt did not know exactly how far away each Cepheid was, but she had a very useful sample to study: those in the Magellanic Clouds.

The Magellanic Clouds, so named for a Portuguese explorer, Ferdinand Magellan, who used them to navigate while sailing around Africa, are a couple of nice little dwarf irregular galaxies in the southern hemisphere. Leavitt did not know the distance to these, but did realise that they were far enough away that she could treat all the Cepheids in them as being effectively the same distance away.

This APOD shows the Magellanic Clouds over the Very Large Array during a lunar eclipse. The link will show you a map of what everything is in the sky.

Extrapolating her results led to a bombshell. As telescopes improved, Edwin Hubble was able to spot Cepheids in the Andromeda galaxy, and calculate their distance. Andromeda was completely separate from the Milky Way. Harlow Shapley, who while showing that Earth was not at the centre of the Galaxy was nonetheless convinced that our Galaxy was the only one, was shattered when he heard. He thrust Hubble's letter to him at his young colleague Cecilia Payne, saying, "Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe."

It turned out that there are several subclasses of Cepheid variables - and not knowing this led Hubble to wildly overestimate how fast the galaxies are receding from each other. Nineteenth century geologists, biologists and physicists had rocked the world by showing, through geology and evolution, and radioactive decay, that the Earth was over four billion years old rather than a few thousand as religious history taught; and Hubble's figures suggested that the Universe was only two billion years old!

Henrietta Leavitt had started a new way of looking at the Universe: she revealed the first set of standard candles. It was Walter Baade and Fritz Zwicky who discovered the next sort: supernovae.

Zwicky and Baade were close colleagues in the 1930s, but at the advent of the Second World War, some scientific friendships fell apart (the most famous being that of Heisenberg and Bohr) and theirs was one of them. But they both made outstanding contributions. Zwicky predicted gravitational lensing and dark matter, and Baade identified Population I and Population II stars, which taught us a lot about galaxies. But they had time to separate the already known novae from the much more impressive supernovae, and to predict the neutron star - the complete collapse of an object that had reached the Chandrasekhar Limit.

Chandrasekhar, known as Chandra, had predicted a strange but inevitable law of white dwarfs. A white dwarf is what is left of a star once it has burned all the hydrogen fuel in its core (the hydrogen at the edges is too far away and too cold), and it has stopped shining - though it will remain extremely hot for billions of years. However, should this white dwarf have a mass more than 1.4 solar masses (a solar mass is the mass of the Sun - about 2,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg, if you care) its gravity will be stronger than that of the repulsion between electrons which basically gives everything its solidity. This idea was not widely accepted, and he could not predict what would happen. Baade and Zwicky, with more observations and probably more knowledge of nuclear physics under their belts, predicted that protons and electrons would fuse into neutrons. This gives off a staggering quantity of energy, and because electron orbits make up virtually all the volume of an atom, the white dwarf shrinks to a tiny, unimaginably dense object only about 20km across.

A neutron star is what is left after a supernova. (Supernova 1987A, on whose rings the Galaxy Zoo logo is based, has confused astronomers by not so far appearing to have left one.) As with Cepheids, there are different types of supernovae. The most important difference is type I and type II. Both basically involve the collapse of the star's core. (Stars don't automatically collapse when their cores are over the Chandrasekhar limit because of the furious heat of nuclear fusion maintaining an outward pressure.) Type II is the explosion of a star between nine and and up to fifty times heavier than the Sun.

A type II supernova still has an outer layer. A type I supernova does not. These are divided into the subclasses of type Ia, Ib and Ic. Type Ia is the collapse of a white dwarf that has accumulated more material since the star's outer layers were puffed off into space. Types Ib and c are the core collapse of a star, making them more similar to a type II explosion, but their outer layers do not contain hydrogen. Type Ia supernovae have a very special property: the transition from white dwarf to neutron star always happens at precisely the same mass - 1.4 Suns, the Chandrasekhar limit.

And because they are of the same mass, the explosions are of exactly the same brightness. Therefore, they are an ideal standard candle. And because they can outshine entire galaxies, these candles can be seen billions of light years away.

It was examining those that are fairly far away that led to the Nobel prize winning discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. By "far away" I mean with a redshift of under 1, so not exactly at the edge of the observable Universe: far enough to get a really large scale of what is going on, but not so very far that we're looking back at ancient history. Near enough to give a picture of modern times. Naturally that discovery is still being questioned, but the papers (Perlmutter et al and Riess et al) were extremely thorough - indeed, thorough enough to be held up as examples worth learning from, as well as critiquing, as part of my course!

What they found was that the supernovae were fainter than we would expect. And because this is, basically, a local effect - though one over huge scales - it means that expansion is going faster than we thought it is. We know that inflation, unfathomably rapid expansion, took place when the Universe was less than a second old. But we had been assuming the Universe's expansion was slowing down ever since - like a ball thrown up into the air, ready to hover for a moment, and then crash through the greenhouse windows or into a paddling pool or similar.

It turns out the ball has a booster rocket, which is dark energy. The density of dark energy never changes - but, as the volume of of the Universe is ever increasing, the density of matter decreases all the time. There isn't much dark energy about per given volume. But there's more all the time. And we found all this out through standard candles.

Just how standard is a standard candle? Science is never as straightforward as would be convenient - though that only contrives to make it even more interesting!

Not all Type Ia supernovae are made quite the same way - or, to put it in more scientific terms, they may have different progenitors. A white dwarf may start off as under 1.4 solar masses, but accumulate enough material to pass that limit. There are two ways it can do this, and both ways are through starting off as a binary star system. Its companion may still be a star, and it may drag off its outer layers. Or its companion may also be a white dwarf, and they might merge.

(It used to be predicted every so often in astronomy that a star might grow by passing through a nebula, but in practice nebulae are far too rarefied for this to be more than negligible - and the star's stellar wind drives off surrounding gas anyway. Also, two white dwarves merging will not make a type Ia supernova if the both their masses add up to less than the Chandrasekhar limit. If that happens, if they have enough hydrogen, they will become a star again!)

This little theoretical paper predicts that the "single degenerate" supernova - the star plus whit dwarf - will explode in the direction of the host star, and contain hydrogen from the star in its spectrum; while the "double degenerate" supernova - the two white dwarves - will have a different shape and contain no hydrogen. (They are called "degenerate" because the term "electron degeneracy" refers to "degenerate matter", i.e. matter crushed to a point where it only stops being a neutron star because of the electrons holding it apart.) It predicts, in the latter scenario, that the lighter white dwarf will break up and form a ring around the heavier - like Saturn's rings - and the resulting explosion, when it occurs, "may be expected to be axially symmetric, but predominantly of the form m = 2. That is, there is an additional reﬂective symmetry about the equator. Here the character of the explosion changes monotonically as the viewing angle moves from the pole to the equator." (I think I know roughly what that means, but I'm not quite sure how to describe it! Also, we do not yet know whether or not that paper's predictions are correct. Science will, hopefully, find out.)

It also depends on what the white dwarf is made of, as pointed out by Robert Gagliano, who is one of the major posters on Supernova Zoo. Even if the explosions have roughly the same characteristics, their spectra will not, for white dwarfs may be made of carbon, sometimes oxygen, and may or may not also contain hydrogen and helium, which may or may not be ionised - all these affect the spectrum.

Finally, and to me the most interesting point of all: as this paper points out, although there aren't necessarily two distinct types of Type Ia supernovae - there is more a continuum (like galaxy shape, really) - it is established that spiral galaxies tend to host brighter supernovae than elliptical galaxies. This paper, from zookeeperKevin, points out that it is correlated with a galaxy's starforming rate. One of Galaxy Zoo's great finds was about galaxies and colour. "Roses are red, spirals are blue, or at least so we thought until Galaxy Zoo": spirals tend to live alone, where there is plenty of free cold gas, and therefore are blue with star formation. Ellipticals tend to live in clusters, where there is no free cold gas, and are therefore "red and dead". I've written more about this here. The exciting exceptions are blue ellipticals and red spirals. What, I would like to know, are their supernovae like?

A normal red elliptical, normal blue spiral, less normal blue elliptical, and less normal red spiral, taken from the Galaxy Zoo Forum.

Now, if all that fried your brain, go and soak it in the music of a Supernova Sonata, or read Alice Allen adapting William Blake to the supernova.

Cults, laws, and free speech

2011-10-14T23:00:00.004+01:00

Cardiff Skeptics in the Pub turned a year old on 20th September. The day before - it also being a Monday - we held its birthday party, with crisps, cakes, balloons and two very special guests: David Allen Green and John Dixon to revisit #Stupidscientology.

Thank you @wmjohn for this photo. Are there any more?

It was a good time to be all insane and swoony over the astonishing fact that our baby group had launched a whole year ago - that had been a pretty good day too. Thanks to all the speakers who've been so far: Simon Perry, Ash Pryce, Andrew Holding, Simon Singh, Hayley Stevens, Deborah Hyde, Jon Ronson, Trystan Swale, James Onen, obviously David and John, Rhys Morgan who's every so often had another news snippet for us, and the great comedy cast of July, whose names for which my memory is embarrassingly incomplete. And the people who've helped with lifts and chair stacking and spreading the word, generally being enthusiastic and supportive, and the audience for keeping us going, and the lady who brought along some profiteroles!

Appreciation expressed, to I hope the smiles of those receiving it and not too much boredom from everyone else (Skeptics leaders love it when you visited one of their events!) - we visited the subject that had got John famous. It may look like an idiotic piece of red tape, political correctness gone mad etc on the surface, but the implications were surprisingly sinister.

David has written a brilliantly detailed blog post about it here; I recommend a read. In short, John, in between tweets about what he was up to in London, had tweeted that he was hurrying past a Church of Scientology so the stupid didn't rub off. A while later, a scientology Twitter account began following him. Well over six months after this, someone complained to the council about the tweet, mentioning, I might add, that they thought there might have been two other tweets they objected to but they could now no longer find them on Google. It was a great many months more before his fellow councillors could make the decision what to do. In the end, they did not take it to court, though John gave us the impression that he might rather have enjoyed himself if they had.

John defended himself with great humour and sense: someone having attempted to make him look a bigot, he was able to raise awareness of quite a lot of unsavoury information (links provided by me, not him) about the Church of Scientology that made "stupid" look like the kindest possible description. You might enjoy this video of him standing up to Kirsty Wark, and being much politer than she was in her attempt to make him appear rude. David's knowledge of law gave him expertise in tackling this issue of free speech defense versus "bigotry" accusation, with weapons I would never have thought of - for example, in his criticism of the document by the Ombudsman, he did not mention the author, because "you can't defame a document". John actually skyrocketed to fame whilst in a tedious two-hour meeting. His mobile was switched off, and he had no knowledge that David had brought the case to the country's awareness. When he switched it on, he had 700-odd new followers and umpteen tweets and voicemails waiting for him.

This is of course far from the first time David has got involved with an issue like this. Not scientology, but a case where the law is being treated as a weapon, rather than a means to get justice.

"The Church of Scientology has as much right as anyone else to assert and protect their ultimate legal rights," he writes. "But it is misconceived and illiberal for litigation (or the threat of litigation) to be used by itself as a weapon."

L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology, is quoted as saying:

"The purpose of the [law] suit is to harass and discourage rather than win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly."

In other words, the point is not winning or losing. As Simon Singh found out, even if you win, you have lost thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, and years of your life. Very few people in their right mind would take that on if there was any way out. The way out is to back down, to apologise, to retract all your statements, to make out that the individual or organisation suing you has nothing to be ashamed of - and your peers will self-censor their own work, too.

I had something like this happen to me 11 years ago, albeit on a much smaller scale. A boss in whose employment I had been extremely unhappy (the guy I describe at the end of this post, if you're interested) took it upon himself to tell the company treasurer I had said I didn't want to be paid for my last two weeks of employment at his firm - at least, that is what she told me when I telephoned to enquire. When I wrote to the firm to challenge this, I was fobbed off for 3 months (the 3 months in which an employee must begin an industrial tribunal), then suddenly accused of theft on the grounds that I had sent an e-mail to a friend with verbal permission. I was informed that there were 4 logged occasions on which I had been forbidden to use the Internet, and that two other employees had wasted four man-hours searching for any viruses I might have allowed into the company's computers, time I was being charged for.

The charges were blatantly ridiculous, since other employees had routinely used e-mails and often sent them to me, one of my duties was using the Internet, the boss was famous for never logging anything or even being able to use a computer, and he had even claimed that each man-hour cost the company £65 after I had spent the best part of a year daily logging man-hours which were £45. And, as Acas told him, it is illegal to deduct pay from an employee under such circumstances; you have to bring a case against them first. If anyone tried this nonsense on me now, I would laugh in their face. But I was only eighteen, I was extremely poorly, I was inexperienced, and I had spent months being bullied and humiliated by him and had had about as much as I could stand. Now obliged to fight for myself when I was least able to do so, I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau (now being cut all over the place), and although I did not win any compensation I was given back most - not all - of the money I was owed. But it took five months, by which time my sickness had become long-term. He never did drop his threat of suing me. My sickness and the worry that he might do it went on to ruin university for me and whenever I start any new employment I still have an undercurrent of alarm that something like this might happen again. Frankly, if I could have foregone my lost wages and allowed the wrong thing to happen, in exchange for having my health and confidence back, I know which I'd have chosen.

(I would love to name the individual and company that did this - and I bet I'm not their only victim - but sadly, I do not dare do so . . .)

The mere threat of litigation is a massive weapon. For me it was merely "civil action", minor but bad enough. For someone like Simon Singh, or Hardeep Singh, or anyone who someone with as much money as Hubbard had to use the law as a weapon as much as he pleased, the consequences could be much, much worse.

The law, there in principle to do a good and essential thing, can also ruin the innocent. That's why I admire David. He dedicates huge amounts of time and energy, often free, to fighting against that, and defending those to whom it happens.

But that's not the only way the law can be used for personal benefit rather than as it is intended.

A few days ago, Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer. I've never been able to afford any kind of Apple product, but the effect they've had has really changed things - there's an app for Galaxy Zoo, for instance. The Curious Astronomer and the mother of a special needs child whose life was transformed by Apple have written about that. Sadly, certain people affiliated with Westboro Baptist Church were not so graceful.

This piece of utterly hateful loser-ness circulated the Internet quite a lot shortly after Steve Jobs's death. (She then claimed that God created the iPhone purely so she could insult its founder . . .)

Even though I didn't know much about Steve Jobs, and I'm certainly not an uncritical fan of Apple, I exploded with indignation when I read this. Death hurts. How can anyone use the occasion of someone's death to pick on their relatives? As I've just described, to be kicked when down makes you feel desperate. Why do Jobs's relatives deserve to be made to feel desperate when they're saying goodbye, already knowing the world is watching them?

How, I tweeted, was this kind of harrassment even legal?

I was then immediately challenged by someone I hadn't come across before: Donalbaion, a mature student in Physics. He pointed out that I was arguing against free speech. Simple as that. To deny Westboro Baptist Church the right to harrass the grieving was anti-free speech.

Initially, of course, I was even angrier. Honestly, who would be suffering from a deprivation of their rights more: the bullies, who would be told "No you can't upset these people", or, say, someone who might have to hold a funeral in secret (and therefore deny many others the chance to mourn) if they didn't want to be psychologically attacked? What kind of freedom is it when you can't even have a funeral in peace?

But of course, anger alone isn't much of an argument. What would be the consequence if Westboro Baptist Church was not allowed to exercise its freedom of speech by picking on grieving people?

Donalbaion tweeted me this review of the book "When the Nazis Came to Skokie". In summary: in 1977, Skokie was an area in which a sixth of the residents were Holocaust survivors and their near families. In this very area, a neo-Nazi group wished to demonstrate. The residents fought against this, citing not only the worry that violence might erupt from the demonstration, but their right to live without intimidation from a group who presumably supported the horrors they'd gone through. But on the other hand, to refuse the neo-Nazis a right to protest would violate freedom of speech. The review concludes: "Strum's book shows that freedom of speech must be defended even when the beneficiaries of that defense are far from admirable individuals."

In other words, once someone (say) took out an injunction against Westboro Baptist Church, who else might lose free speech as a consequence? It could be anyone, for any reason. It's just too dangerous.

But that's not the end of the story. All that agonising over human rights, knowing that people are going to be bullied and degraded - that is, according to this piece of writing, precisely what they want us to do. Go and read it now.

Apparently, this is not about beliefs at all. Whether or not they honestly think God agrees with all their statements about who is going to Hell, their aim is that someone else will get angry enough to try and violate their rights somehow. And then they can sue them.

As "El_Camino_SS" has written:

I saw that he was way too calm and collected for what he looked like in the media. I noticed that he never made personal statements against a person, which is verbal assault, and an out against a lawsuit. Also, for a religious fanatic, a group of people who pride themselves on personal attacks, he was running a protest so terribly by the books that I was impressed by it. He will not bait a person, ever. He will not make personal attacks. He will make blanket statements. He will look at a person in the crowd that he thinks is gay, walk over to his stack of signs, pull out the appropriate, well designed, easily read, laminated bright board, and hold it up and loudly proclaim that "gays are going to hell" or some such nonsense, and make eye contact, but he will never cross the line of telling that person that they're going to hell. That would be the part that would screw up the lawsuit. He just wants to get them after him, but wants to appear utterly blameless for damages.

. . . They run too tight of a ship to slip up, and at that point, I realized that the objective of the group was not anything religious at all.

Assuming the above is true - and here I do not claim to know for sure - this seems to me another misuse of law, and it's even more cynical than the type of misuse about which Skeptics here in the UK have heard so much. It's not even, strictly speaking, misusing the law. It's not using archaic silly laws that are set up to benefit the already rich and powerful. It's using a hallmark of civilisation simply to try and get money out of people.

And frankly, I'm not sure if there's anything we can do. With the first type, we can sign the petition to change the UK's outdated and embarrassing libel laws. With this type? We can't change that law, because that way almost everybody would lose their rights, rather than in the above case, where so many would gain them. After all, a civilised society does not remove its welfare state because a handful of people abuse it. And Donalbaion was right to point out that we cannot put free speech to a majority at risk because a handful of people abuse that.

I suppose, in this case, that if anything can be done, it could be a grassroots, done-by-the-people effect. For example, stronger people are less bothered by banners which display the words "God" and "Hate" in the same breath - so a campaign to give people strength in some way. Perhaps similar banners could be waved, saying something like "Civilised people don't target the grieving" - using the Phelps' tactics of blanket statements and never coming across as personal. Just showing solidarity. Bringing a society to a point where it no longer cares. Of course, you good folks in the States may already be doing that; I honestly don't know. My post is about law and free speech, not about any particular church.

And there are things that to some extent make up for the worst. For instance, according to that journalist's post, at least the grieving cannot be verbally attacked, and that these folks only stay for a maximum of 30 minutes. And, more importantly, they are a tiny minority. Take a peep at this Apple store in Chicago (photo taken by Arfon from the Zooniverse). We may not all be Steve Jobs, but if your rights have been violated, in most cases in civilised countries it will only be a few people who've done it, rather than an entire society. Often, most people are on your side.

Astrophysics, here I come

2011-10-08T02:00:00.000+01:00

Whew! I'm here!

"Here" is London, the city I was born in and still think of as home. Through a friend of a friend I've found some lovely lodgings just outside the North Circular and am getting used to cooking for one again. All of a sudden there are things going on all around me. There are kids playing with remote controlled cars in the streets, there are buses and trains for which I seldom have to wait more than one or two minutes, there are endless food shops, there is shouting and laughter, there are beautiful parks, there are such a huge variety of people, there are all these friends I can meet without travelling for hours. And there is Queen Mary University and a course which, so far, looks as if it's going to be the course of my dreams.

Over the years of running the Galaxy Zoo forum and getting more and more interested in astronomy, I became increasingly aware of the gaps in my knowledge - the more I knew, the more I found there was to know for which knew I needed some training. Absorbing facts is one thing, but mathematics and computer code and the language I call "journalese" (in other words, the very dry style in which scientific papers are written) is quite another. My knowledge contained some of the gorgeous constructions of science, but without the nuts and bolts to hold them together or build on them. The trouble was that neither my undergraduate degree in Environmental Sciences nor my attempt at teaching had been any encouragement to study any more. I had long stopped thinking of myself as academically minded. So I had thrust the idea into the back of my mind and it stayed there for years, until one tedious morning driving to a pretty useless course I was on for work when the idea of doing a masters in astrophysics suddenly popped into my head like a massive bright gold light being switched on.

At work later that day I snuck onto Google and by that evening I knew which course I wanted to do: this one. There weren't very many others, to be honest (at least not without also doing an undergraduate degree), but this seemed both the friendliest and the best tailoured to what I wanted. I began filling out the form, but procrastinated, worried about money and unable to get hold of one of the referees I had in mind. Then it was off to Boston for the 218th AAS Conference and that was it.

That conference was one of the happiest times of my life. I was invited into what turned out to be a waterfall of astrophysics, flooding me from all sides. Everywhere I went there was more. And miraculously, I found I actually understood a lot of it. Not a large percentage. But I did begin to notice that what I wasn't understanding was the jargon, the mathematics, the acronyms. The concepts themselves were fine. And many astronomers didn't understand the acronyms either: astronomers were specialists, so a cosmologist for example might be bemused by the many Kepler reports on extrasolar planets - and they were quite happy to tell me so. Even more encouragingly, several astronomers wanted to talk to me at their work, and were quite happy to explain things to me in detail. Since I was writing an article for the Astronomy Now magazine, and because the older I get the less self-conscious I become, I never worried about putting my hand up in seminars or press conferences to ask questions. And the upshot of that was that I heard the same thing from umpteen genuine scientists: "Where do you study?" and upon hearing that I was not a student, "Oh, you must do a PhD! Your questions are really good - you've obviously got a great aptitude for this subject!"

(It's really hard work, not aptitude, but we are often reminded that the former is what really makes the difference. For instance, I also used to be one of the worst public speakers I know. I just curled up and mumbled. Seriously. Now, due to repeatedly bludgeoning myself with the task, public speaking is one of the things I'm best at. In fact this was one way I reasoned myself into going ahead and applying: if you can run the Galaxy Zoo Forum, co-found Cardiff Skeptics and learn public speaking, I told myself, you can conquer mathematics. We'll see in the next few weeks if I was right . . .)

This autumn, I'm studying Cosmology and Research Methods. The latter is quite a new course and there is some worry that it seems "soft" and is somewhat hard to teach. It's actually incredibly valuable - everything anyone studying science needs, everything I wish I'd been told as an undergraduate, everything you need to know if you want to back up some claim you've made (or debunk someone else's). The material we are reading for it is also anything but "soft"! Next term will be Astrophysical Plasmas, and Extrasolar Planets and Astrophysical Disks, both of which sound pretty mysterious! Next year will be the Galaxy, the Solar System, Stellar Structure and Evolution, and Electromagnetic Radiation in Astrophysics - these are all more familiar to me and I can't wait to take them, but since it will also be my dissertation that year, I'm glad to be getting the difficult things out of the way now.

It's a part-time course because for one thing I want to go slowly and for another and MSc course is expensive, as is living in London. So I'm also looking for a job. If you happen to know of any science or science communication related jobs, please let me know. Science communication would of course be my ideal, but I realise I can't be choosy! As well as astronomy I have some background in Environmental Science and Chemistry, plus teaching English and Science, plus other supervisory roles, plus an awful lot of admin. Oh, and some experience of working with vulnerable people - which has been the subject of a lot of my outraged-at-injustice posts the last year or so. Oh, and I'm a very good proofreader and editor. (This is not a post in which I'm going to bother to be modest.)

I'm hoping to get myself together and get blogging more; it's been a topsy-turvy year and I haven't done much for some time. Meanwhile, because I owe so much to Galaxy Zoo for getting me into astrophysics, and because it's so much more fun to feel as if I'm doing the course for hundreds of other people as well as me, and because it'll make sure I myself keep up to date, I'm writing about what I'm learning here on the Galaxy Zoo Forum. Please come along to ask questions and join the lively discussions it's prompting!

Apologies, also, for not writing an Ada Lovelace Day post. Today is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women in science, and women who have influenced us. Can I make the excuse that I've been busy starting off on what might one day make me, myself, a female scientist? (I don't know if I will aim to do that or not yet. Let's just say that it looks a lot more possible than it used to.) Carolyn Porco recently tweeted a list of inventions you probably didn't know were made by women, and I also want to make a tribute to Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who died a few days ago. Her loss to the world is great: she has done amazing things for women, for politics and for the environment; you can read more about her at the Green Belt Movement.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, and may neither men nor women ever be put off from learning!

Why do stars live in galaxies?

2011-09-14T02:25:00.004+01:00

Coma Cluster from SDSS

This post is dedicated to David Allen Green, who asked me after seeing my PubSci talk why the Universe is full of galaxies - stars living in "cities" - rather than stars being evenly spread around, so the Universe is one big galaxy.

People often remark that the Big Bang sounds like an explosion, or is described as an explosion - and that is a violent, chaotic, destructive event, so why did it produce so much order? I have written about the Big Bang itself in more detail here. David knew this was not the case. His question is, in more scientific terms, this: if it produced so much order, and everything expanded - why did it expand with some areas being denser than others?

I'm not going to answer in the traditional way a scientist would expect. I have a tendency to answer things by telling the story in the opposite order from the traditional way. Rather than starting with the Big Bang, I'm going to start with stars.

The Big Bang did not emit stars. It did not even emit atoms. All this stuff came later - when things had cooled and been able to clump. Paradoxically, a star cannot form from hot gas, only cold, because the atoms (or molecules, or ionised atoms and electrons) of a hot gas or plasma are whizzing around too fast to be able to stick together and condense.

So, how can gas cool down? There not being fridges readily available in outer space, it basically needs to be shielded from radiation. This happens in dust clouds. We can't see the centre of our own Milky Way Galaxy because of all the dust in the way. Longer wavelength radiation can get through a lot of it, but not optical (visible light). Where the dust or gas is thick enough, it can cool. And that's when it gets affected by gravity. It contracts.

Star formation typically occurs in clumps, turning the whole area apparently blue. Take a look at these two galaxies and you'll see where the star formation is occurring:

Galaxy Zoo 1 tutorial

In the spiral galaxy (left), the stars are moving in the same direction. In fact, they move into and out of dense areas, rather like cars moving into and out of traffic jams. This allows regular shock waves to pass through gas clouds, triggering their gravitational collapse and setting off star formation. In the elliptical, on the other hand, each star is going on its own route (see here - click the arrow on the right - for some rather silly star orbits which still remain stable, like a ball falling back to the Earth after being thrown upwards). This leads to the gas being in pretty much a mess, too. There's nowhere it can comfortably clump and cool without being disturbed for a while. Indeed there are no gas clouds left - an elliptical is known for having used up all its gas and having no fuel left. (There is some, but it is too hot and thinly spread to form stars.)

When stars do form, they often start in clusters like the Pleiades:

Digitised Sky Survey; Wiki

The nearest area to us where star formation like this is occurring now is in Orion's Belt. Next time you see the familiar hunter and those three stars lined up, you can relish the knowledge that although it looks dark around them, there's a churning gas cloud there and a great deal going on inside it - APOD has a gorgeous picture collection here.

Star formation stops in the cluster once the stellar wind from the young stars blows off the rest of the gas; we know the Pleiades are young because there is still a lot of gas surrounding them. Due to the gravity of stars in their local neighbourhoods, these young clusters then tend to drift apart. While in Boston I heard one theory that we may have captured some of our comets and even planets from our sister stars in the Sun's infancy. It was an odd talk . . .

Anyway - this was not the question, but I hope it demonstrates that star formation is not straightforward, and that things need to happen to get it going. I suppose one could say space needs to settle down and get ready.

It does demonstrate why stars don't live outside galaxies: basically, they need to form from gas clouds, and any self-respecting gas cloud that happens to collapse in space won't just generate one star at a time - it'll generate lots! The closest we can get to these is an irregular galaxy. These are clumps of star formation without a local supermassive black hole, and without a defined structure such as spiral or elliptical. They are also far smaller than the big monster we live in and the sort the Zoo has been studying. (This is why Richard's project is so exciting from a purely scientific as well as a citizen science point of view - well, duh, if it wasn't good science, it wouldn't be good citizen science either. But you know what I mean. He has already found that irregular galaxies are much more starforming even than beautiful blue spirals.)

Irregular galaxy from SDSS

So, stars form when gas clouds collapse. And a good thing too, or we wouldn't be here - not only does the Sun give us light and heat and keep the Earth in a stable orbit, but it's nuclear fusion in stars that creates heavy enough atoms and molecules to form rocks and iron and organic molecules and water and so on that are needed to create life. (As Carl Sagan put it in Pale Blue Dot, it's funny that we consider this the anthropic principle when it might just as well be called "the lithic principle", that the Universe was primed to create rocks, too.)

But why should there be clouds of gas in the first place? If the Big Bang sent everything out in its own direction, and the force of the explosion was equal, sending everything in a sphere (assuming there are three dimensions - in any case, sending equal quantities of everything in equal directions) - then everything should be the same space apart.

Picture a given area of atoms, say of hydrogen. Each is the same weight and has the same gravity. Each is equally spaced from all the others. Each is pulling on the ones around it - so each feels a force from all of its neighbours in every direction. Like a tug of war whose sides are entirely evenly matched, nothing goes anywhere.

But the Universe did not expand quite evenly. Its evenness - its homogeneity - is very, very nearly complete. Especially after inflation. When we look back at the time before any atom was cool enough to get near another, the differences were less than one part in ten thousand.

That time is called "the dark ages" and it's the limit of how far back we can see. There's something in the way. And that's another sort of cloud - or to be exact, a plasma. A plasma is a seething mass of ionised atoms and their electrons - atoms whose electrons have been torn off. (There's probably no net electric charge, since for every negative electron zooming around, there's a positively charged atom somewhere.) The Sun is a plasma. And the one at the edge of the visible Universe is called the Cosmic Microwave Background.

We can't see through it because its edge marks the end of a time in the Universe when it was so hot that light couldn't get through it. (Recall that as you look deep into space, you look back in time. When we look at the Cosmic Microwave Background, we look at a time over 13 billion years ago. When you look at the Sun, you look at a moment 8 minutes ago - and hurt your eyes, incidentally, so I don't recommend that.)

Space was so hot and dense then that whenever a photon of light went anywhere, it promptly collided with an atom or an electron and was sent off elsewhere. It would have been like looking through a thick cloud - or, indeed, the Sun itself, where the same thing happens. (This is why the light that shines down on us is millions of years old. It took that long to escape.) But once the Universe had cooled enough, electrons were able to bind with protons and neutrons, to form neutral atoms. At that point light could get through. We cannot look back any further than that boundary; we have to look at the rest of the Universe and work out what happened before that point.

The COBE satellite, which launched in 1989, made a discovery about the Cosmic Microwave Background that explained our existence: some parts of it were hotter than others. Just a bit. And you've read earlier what hot particles do. They whizz around, they bounce off each other - they don't clump together as easily as cold ones. So everywhere in the Cosmic Microwave Background that was a tiny bit cooler got that tiny bit denser.

And that's where gravity set in. That's where the clouds of hydrogen and helium started to fall together. I have yet to read an astronomy book that doesn't jokingly relate this to capitalism - that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - in other words, any area with just a bit of density will, over time, attract more and more material. And, conversely, the empty areas get empty. Marcus Chown has written a whole book about how the Cosmic Microwave Background was discovered, and the tiny, tiny fluctuations in it - Afterglow of Creation.

(I once asked Chris if heat alone could account for the fluctuations. Things were very hot then, and as in Brownian motion - the random motion of water molecules that kicked a pollen grain around and therefore allowed Einstein to demonstrate that atoms did exist, and measure their size - there would be a certain amount of randomness: particles moving now one way, now another, like waves on a lake. Would that alone be enough to account for the fluctuations? Chris said no. They were caused by something more, some other irregularity in the Big Bang. I don't know what.)

Stars and galaxies soon formed; the furthest - that is, the earliest we can find - you can read about here. Look at the Hubble Deep Field, a region of space containing vast numbers of very early galaxies, and you'd think that all that uniformity you'd expect from the Big Bang hadn't happened at all.

NASA; Wiki

And yet . . . David was also not wrong. Not at all.

Before writing this blog post, I dug out Horizons of Cosmology by Joseph Silk, which Astronomy Now had kindly sent me in exchange for a review, and which prompted this blog post. I thought it would probably remind me of a few useful things, and it did.

Galaxies live in clusters. Our own Milky Way does - and it is steadily zooming towards a larger cluster, even while the Milky Way and Andromeda circle each other, ready to merge. And clusters live in superclusters. Superclusters are the largest objects in the Universe. They are like bright filaments through the blackness of space. An accident and emergency doctor and dedicated galaxy classifier once remarked to me that they look remarkably like neurones in the brain.

NASA and Universe Today

Silk describes some of the deep sky surveys, the search to understand inflation and the minute differences in temperature that seeded the unevenness, and goes on:

"The larger the region, the more the universe approaches homogeneity. On average, the universe is completely homogenous. There is no dense centre, no rarified boundary region. Yet everywhere there are galaxies. In some regions, there are slightly more than the average, and in others, slightly fewer. We describe these variations as fluctuations in the average density of the Universe. Some are positive, some are negative.

When we measure the strength of the density fluctuations, in other words, we find that the overdensity or underdensity is smaller with increasing scale . . ."

Float away from our world, and look down at it: it will seem huge. Further, and it will shrink, and so too will the Sun, melding into our local group of stars. Later will come our Galaxy's spiral arm, then the galaxy itself. Then the cluster. Then strings of superclusters . . . the further you go, the more you see, the more similarity you will see. It's like when you break the world down to see atoms, and then electrons and quarks. Nature is simple. The Universe is vast. And I love it.

(You may notice I have created a silly new hashtag called Fizzicks Questions. I hope to answer more - and tell you about some good answers I have been given to my own astronomy questions - in the future.)

Shut up and be grateful - that's an order

2011-09-13T16:25:00.004+01:00

I confess I'm a regular reader of the Virginia Ironside column at the Independent. The dilemmas are often interesting and indeed have given me ideas for stories, as well as prodding thoughts about real people I meet. However, I don't always agree with what Virginia says, and today's dilemma was no exception. A lady with osteoporosis in many joints is understandably infuriated with people being made anxious by her slowness and asks how to get them to calm down without being rude. Virginia responded with a blast of accusations of rudeness and being "impossible to please" - "people like you irritate me". Other letters published were all to the effect that the person writing in was basically an ungrateful cow.

Since nobody had any practical advice to offer, I gave mine. I also thought of blogging about how all these accusations completely missed the point of the dilemma. About how fussing, while better than the horrific prejudice thousands of disabled people face, is not the solution. And about regardless of how well a fusser means, the questioner had to live with this situation, and was asking about how to live it better - and being made to feel dreadful is not going to help her or anyone else. However, I don't have to, because BrennyBaby at NewsJiffy has already done it for me - many thanks!

(Related post: Blaming the vulnerable, from back in January.)

Update:

It got a lot more interesting than that. I did not really expect the writer of the dilemma to see my comment - but not only did she see it, she's posted her original letter and got a really good discussion going right here, so please check out the comments. And please join in!

On a time and place for pain

2011-07-30T17:22:00.008+01:00

Many years ago I awoke very early, surrounded by sleeping people. I was on a week-long retreat with the creative writing society at university; I had just finished my degree. Curled up silently, feet away, was the guy I was mildly interested in at the time, in the arms of a girl whose arms were always covered with angry red slashes. I'd found out too late that she didn't like talking about it, which put me in a terrible bind: I ached to listen, to try and help her, and it seemed unforgiveable to ignore them, yet that boundary was one she had asked me to respect.

It was a wonderful week, but one in an unhappy time, for various reasons such as my then poor health and generally being young, with romances that weren't meant to work out, not working out. That sort of thing.

I couldn't bear to stay in that room. I crept downstairs. It was summer, so already light. There were more people downstairs; there were 13 of us in a house for about 5. The kitchen was empty, though. On the windowsill there were huge boxes of books. One was called "Cutting". I picked it up. I've never forgotten it.

I don't know how good, really, the book is. I know nothing about psychology and I have the feeling the author, a psychiatrist named Steven Levenkron, was writing about his own theories and I don't know whether or not they were tested. I could go and do a bunch of research now, but this is the wrong place to go into that or the issue of self-harm, which other poeple have written about far better than I could. Because that's not the point right now. I wanted to write about an atypical case in the book.

A 12-year-old girl was very good at gym, and seemed to be constantly training, always pushing herself harder. Sometimes she had an accident on the equipment, which hurt, but she would recover and go on. Her gym teacher grew concerned and called her parents, however, when injuries began to appear on her body that could not be accounted for by any accident he'd seen.

It turned out that the girl was used to the fact that after hard exercise, her body ached, and she had heard that that was a sign she was really pushing herself and on the way to success. Feeling desperate for more success - due to ambition or due to feeling undervalued out of the gym or feeling honour bound to please, whatever it was - she had started inflicting pain on herself, confusing that kind of pain with the by-product of hard training.

Now before we start shaking our heads and sighing pitifully and thinking how dreadfully obvious it is that two forms of pain should not be confused, let's remind ourselves how similar they often seem - and how much we need to reassure ourselves that the productive kind is worth going through. Isn't "no pain, no gain" a common saying? I once had an immensely illuminating discussion with a particle physicist at Sussex University. For some reason he and I and a few other students were talking about mathematics and how far removed it is from society. (I could not more recommend this wonderful essay by Paul Lockhart on that.) This physicist's remark was: "With so much television these days, and things like that, people think they should understand something instantly, and they must be stupid if they don't, so they should do something else. But mathematics is like a language, or a musical instrument. You need to practice."

Although the first bit sounds a bit Susan Greenfield ish, his words resonated with both my own education, and the curriculum I was supposed to feed to the children I later taught. In short: here is the learning objective for today, all of you must get it by the end of the lesson, and we will move on. No allowance for children who might whizz through five or six of such "objectives". Nor any allowance for topics, for skills, for complexities that needed a long story, that required several lessons - and often bits from apparently unrelated subjects - until it all hung together.

He had a point. If you don't get maths immediately, you're encouraged to stick to arts subjects. That's the attitude that, if many of us want to get anywhere, we must fight. The fighting can be painful. So can the practicing and practicing. Those of us who come to university to do a science degree, having done the kind of maths lessons that address something for one lesson, prepare you for the exam, and then leave you to forget. You have to make up for all that. It can hurt.

It leads to a schism of two cultures. The people who feel let down by the get-things-instantly approach foster their own reactive culture of work-yourself-like-mad-to-make-up-for-it. And a reactive, they-did-this-to-me-and-it-was-really-damaging approach to things can go a bit into overdrive.

Similarly, something being "hard to understand" can often be labelled as "and therefore, correct", along with "if you don't understand it, you just need your brain to work harder". Alternative medicine proponents use very warped logic to seem deep. Indeed, they use what they think is the language of scientists, and borrow the catchphrases of brave fighters, to look like lone, persecuted proponents of truth.

The fact that their logic is "hard to understand" does not make it correct. Something being hard to understand may mean that it is hard to understand, but important and worthwhile - quantum mechanics, for example. It may also mean there isn't anything there to understand.

Similarly, someone I used to know got very angry when I responded to his constant nagging that I became a devout Christian with a few choice quotes from the Bible, inspired by a few handy hints like this. When he told me that God was all about peace, and anyone who engaged in war was directly disobeying God, I reminded him of Numbers 31 7-18. "Where are you getting all this from?" he demanded. "You're obviously not looking this up as you go along." (For the record, I do not usually go around upsetting people by pointing all this stuff out until I've been severely provoked.)

The crux of the matter - excuse the pun - was that he would end up by acknowledging, "Yes, some of these things are hard to understand. But God is Love." Apparently, I was supposed to twist my brain around to equate war crimes and genocide with love. It was difficult, but a mature, thoughtful person could manage it.

Sorry, I don't think I'm being immature or thoughtless to refuse to equate war crimes and genocide with love. I don't label that as "hard to understand". I label it as "barbarity that is an integral part of an important and sometimes beautiful historic document, whose barbarity should not be overlooked or embraced".

But many people do feel that the "hard to understand" actually is maturity and depth. They have worked hard to find peace with it, and they feel that I should, too.

Maybe it's not the same thing as the pain. But maybe it is. Maybe feeling that you've made a difficult, complex leap, in whatever form, feels like an achievement - when it might simply be that you've made a difficult, complex leap into a much worse place than you were before you made it.

The reason I'm writing all this is to make a request to many teachers, employers, and other leaders out there. Not anyone I'm currently working for or with, all of whom (and I am very lucky to be able to say this) are wonderful.

Take a man whose company I worked in when I was 18. He believed himself to be naturally of infallible honesty, but irrevocably corrupted by a cruel world. He had had to adapt. He had had to learn to exploit and deceive. He had faced the pain of watching his real self die. He had to, he felt, charge a client £600 for his trainee (me) to update a few words and dates in a document to send them, a process which took 2 hours and for which I would be paid £7, minus tax. It was not respectable to tell your clients the truth about anything. "At the end of the day", as was a favourite phrase of his other two employees, that was how business operated.

Well, if that was what he wanted to think, that was his problem, I thought, and got on with my work. But no, he had to make it my problem as well. He couldn't stand the idea of me thinking, even privately, that one might be able to run a business without deceiving everybody, one might buy locally produced food, one might have a romance that worked, one might smile and do someone a favour without feeling afterwards as if you had personally handed them a spoon to dig into your flesh. I knew not to contradict him. I knew to look polite and listen. But my opinion must have been written on my face. I had to have daily lectures about how unacceptable my attitude was, how he had faced the pain of betraying his principles, and my not facing similar pain was equivalent to my being a bad worker (no matter how good my work was), and I had wasted company time by having him lecture me, too. I owed it to him to get as badly hurt as he had, to feel as if I too was filled with poison.

Why this was so important to him I have no idea. I'm glad I've never met anyone quite like that since. What was so strange was that I was, as he constantly reminded me, the bottom of the heap - why was it so important to him how my brain worked? He seemed to think he was doing me a favour by making me miserable. I'm sure I need hardly say he wasn't. It wasn't as if I learnt anything, other than that he wanted me to be miserable. Maybe he thought I was learning, maturing somehow.

It was the teachers on the science teaching course I nearly completed four years ago who were even more blatant. (I've written elsewhere about some of their methods.) Let me put it this way. Two of them, a man and a woman, complained to my mentor in my hearing that I had failed to cry when they expected me to.

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, my commitment, effort, and indications of success were measured by my ability to weep when they criticised my teaching.

Indeed, I recall now, all the girls in that school who I worked with had broken down in tears in public at some point or another - except me. I don't cry often or easily. It's not my thing - that's just the way I am. When someone humiliates me in public, I crawl into a shell. Surely to cry would be to let them win? I guess that was what they wanted. I guess they also didn't apply that standard to the male trainee teachers.

If they had some point to make about my teaching, then I presumed this was to instruct rather than upset and therefore I listened as hard as I could. It wasn't as if there was any point taking it personally. Of course my teaching wasn't perfect. I was a trainee for goodness sake. I was full of human faults like everyone else. I didn't know the kids or the curriculum as well as them. I didn't have their authority. I hadn't gained the children's respect. (Well, of course I wasn't going to gain that if they shouted at me or made sneering remarks in front of the children, as some of them did!)

And it's the same in a lot of jobs, if not to quite such a degree. Apparently "I'm stressed" and "I'm broke" is an acceptable form of boasting. To be willing to be stressed out, to be willing to be utterly humiliated, to give up your principles, to give up your dignity and important things in your life, means you are committed to the job.

It doesn't. It means you are committed to the ego management of your boss. It means they have power. It doesn't mean you're good at your work, but I guess the former is a lot more satisfactory to them (and indeed to be too good would be an insubordination).

Bosses? Teachers? Leaders? People with a public influence? Please think twice before being dissatisfied if those below you seem happy. It doesn't mean they're not learning, concentrating or respectful. Most of them will learn far better without extra pain. If you really need to see someone getting hurt, please bear in mind that in their lives they will all have plenty of that to deal with all on their own.

Thanks.

What the hell I'm actually doing these days

2011-07-14T13:49:00.007+01:00

No, I haven't forgotten to do a blog series about the conference in America. It was utterly wonderful - here's my Galaxy Zoo blogpost about it - but I seem instead of blogging to be finishing up work neatly, researching astronomy history, trying to get my head around maths, whizzing around doing various talks, daydreaming, procrastinating, puffin watching, trying to stay in touch with friends, and hiding from my duties in ridiculous and ancient computer games. Sorry!

I said finishing up things at work? Yes - I'll be leaving my charity in about five weeks or so. I've got a place at Queen Mary University to do MSc Astrophysics! After my undergraduate degree, and not passing the teaching course, I spent many years vowing never to do postgraduate anything. Deep down I didn't think I was clever enough. However, I've changed my mind. The initial trigger was realising that the research I'm doing really needs me to have a deeper understanding of scientific research and how to read a journal. The main reason, now, is that the conference opened my curiosity and confidence like a bursting dam. There's nothing more encouraging than finding you actually understand professional talks and posters, that people are happy to answer your questions - and then to be told by several strangers, "You ought to do a PhD, you ask very good questions." Pardon the pun, but I'm over the moon. It was odd to get the offer by e-mail on a Sunday morning. I have a picture in my mind of a zombified admissions team slouched red-eyed over their desks on a Saturday night, fuelled with fourteen cups of that milkless sugarless corrosive caffeine that professional astronomers call coffee.

In other words, if you don't feel confident about something, maybe you can do it after all. I hope other people who've been disappointed in other aspects of their education will get another chance, as I have.

As for the talks, I recently went to Aberystwyth - a delightful experience because Mark and Sam were such lovely hosts, and a strange, nostalgic one because I lived in Aberystwyth for a few weeks when I was nine. I recognised nothing - not even the street I'd lived on - except the seafront and Constitution Hill. Skeptic speakers, Aberystwyth may be a long way away but I seriously recommend you go there.

My next Skeptics in the Pub talks will be in Winchester (August 25th) and Skeptics on the Fringe in Edinburgh (11th August)! Look what an amazing picture Ash Pryce made - even though Michael keeping that close an eye on me and the fact that my chin has decided to take up half my face are both amusingly disturbing.

Hope to see you at one of these. Cardiff Skeptics is also on Monday, and we've got a fantastic team lined up for a chaotic evening of science comedy.

A revolution snatched away

2011-07-08T18:16:00.002+01:00

I avoided the tabloids anyway. A glance at a headline, or the first few sentences of an article, and I felt quite sick enough with no need to go further, like seeing a plate of mouldy food. Or hearing respectable-looking people spouting about how all jobseekers and immigrants are scroungers out to destroy their families and our culture because they read about it in such and such a rag. Or how climate change is all a lie, and how all scientists are dishonest "boffins" who mindlessly propogate each other's unfounded ideas. It kind of told me all I felt I needed to know. You know? And I know so little about media, law, and corporations - they're just not my sort of subjects - so I fear this will be a most spectacularly uninformed sort of blogpost. And yet I've certainly discovered that it is important to listen to the voices of the uninformed - sometimes they ask the best questions, or reveal weak spots that I can help strengthen.

It all happened so fast. I've spent the last few days glued to Twitter and the news - when I'm not busy at the office, obviously, and I've been doing extra time there this week as we've got a fundraising event tomorrow. There's too much stuff to read. I can't seem to keep up even if I spend all evening reading all the stories I can lay my mouse arrow on.

First it was the horror at them not only hacking Milly Dowler's phone, not only torturing the bereaved with false hope, but tampering with evidence; and Rebekah Brooks having the cheek to claim she had nothing to do with it and it was all for the public good. It got worse, with 7/7 family victims and dead soldiers's families having the same done to them. How could thinking, feeling people do this to each other? How could we give them the power to be the ones to tell us what's going on in the world every day?

David set up the #RebekahBrooksExcuses hashtag, which promptly went viral. I heard that the police knew what News of the World had been doing, and were either too pathetic to react or were actually bribed. Angry Mob pointed out very sensibly that this shouldn't really be news. It was the state of things. Should we be angrier about a 13-year-old girl than someone else? Part of me couldn't help but think yes - in the sense that as a former teacher I can't help but see children as people to especially nurture and treasure, and to feel that this callousness went beyond the mainstream - but it was a very good point (and I recommend you read that article). "We appear to be in a situation in which the majority of newspaper consumers accept without protest that what they read each day is not or cannot to be trusted . . . As consumers we can’t afford to be selectively outraged by an illegal technique depending on who it targets," wrote Kia Abdullah. Indeed.

Outrage grew into a determination to do something. We on Twitter smugly noticed we had power, and that was why many right-wingers especially hate Twitter. A Facebook group was created to "Boycott News of the World". (There are now several - including one which urges a boycott of all Murdoch's empire.) Of course, since most of its members wouldn't have been News of the World readers anyway, a boycott wouldn't be so effective - so they asked for ideas on what to do. For example, urging friends and relatives to boycott it; putting pressure on shops not to stock it; putting pressure on large corporations not to advertise in it. Ford was I think the first to publicly pull out (not of News International though!) - the Co-op put out a press release to say it was suspending it for now. Quite a few followed suit.

I wrote in with another suggestion: that a new "newspaper" was created offering cheap advertising space to all those who pulled out of News of the World advertising, along with exposes about phone hacking. I also signed Avaaz and 38 Degrees's petitions (I worry about signing two; but I did write a personal note with both of them - here is the one for Avaaz if you'd like to read it) - briefly, I asked the government to take this opportunity to consider the UK's own media laws. Clearly we have nothing to stop one individual taking over most of our media - which is wrong. No voice should have quite so much domination, as it affects not only our culture and policies but effectively decides who comes to power. Shouldn't we have a law to say that no individual or corporation can own more than such-and-such a percentage of our media? I'm sure it would be more complicated than that, but shouldn't it also be basic civilisation?

Then I saw Hugh Grant. Did you see Hugh Grant? I've never been a fan of him as an actor, but it took me about five seconds to become a fan of his bugging of and then confrontation with Paul McMullen - who seems to think that a) his own bugging of people is "a game", b) an actor's doing the same thing is "stooping" and "hilarious", and c) someone else's income somehow affects the issue. Even with terrorists I ask myself "What is driving them to this?" but with McMullen all I could think about was how pleasant it would be to pelt him with rotten tomatoes.

It was furore. And out of furore came hope. Steve Richards and Matthew Norman wrote thrilling pieces in the Independent about what this means for Murdoch in the long run. "When Margaret Thatcher made her Faustian pact with Mr Murdoch in the 1980s, granting him his every heart's desire in return for his unwavering slavish support, she hastened the creation of the monster we see revealed in all its gruesome hideosity today," wrote Matthew Norman. "In general terms, she gifted him the preposterous media market share he expertly parlayed into a stranglehold over the political elite. In a country without a written constitution, bereft of checks and balances and devoid of oversight, the levers of power are there to be seized by the most ruthless buccaneer in town . . ."

Politicians don't dare oppose what Murdoch's newspapers say, he argues, because it is they that make or break their careers. There was, is, opposition - but until now it's only been in whispers. They have now turned to outright shouting. "Today there is that tantalising sense that we no longer need to tolerate such Murdoch-Government axis powers' outrages . . ." Norman continued. "Today there is the hope, faint but seductive, of change. Public repugnance on this scale is a rare and precious force in a country beset by apathy. It fades very quickly, and must be harnessed and deployed before it does. It would take cross-party unity on a scale seldom witnessed outside time of war, with all three leaders agreeing that this, finally, is the moment to take up Vince Cable's rallying cry and go to war with Murdoch to break his dominion."

I watched. I retweeted. I wished I was nearer where things were going on. I fully wished that News of the World could be steadily bankrupted, as advertisers pulled out and sales plummeted. I hoped that Murdoch and Brooks and Coulson and their type would be the ones to pay. But they were several steps ahead.

I watched, as ever, in the office after I'd finished all the day's tasks. Then I got a very annoying phone call from a chap from Oxfam who demanded that I set up a standing order for what amounted to 12% of my income, fobbed off my "I'm at work and yes I am having a busy day" with "I won't keep you long" followed by an in-depth lecture, and who I eventually had to rudely hang up on. (I gave up donating to Oxfam because they pelted me virtually weekly with junk mail demanding that I give more when I had just graduated and was jobless for months. It must have cost more to send me so much stuff than what I was actually giving them. I told him this, and he informed me that only 11% of donations went to administration costs.) Then I was in such a bad mood that I went and spent more than 12% of my weekly wage getting myself some more work trousers and a birthday shirt for my mum, and a carrot cake. Then I went and picked my mum up from work, and we went home and ate. This took a couple of hours. Then I switched on my laptop and found out that News of the World was closing down.

For a minute or two I was almost dancing with glee. Finally, they had realised that they were not above the law and basic decency. They had responded much more dramatically than I had thought. Closing down! Actually shutting up shop!

Until this amazement faded and I realised what had actually happened. Brooks and the managers were staying. The journalists working for them were being sacked. Two hundred and fifty people about to be made unemployed - probably the majority of whom had never done anything wrong except to work for a dodgy paper, which some of them might well have been doing simply because they loved journalism and hoped to move onto something better once they'd risen a bit higher. The National Union of Journalists called an emergency meeting, and I hope it can help as many of these poor people as possible.

Opinion was split over that. Many people commented, not without reason, "Now these people are going to be the jobless they themselves have been smearing." Or, "Why the outrage at the News of the World closing when yesterday you were shouting for it to be made bankrupt?" I had made a joke about how Cameron was going to use our taxes to bail out the bankrupt News of the World, just like the banks - sadly, something very much like that had happened. As ever, the more vulnerable are the ones that paid to save the rich.

Two days ago it seemed that things were in the people's hands. Now they're not. Coulson is being very publicly arrested again, and I have the depressing feeling that he will easily talk his way out of it all again. The News of the World will simply be rebranded - even more depressingly, its new domain name was set up five days ago, I think before even the campaigns started. It seems they knew this was going to happen eventually, and merely picked their moment.

"Murdoch has never been as vulnerable as today and, if allowed to wriggle free, never will be again. This is an historic opportunity for parliament to excise the most aggressive malignancy in the body politic these past three decades, or at the very least stop it growing," wrote Matthew Norman.

I fear he's being very well protected from his vulnerability. There is one weak link left in his chain, though, and that is whether anyone actually buys his stuff or not. He and the government cannot yet force us to buy certain newspapers. We can also continue to pressure companies not to advertise in them (I wonder if those who pulled out knew all along that it was safe to do so?). We can, I suppose, keep the pressure on the government to reform media law to prevent such ridiculous domination happening again - although I don't know if domination and revolting tactics are necessarily related. (The only point McMullen made that did give me a nasty twinge was that hacking can also expose corruption that should be exposed . . .) And I couldn't resist putting up the logo of this Facebook group. Although it's mean to the journalists who write for the other papers, it sort of amounts to something we can still do.

Ice Blobology in the Kuiper Belt

2011-06-27T19:02:00.008+01:00

Back in 2006, just before my interest in astronomy was rekindled by Galaxy Zoo, a spacecraft launched. It was called New Horizons. On 14th July 2015, it will reach a dwarf planet foursome: Pluto, Charon, Nix and Hydra. One of the things it will do there is use a spectroscope to examine Pluto's atmosphere - and see if Charon has one too, though that is another story. Its spectroscope, incidentally, is called Alice, which unlike CERN's is a whim not an acronym. The Rosetta spacecraft has an Alice on board too.

Diagram of New Horizons, from the BBC

So at the moment, New Horizons is about halfway to Pluto. But once it's done that job, it's got a whole Kuiper Belt to explore - and NASA is employing a wonderfully democratic way of choosing where to send it next: zooites.

The Kuiper Belt is the part of our Solar System that lies beyond Neptune. In 1943, a man named Kenneth Edgeworth speculated that beyond Neptune, any matter would have been too widely distributed to condense into more planets. Gerard Kuiper wrote in 1951 that a belt of small bodies would have been around in early times, but - because he believed, as many people did at the time, that Pluto is the size of the Earth, when we now know it is less than a fifth the size of the Moon - he did not think it would be there today. He is far from the first scientist to be remembered for something he did believe in! If Pluto had been as massive as Earth it would have done what actual planets do, that is, gravitationally scoop up or scatter all the other matter in its orbit.

The Kuiper Belt extends out to roughly twice as far as Neptune. It's thought to be the origin of a some comets, as even materials such as ammonia that we think of as gas are solid so far from the Sun. It is not the same as the Oort Cloud, which pretty much extends halfway to the next star - a sort of Sun-bubble, if you like. It's believed to be of a complex structure - Neptune's gravity, and resonances, and the fact that it maintains roughly the same disk shape as the rest of the Solar System, bunch up areas of the matter together. But, being of bodies so small, and so far from any source of light or heat, it's not been very easy to study. In fact, it was only really discovered for certain in 1992! This discovery involved painstaking poring over what were doubtless faint fuzzy images by two astronomers named David Jewett and Jane Luu, working in Hawaii in the late 1980s.

Technology has moved on since then, and now there are thousands of ground-based images of the Kuiper Belt. The Zooniverse has set its - what is it now, 400,000? I keep losing count - volunteers to going through these images to find possible Kuiper Belt Objects. If all goes well, New Horizons will be able to explore one or more of them.

This project is called Ice Hunters. Here's a sampling for you:

You can read about the mission and do the tutorial and so on - but here's a quick overview of what to do with that image. How to tell what is a Kuiper Belt Object out of that lot? (Click to enlarge, by the way.)

Well, what happens with image like these is that the area is looked at twice, and two images produced - one positive, one negative. When the two are overlaid, if nothing has changed, the image should be consistent. But if something has changed, it will be obvious. This, incidentally, is how Henrietta Leavitt found her Cepheid variable stars - very plodding, detailed work indeed, when plates meant sheets of glass, spotted with black or white, and spectra about 2mm long.

In practice, you can probably see that it's not working quite that smoothly: all the white blobs that contain some black are background stars. But there are two (or more, if I've failed to spot them) pure white blobs. Here they are, marked out:

(PS if you're wondering why my Facebook tab has "aaaaaaargh" as its heading, it was because I was commenting on a dreadful joke made by Richard Wiseman. I'm so intellectual sometimes.)

You can go back and look at images you classified. Here's one of mine, which has another interesting object in it. It's on the lower right.

It probably looks like a wormy thing at this size. In any case, it's actually apparently three blobs stuck together. Just like in the Galaxy Zoo Asteroid Thread, asteroids move relative to the Earth, so their position changes. So we're keeping an eye out for asteroids too.

Very thin, hairy streaks tend to be cosmic rays, not asteroids. I got caught out a couple of times marking them before re-reading the tutorial and realising I shouldn't. Oh well - as with all the Zooniverse projects, the beauty of it is they get several people to classify each image, so just such mistakes get ironed out. And, added up, human eyes are much better at this than computers.

Another way I got caught out is by images like this one:

On the right there is a dark streak, which is full of pure white blobs. Whenever there are that many pure white blobs, they tend to be in just such a dark streak, and I've come to the conclusion that these must be where the subtracting has slipped and we're being shown just one plate. They're doubtless stars - otherwise, Kuiper Belt Objects would be all over the place. Which just goes to show how important it is to clean up all those pesky stars! That must take an awful lot of programming, which is still continuing judging by the fact that they've got a checklist where we can mark out what's wrong with the image on the right.

And, being very fond of paraedolia, I couldn't help but laugh at some of the silliness in many of Ice Hunters's images . . . look at this little man jumping around on the bottom left!

We also have doughnut eyes . . .

. . . and a lot of spaghettified bottles and heads in bubbles!

So who wouldn't want spaghettified bottles, heads in bubbles and a chance to help NASA decide where its spacecraft is going to go? There's already what might turn into a row about which is the best Zooniverse project on my Facebook page. Personally, I have a fierce, mindless, animal loyalty to Galaxy Zoo, for being my first, and the one I have looked after for four years (Chris and I joked in Chicago about how the baby is growing up and has to go to preschool!). But I think I might hang onto Ice Hunters better than I did the other ones I tried. We'll see. Sadly, there just isn't time to pay attention to them all.

I'll be on a plane during the Rapture

2011-05-21T01:00:00.005+01:00

Sorry for the lack of updates on this blog. Two months ago today I dug a grave and buried one of my best friends. She never said anything very intellectual to me, and she had four legs and was tortoiseshell, but it's astonishing how huge her personality was, how complex and important such a friendship can become. Here she is, my beloved Cassie, who had a horrific paralysing spinal injury - we know not how. She was only two years old.

She died only just before I was due to give my first Skeptics in the Pub talk. Thank goodness, Hayley stepped in. I've thought of writing about Cassie here, but I still don't think I can bear it - besides that not being the most interesting of blog posts. Anyway, since then, I've been busy with work and so on but more to the point just haven't felt like writing.

Now, things are getting more interesting - and it's a good moment to get back into writing again. Tomorrow night I get on a train and damn well hope it doesn't get delayed, because if it does, I'll miss my overnight coach to the airport and then will be in trouble! I'm going to Boston, Massachusetts - for the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. I've kept very quiet about this because I barely dared believe it was happening, but I haven't received any last minute "oh by the way, sorry, you can't come" sort of messages - thank you so much to Chris and Galaxy Zoo for inviting me along! I'll be doing some Zoo/SDSS work in exchange, and if it's interesting - which I bet it will be - I will blog about it.

I'm going to be extending my stay in the States by a couple of weeks as I'm doing some research there - I'll blog about that too if it's successful, but not yet. It's in the preliminary stages at the moment, so I'm going to be annoyingly mysterious for the time being.

I believe you'll be able to follow tweets with the hashtag #aas218 if you want to keep an eye on what's happening. We'll be hearing quite a lot about Chandra and Kepler, and a great many other things astronomical, and the Henry Norris Russell Prize Lecture will be given by Margaret Geller - this is only the fourth time a female astronomer has won this and I do hope I'll be able to attend it.

As for the Rapture - the boredom with waiting for 2012 I guess - well, if it happens, at least I will get an excellent view of everything going on from the plane. If they let me pick a seat by the window, anyway.

(PS If you get the Society for Popular Astronomy magazine you'll find an article in the May/June Young Stargazers by me about the Big Bang. I hope you like it!)

My New Theory!

2011-04-01T15:33:00.005+01:00

Dear all, I wish to announce an extremely important change to this blog, and to my life as a science communicator. First of all, I scrap this science communicator nonsense. They keep telling us that anyone can do science and I did experiments at school 'cause I was forced to in lessons so first and foremost I am a SCIENTIST and I have made DISCOVERIES and anyone who says otherwise is clearly either just gullible or in the pay of selfish academics who want to keep everything for themselves.

I have long had a problem with the lie that is relativity. Check it out for yourself! One minute these boffins are telling you that there is no force called gravity, that it is merely the curvature of spacetime. Next they say that it is a force but it is much smaller than the other forces, clearly ignoring black holes. By "they", well actually I've only heard it from Brian Cox, who was so mean about that most ancient and best proven science, astrology. And then they bring in this idea of tiny particles called "gravitons". How do you need gravitons if gravity is just curving space? As if you can curve nothing. Don't be stupid.

And don't get me started on Dark Matter. They can't even agree on what it is. One minute they say there's all this stuff around our galaxy that changes something to do with the rotation. Then they come up with all these other stupid ideas like MOND, which sounds more like a fashion item than science to me. If science is about making discoveries, why aren't all scientists in agreement with each other? They just want to keep up the pretence of still disagreeing so it doesn't look like they're all one obessive hive minded communist league. And to get funding for silly things like CERN, which recreate conditions from a time that never happened in the first place, when our money could be going to useful things!

It only requires a little thought. Gravitons are particles to do with gravity. When there's lots of matter around, they cluster round the matter or something, and they show gravity. But what if there isn't much stuff around? Like outside galaxies. Well maybe there's still lots of gravitons there. Just because galaxies are clumped together doesn't mean everything else has to be. (I mean, look at the way everyone's expected to be the same.)

So obviously that is what causes galaxies to rotate in a funny way. There's loads of gravitons about the place at the edge of galaxies, looking for a home. So scrap your stupid mathematical models - maths is only a way of intimidating people anyway, it doesn't mean anything - and get promoting my idea for what things are really all about. There's plenty of evidence, just look!

A representation of dark matter in the Bullet Cluster. Read more on Discovery Magazine and BangUniverse.

I would delete all the other stupid gullible posts from this blog that was really just me uncritically swallowing all the rubbish scientists had told me, but I thought I'd let them serve as a warning to you all.

P.S. In other news, skepticism has finally been acknowledged as just another cult, UK Uncut are going to become a political party, and you might see two dentist-requiring Suns in the sky any day now.

Wandering stars and 24/7

2011-03-13T03:52:00.006Z

[The] collection of seven gods, seven days, and seven worlds - the Sun, the Moon, and the five wandering planets - entered the perceptions of people everywhere. The number seven began to acquire supernatural connotations. There were seven "heavens", the seven transparent spherical shells, centred on the Earth, that were imagined to make the worlds move. The outermost - the seventh heaven - is where the "fixed" stars were imagined to reside. There are Seven Days of Creation (if we include God's day of rest), seven orifices to the head, seven virtues, seven deadly sins, seven evil demons in Sumerian myth, seven vowels in the Greek alphabet (each affiliated with a planetary god), Seven Governors of Destiny according to the Hermetists, Seven Great Books of Manichaeism, Seven Sacraments, Seven Sages of Ancient Greece, and seven alchemical "bodies" (gold, silver, mercury, lead, tin, and copper - gold still associated with the Sun, silver with the Moon, iron with Mars, etc.). The seventh son of a seventh son is endowed with supernatural powers. Seven is a "lucky" number. In the New Testament's Book of Revelations, seven seals on a scroll are opened, seven trumpets are sounded, seven bowls are filled. St Augustine obscurely argued that for the mystic importance of seven on the grounds that three "is the first whole number that is odd" (what about one?), "four is the first that is even" (what about two?), and "of these . . . seven is composed. And so on. Even in our time these associations linger.

The existence even of the four satellites of Jupiter that Galileo discovered - hardly planets - was disbelieved on the grounds that it challenged the precedence of the number seven. As acceptance of the Copernican system grew, the Earth was added to the list of planets, and the Sun and Moon were removed. Thus, there seemed to be only six planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn). So learned academic arguments were invented showing why there had to be six. For example, six is the first "perfect" number, equal to the sum of its divisors (1 + 2 + 3). Q.E.D. And anyway, there were only six days of creation, not seven. People found ways to accommodate from seven planets to six . . .
- Carl Sagan, "Pale Blue Dot", 1994

And that was before Harry Potter and the seven Horcruxes, not to mention seven Weasley siblings, and George R R Martin's "A Song of Ice and Fire" series in which a major religion is centred on seven gods and whose holy book is called "The Seven-Pointed Star". Not to mention seven colours in a rainbow. If you can take a really good photograph of one, and distinguish blue from violet in colour, and the two of them each take up as much room as any of the other colours, I'd love to see it - I honestly have yet to see a rainbow like that (much as I like blue and indigo).

Anyway, doing some totally unrelated research, I stumbled upon the Babylonians. I knew they were responsible for 360º , 60 seconds a minute and 60 minutes an hour, and probably for popularising algebra (I recommend Marcus de Sautoy's "The Story of Maths"!), and I knew they were very meticulous astronomers, but I hadn't previously come across the intricacy of their days of the week system.

It was in a book I was reading, and not one recently published, so being an incorrigible skeptic I had to go online to get an independent corroboration. (No, that's honestly nothing to do with the trolls on the Guardian comments pages accusing me of "getting all my information from the Guardian" when in fact I was getting most of it from the Sense About Science website! Although one does wonder what they were doing there if they so despise it . . .) It was quite a trawl. I found plenty of sources confirming that each of the ancient "planets" (in those days, "wandering stars" - stars that did not move across the sky at the same speed as other stars) had its own weekday, such as here, here and here. And I ended up reading part of an interesting book about the origins of weekdays. Following the French Revolution, a ten day week was imposed - but it just didn't work.

Ancient Inventions even claims that "when the Babylonians invented the seven-day week, they anticipated the findings of 20th century biologists. It has recently been discovered that the human body is governed by a seven-day biorhythm, which is detectable from small variations in blood pressue and heartbeat as well as response to infection and even organ transplants. The same biorhythm affects other life-forms, even simple organisms such as bacteria."

I'm not entirely sure I buy this. The only source it cites is a book (which may or may not be correct but I am not going to go and ask my library for before I post this!), but furthermore their wording makes no differentiation between cause and effect. The shells of some coastal critters or other that grew near towns during the Industrial Revolution show layers of growth like tree rings - and every seventh layer is palest, i.e. the ones they grew on Sunday when the factory was shut. (Source: memory of a lecture in my degree. Take with pinch of salt to suit your taste, but I have a nerdy memory for random facts.) Besides, human timekeeping is not to 24 hours - it's longer. This is not even a relic of a past when the Earth was spinning faster, or it would be shorter. And in any case, seven is not a universal special number - in China, for instance, the "lucky number" is eight.

Still, it could be true. I'm guessing the bacteria in question are influenced by the same things humans are influenced by - pollution, for instance, probably occurs at different timescales and intensities at weekends. But you never know.

So, in attempting to research one thing, I came across the Babylonians and their planetary systems and timekeeping, and in attempting to research that, I came across a lot of other things, and I hastily stopped there. Research is great fun, though! And by the way, it isn't something I have a clue how to do academically. So don't feel unqualified to go looking things up.

Sorry, but after all that, the best pages I have to show you are Wikipedia: Planetary Hours and Week-Day Names. The latter at least has obviously had a lot of source verification put into it. (Wiki can actually be very strict - Rick Nowell on the Galaxy Zoo Forum found that creating the "Peas" page was a huge task due to the very tight sourcing rules. My research of the entire project - which was used, for example, in selecting names to go in the acknowledgements on the papers - was disallowed because it was a blog post.)

Anyway, to summarise on the ancient deities to whom the planets were assigned. Sunday of course was the Sun, Monday the Moon - those are obvious. Tuesday is Mars. In Latin languages this is more obvious - for example, in Spanish (a handy reference, since it's similar to Latin and I speak it), Martes. English is based on the Anglo-Saxon/German equivalent, known as Tiw, another god of war. Wednesday, or Miercoles in Spanish, is Mercury (in German, Mittwoch, or midweek - there is an older connection to Woden or Odin). Thursday is Thor or Jupiter (Jueves in Spanish). Friday, Viernes, is Venus, or Freitag or Freya's day. Saturday invariably sounds like Sabbath or Saturn. All well and good, you probably knew some or all of that. But why do they come in that order?

Since all these "heavenly bodies" moved around in their "heavenly shells", they each crossed the background of apparently static stars and made a complete circuit of the heavens. It is easy to instinctively reject this as the Sun and Moon surely do that every 24 hours, except that that's a circuit of the sky - not the entire background of stars, for example starting in the constellation Taurus (to the right of Orion) and all the way around until they get back again. From that point of view they do it in a funny order: the Moon is fastest, then Mercury, then Venus, then the Sun, then Mars, then Jupiter, then Saturn. All right, some of those are in the order in which the planets are really spaced from the Sun. But not all.

But the weekdays don't follow that, or they'd go in the order of Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. And this is where the 24 hour timetable comes in.

Each "hour" is supposedly "controlled" by a planet or deity. For example, midnight on Monday is controlled by the Moon. Then after that we go to Saturn - the "god" who takes the longest time to cross the entire heavens (or ecliptic). Then Jupiter, the second-longest. Then Mars, and so on. The table at the bottom of this section shows the system, as does this table I wrote myself to see if it worked before I found that one:
. . . and so on. (The page ran out.)

Of course, one website - I now can't remember which - threw a spanner in the works by claiming that the Babylonians only had 12 hours, which stops the system working. Sources seem to differ as to whether or not they bought into astrology and predictions. On the one hand, one cites as 11th century writer as claiming that "predictions are a new science", and on the other, we've got this really detailed and prescriptive table of what all the hours are supposed to mean - for example, you should ask a lady out on a date during one of Venus's hours. (Detailed and prescriptive is also exactly how I would describe the ridiculously large array of different labels on homeopathic products, all of which basically just contain sugar.) All I can say is, if you ask me on a date at 6am on a Monday morning, I will not rush to my astrological chart and swoon obediently because of some arbitrary rule, I will wonder (unless we have been up all night talking for example) what the heck is going on!

Sadly, most of the websites I found, whilst trying to make some sense of this fascinating history of people who made such detailed records, were trashy horoscope sites, so do please indulge me and let me make a little bit of fun. Some of the discoveries ancient people made, as well as the time and care they took with compiling massive records, are really incredible achievements. Incidentally, just a few of those are what I'll be talking about at Cardiff Skeptics on Monday next week - I hope to see some of you then.

Why women still need to unite

2011-02-27T16:06:00.007Z

When I was about five, I was in a children's choir, and one of the causes we raised money for was the Romanian orphans. This was the mid to late eighties. I put my Christmas money in a little white envelope for them and labelled it, in shaky capitals, "For the Romanian orphans, as pocket money". When my parents explained that they were starving, I wanted to send them chocolate biscuits. My parents told me those would probably make them ill.

Years and years later, I now know why it was Romanian orphans in particular - it was because of the persecution of their mothers' bodies, reducing women to livestock, or fields to be ploughed, and these children were born to mothers who couldn't afford to raise them. Abortion was illegal until a woman was over forty-two or had five children already. Women were inspected at their workplaces to see if they were pregnant. Men or women over twenty-five who remained childless were heavily taxed, and I don't doubt made to suffer in other ways as well.

One of the things I remember clearly from Lionel Shriver's haunting novel "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is his mother Eva's disgust at society's attitude to her pregnancy. Suddenly, she felt, she was no longer her own mistress or regarded as such - suddenly, even strangers felt that they had some kind of corporate ownership of her "bump". She was not trusted to care for her baby properly. Her husband in particular, the man she loved, thought he could lay down the law about what she should and should not do. The assumption was not that "society will intervene if you behave carelessly", but "society assumes you do behave carelessly and will therefore intervene constantly and on autopilot". She couldn't even have a quick dance around a room without being read a lecture. I was younger then and thought she was being overly grumpy. Now I only have to look around on the Internet to see how right she was.

Even when someone writes "I don't think the woman's choice alone matters, because there are two people involved", meaning to sound a bit fair on both sides, an alarm bell rings for me. Of course there are two people involved, but it seems to be all too easily assumed these days that the woman herself is incapable - or not a good enough person - to make a decision that would also be good for the baby. It's assumed that the two are automatically in conflict, and therefore everybody's job to leap to the defense of the baby against the woman - in other words, try to take control, when it's her who has to bring the child to birth and then be its mother. I can't think of anything better designed to drive a wedge between a mother and her baby - a bond that biology dictates should be as strong as anything - or at the very least destroy a mother's confidence when she is already at her most vulnerable.

It always surprises me that the cycle of oestrus is supposed to be "primitive", and that the human ability to conceive at any time, regardless of wishes or ability to care for the offspring, is something so advanced and wonderful. In the cases of most animals, I don't know if "wanting" to conceive or not has a meaning the way it does for us, but why do humans conceive so readily when they don't always want to? It seems like a silly mistake of evolution to me, and one that causes untold grief.

If these kind of issues interest you, I recommend you follow @antitheistangie on Twitter. She endures daily threats of murder, rape, the harming of the child she already has, etc. etc. etc. because she has dared - for the sake of other women - to make public the fact that she had an abortion for a variety of what to a Western European like me seem to be very sensible reasons. As far as I know, none of her harrassers are ever even reprimanded, much less brought to justice.

I hope it's clear from other entries on this blog how much I adore children - what I hate is the orders from above how their mothers should raise them, which so frequently run contrary to both the mother's interests and the child's. In this country, women are forbidden as far as is possible to stay at home and look after the kids if that's what they want to do. In America, it seems to be the opposite. Let me take you through a sad life for a woman under the Republicans' plans.

Let's say she's single, and in or aiming at a career, probably planning to have a family when the right partner comes along. And let's say that before she is ready to support a family, she is raped. However, the law has redefined rape. If she is forcibly drugged, or tied down and unable to fight back, that means the rape is her fault and she is not allowed an abortion. (This would also be also the case in, for example, family incest, where the victim is too young or too disempowered to fight.) Furthermore, she would be considered "the accuser", not "the victim" in this crime.

Since all health care has to be paid for, this woman's employer would be punished by the state if her health insurance covered abortion. She might scrape together every penny she has to pay for it herself, but the doctor who would perform the abortion is murdered and the murderer is let off by state law. She might try another place, but the hospital would be quite within its rights to turn her down.

If she miscarries, she could face the death pentalty - even if the baby wasn't properly formed, which often occurs in pregnancies, miscarriage being the usual natural result - unless she could somehow prove that she herself had no hand in the miscarriage. (How any woman could prove this, especially while doubtless sick and weak and also quite possibly grieving, I don't know).

If she bears the child, she has no means of support. She is not supposed to work, and childcare is withdrawn, because she should be at home with the child - but she will not receive any aid or even food. The program Head Start which would be the way she would have got her child into preschool has been terminated. Doubtless it is considered her own fault she was raped, too. In such circumstances the child is horrifically disadvantaged, probably in terms of social stigma as well as economically. Once a perfectly capable, productive lady, she and her child are both condemned by a string of laws to a cycle of difficulty and unhappiness.

All because the law-makers wanted control over this woman's body.

To be fair, these are a variety of proposed state laws I've detailed, rather than laws already in place for one state - but once these get a hold anywhere, would they start spreading? When I read what I could of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" (I never finished it, I'm afraid), I didn't believe for one minute that freedom could really be lost with such ease and totality. Now I'm reading up on these laws, it seems much more plausible.

Freedom doesn't mean "yeah, let's coldly have lots of abortions". It means, for starters, having access to education, family planning, and contraceptives so you don't need one in the first place (though contraceptives do sometimes fail). To assume that everyone worth anything will stay celibate is not realistic, and excusing rapists from responsibility makes it an even more ridiculous assumption. It means having enough education and confidence to make the best decisions for your offspring, and to be allowed to carry them out.

This is a momentous time for women right now - not just because the Republicans are trying to implement increasingly loony hate-filled laws against them (fortunately the redfining rape one got - hopefully - kicked out), but because of the revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East. Did you see the photos of the Egyptian girls mending the pavements in Tahrir Square? Here are three interviews with young women who found themselves amidst the revolutions, and their hopes for how things will turn out. Women played a part in the revolutions; I cannot hope more strongly that women will continue to play a part in the future of their countries.

Apparently, the horrible case of Lara Logan - who was attacked and gang raped during the Egyptian revolution, and saved by a group of guards and women - is being used as a platform to suggest that women shouldn't be journalists in potentially violent areas. This is rubbish - it sacrifices the woman and all her potential whilst limply accepting that violence is inevitable. (Although it would be a great moment to say "We shouldn't go to war because some people would get killed" - sadly I don't think Logan's detractors, or anyone else who accepts violence, will buy into that one.) Surely it is equally horrible for a man or for a woman to be attacked as she was. If any person gets attacked, that is awful. But it's something we have to speak up and challenge, not run away from. Although I know nothing about Logan and would not dream to speak for her, I imagine that most journalists in such areas feel that the risk of attack is worth it for the sake of informing the world of important events.

To say that she should not go to Egypt is to say, "Violence towards women is inevitable - solution: keep the women at home." (Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin suffered precisely the same thing - she was frequently turned down from working at observatories because she would be alone in them at night, which apparently wasn't safe for a woman. Being "assaulted by blacks" was apparently the greatest risk, neatly using racism to absolve the sexists of responsibility!)

What is needed is a culture change to make violence less acceptable. That of course is far harder. But I think men too would benefit.

I'm talking a lot about women's rights in this blog post and hope that my male readers don't feel it's in any way to their exclusion. We women are physically weaker and able to bear children, which means we can be preyed on and controlled and abused in ways that men cannot, so we do need some specific laws to protect us. But also, a society which does that to its women will, by definition, have to do it to men too, in case any men disagree that women should go through this. Doubtless such a man would be punished as some kind of sissy or collaborator. (Of course it can work the reverse way - that in a free society, a man might howl at and denounce women's rights, but he's usually just laughed at rather than for example beaten up or jailed.)

Here in the UK, some of the greatest champions of women's rights I know are men. There's nothing odd about that. I'm as pale white as you can get, but I'll get as upset as anyone else when I see racism taking place, for example. A society that welcomes everyone is far more pleasant and constructive than one which reviles non-whites. I think the same can be said of sexism. "Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."

Any population which penalises and degrades some of its citizens - for their race, or religion, or colour, or for their sex or fertility - is wasting a part of its potential, as well as tying up all its citizens into a system of injustice and unhappiness. Therefore, no matter how good your intentions in wanting to protect all babies, threatening and punishing and controlling their mothers will, to say the least, backfire. And these things need to be stopped.

Who has the power to change things?

2011-02-19T13:41:00.005Z

The finger-pointing game in our economic woes took an interesting step upwards today.

We've been hear a great deal about benefit scroungers and have done for as long as I can remember. Immigrants who've fled tyranny; Laura and Dud and Pete who are too sick to work; so on so forth. I think certain powers that be, not to mention the tabloids, would have us all believe that anyone who claims benefits is like "Mick" whose phone in became one of the BBC's most popular stories.

The article appeals to the angry and powerless. "It's free money, I love it," this chap is quoted as saying. What society gives to him is actually tiny compared to what it gives to the banks - but this is a small, sorry target you can hate and perhaps attack. And this is not someone powerful. This is scrouging we might have a hope of stopping.

For the record, no, I don't think what he's doing is right at all. But I think he reveals some rather wider problems:

"All my family have worked all their lives - they worked down pits, in the steelworks, and they've all died from illnesses related to that. And they've had nothing to show for it at the end of it. All that money they've paid in, they've paid out again to the bankers . . . The people who are working today - they're paying for the bankers, their million-pound bonuses every month."

He also remarks that neither he nor his friends can see any future for themselves. Is this simple laziness or is it a problem with education and society that we can work together to address? Maybe some of each.

(On a completely unrelated note, these new cuts and laws to "make work pay" and make it harder for people like Mick to remain on benefits look to me as if they are already firmly in existence. When, after months of unsuccessful job-searching, I finally caved in and applied for jobseeker's allowance, I was made to feel like a criminal: it was difficult, humiliating, protracted, soul-destroying and time-consuming - getting a job would have been a breeze by comparison; and when I finally found one, it was! They even managed to mishear my National Insurance Number over the phone once and use this as an excuse to try and close my claim down. I heard about a young man who tried to hand an employment application form into a shop well before the closing date but was turned away because they'd already had so many - and lost his benefits for three months for "turning down an opportunity". I was also given to understand that my benefits would last less than a year, after which time I would just have to sink or swim. So how does this Mick spend 18 years on them? Does he apply for jobs but not take them? I have no idea. I suspect every Job Centre's system and strictness is different. But that's a question for another time, and probably someone other than me to answer.)

We're warned not to over-tax or rather "punish" the large corporations and the rich, for they are "wealth generators" who will benefit the whole country. If we do not give them everything they want, they will set up their businesses abroad - and that will be wealth gone from Britain, presumably benefitting nasty beardy terrorists and setting up ever more infuriating, obstructionist and expensive call centres who make us want to throw our goddamn mobiles out of the window, except that we need them not only to grab the odd happy minute with a friend but to chase up job after job.

Well, I'm no economist, and I'm prepared to be proved wrong - but I don't think these "wealth generators" are doing quite what they're cracked up to do.

What they've done instead is generate massive inequality. It's so great that many people don't see any point in even attempting to get somewhere. The fact that some (and I would like to know what percentage) are taking advantage of the welfare state does not mean that the welfare state is to blame for society's problems.

Returning to the original subject of problems and blame, today UK Uncut are spending this weekend staging mass protest against Barclays Bank, which have paid a tiny £113 million in tax whilst earning profits of £11.6 billion, £1.5 billion of which went to bonuses - and whose chief Bob Diamond says that "the time for remorse is over" and that banks should, it seems, continue exactly as they have been doing. (If my economics are right, your average taxpayer pays maybe 20% tax, while Barclays pays 1%; and Bob Diamond's pay package this year is over 1000 times what Mick gets, including rent.)

It's quite an imaginative style of protest: "‘teams of UK Uncut volunteers will be entering the banks, occupying them and transforming them into something that people need, but will be cut’. In central London, hundreds are expected to set up a live stand-up comedy show, libraries, and a mothers' breakfast club, all inside different branches of Barclays". As I write, I hear reports that around 40 branches of Barclays have closed. (Update: 50 now - from the Guardian.)

But is all this simply the banks' fault? Not entirely. Because none of what they are doing is against the law. As David Allen Green points out, this campaign is asking for a "voluntary tax". (Although David Cameron demands that charities prop up society and people work for free, bankers are exempt; how other than by offering them high salaries could we expect talented people to stay and do such an important job?)

"This campaign is misconceived to the very point of daftness," writes David Allen Green:

Tax avoidance and minimisation can be addressed by better tax legislation and policy. It really is that simple.
The HMRC is under-resourced, especially compared with the access multinationals have to expert legal and accountancy advice. The UKUncut protesters should campaign for more funding for HMRC and improved tax legislation. If they should be protesting anywhere on a miserable day like today, it should be outside the Treasury.

You can hardly argue with this - but there are complications. In fact, I'm going to be a coward and say that both parties are right.

For one thing, it doesn't seem to me that protesting directly to the treasury or government would do much, other than get the protestors kettled by police (plus someone hot-headed to lose the point and disgrace the entire movement). As Robert Peel said when he repealed the Corn Laws, politics is largely about perception. The government and the banks work together so closely that they've become seen as a single entity. To picket one means to annoy the other.

LatentExistence explains: "Shouting at politicians achieves nothing . . . Making life hard for big business, on the other hand, makes things happen . . . Protesting in high street shops has made more happen than tens of thousands gathering in parliament square has." And you should go and read PatoBlog's post right now. He points out that big businesses have the ear of the government (as we know) and have a special powers to have a voice in laws that affect them. The public are increasingly aware of this - "Tax avoidance is on the public radar to an unprecedented extent, and that's a good thing" - but unaware of what companies and the government do behind closed doors. On the other hand, companies have to compete in a way the government does not. They do rely on "consumer choice", and all the consumers threatening to go somewhere else will have to have some effect. It may be misconceived, ignorant and entirely decorative, but I can't help but feel pleased that I do not have a mobile phone account with Vodafone . . .

One of the commentors on David Allen Green's blogpost states the depressing, well-known mantra: "UKUncut really are stupid. They are campaigning for a company to pay more tax. So to pay that increase in tax the company will raise it prices. So who pays for the tax in the end - the public."

Does that have to be the case? Are the bonuses and the top few salaries always static, out of some immutable law? It would be very difficult to change that, yes. But if we did, profit could be shared more equally among the workforce, for example, so that Mick's point about his family having subsidised the rich need no longer be an uncomfortable possibility.

And some of it could even be used to pay tax. Then the rich really would be wealth generators.

I've said before that the most difficult option of all might end up being the right one. It's wrong to scrounge benefits, but it's also wrong to let a few siphon off a huge percentage of the profits while ordering the poor to run the country for nothing. To challenge this very well-protected system is not easy and I don't even know where to start, but I'm eternally optimistic.

Of course, this post might be riddled with errors - business and economics never were my strong point. But at least curiosity is a start. Thoughts, anybody?

Duck! The sun's throwing bits of itself around!

2011-02-18T22:19:00.006Z

It's pelting down with rain outside and Cassie the tortoiseshell fluffball is squeaking disconsolately at the cat flap, not wanting to go out in that. I'm irked, too, but for different reasons. There might be an aurora, you see, but there's not a chance of seeing it in this weather. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

On Monday this week, the Sun let off a huge solar flare. That's a massive explosion on its surface. Surprising as it may sound, the Sun has a magnetic field, just as the Earth does - but it's not static. Sometimes, two magnetic fields which previously weren't lined up can suddenly realign themselves, releasing a huge amount of energy. Matter on the surface of the Sun can suddenly be accelerated to close to the speed of light. If the event is powerful enough, this gives rise to a coronal mass ejection - a great burst of matter heading out of the Sun.

Now, at 93 million miles away from the Sun and comparatively extremely small, it's not often the Earth gets in the way of coronal mass ejections. But occasionally we do - and this is just what's happened this week. The matter, of course, does not travel at light speed, so we get a few days' warning.

What happens when such a thing hits the Earth? Don't worry. Nothing lethal. Because all these particles are charged, they're affected by magnetic fields - and Earth has one of those too. This is what happens:

(From Chandra.)

Incidentally, Jupiter and Saturn too have spectacular magnetic fields and aurorae - indeed, Saturn's magnetic field might be responsible for all kinds of odd effects among its moons.

Although Earth's magnetic field directs the charged particles away from most of the Earth, it directs them towards the poles. But those don't suffer mass destruction. Rather, they shimmer with the Northern Lights, or the Aurora Boreolis.

The Aurora over North Norway, from APOD.

The Aurora from above, photographed by astronauts aboard the Interntional Space Station. APOD.

I went to Norway when I was 20 but have never seen the aurora, and that's one of the things I really long to do. It annoyed me that Philip Pullman turned it into something supernatural in "Northern Lights", but he certainly expressed a silent, throat-tightening beauty about it that made me want to go and see it even more. They move around - I don't know how fast. The green light is from excited oxygen atoms. "Excited", in this case, means that one or more electrons have jumped up to a higher energy state (you can think of that like jumping up to a higher electron shell). More rarely, it emits red light. Nitrogen, too, glows in different colours - blue and red. There's a nice little description of the chemistry here.

A coronal mass ejection is not needed to produce the aurora - it occurs anyway because of the solar wind. The Sun is in fact hurling ionised matter at us all the time. A coronal mass ejection is just a great glut in one go. This can result in the "northern lights" being seen much further south than usual - it seems they have already been seen in Northern Ireland.

The problem with coronal mass ejections is that they can disrupt communications. In November 2003 there was a particularly large one, which was not only hazardous for space observatories such as SOHO but also for aircraft. There's a good write-up in the introduction Dr Stuart Clark's "The Sun Kings" about the things that took place then: radios that aided expeditions, forest firefighters, marine emergency calls and the like became unreliable; aircraft had to fly below 25,000 feet and at a lower latitude than north Scotland; Sweden suffered blackouts; nuclear power plants in America reduced their power in case of damage. Compasses, too, no longer knew which way was north and swung about wildly. As luck would have it, Cassini, ten times further away, got a bashing too!

Infuriatingly, I missed this whole thing. I was in Granada, southern Spain, at the time, on a year abroad for my degree, and only using the Internet in cafes every few days (Galaxy Zoo did not then exist and I didn't even hear of Facebook for another few years). I think it must have been around Halloween - I recall walking round Granada with a friend terrified of masks that night, and listening to her worries about love and commitment. Then the 2006 solar eclipse happened when I went back to Spain for a TEFL course - we would only have seen a partial eclipse, but I missed it then, too.

The most spectacular coronal mass ejection to hit Earth on record is the one that occurred in 1859 - again, as detailed in Stuart Clark's book. In that one, auroras appeared, it seems, all over the planet. You could read a book at night - if you weren't busy being terrified of the end of the world, as it seems many people were. Hilariously, however, there were so many charged particles in the air that this happened:

Boston telegraph operator (to Portland operator): "Please cut off your battery [power source] entirely for fifteen minutes."
Portland operator: "Will do so. It is now disconnected."
Boston: "Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?"
Portland: "Better than with our batteries on. - Current comes and goes gradually."
Boston: "My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble."
Portland: "Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?"
Boston: "Yes. Go ahead."

I first heard of this conversation in an Astrofest lecture - it was especially amusing because the lecturer showed us the code used first! In any case, it's rather like an msn conversation with the Internet switched off (so if anyone tells you that the Internet's a new and unnatural thing, remind them about telegrams).

Coronal mass ejections do not appear entirely randomly. The Sun has a cycle of its own: an eleven-year period that alternates between a "quiet" time of mostly steady shining, and a less-quiet time of more sunspots and flares. These changes correspond to changes in solar output - in other words, how much heat and light we get. There have been efforts to link this changing activity with climate change, but the trends are weak - if that. In the short term, it does work to some extent - there have been arguments for decades over whether you can correlate solar activity with the price of wheat. And it is possible that a few decades of warmth or chill (the Little Ice Age; the time Britons grew grapes, etc.) are due to changes in solar activity - but they were not global events but local ones, suggesting that conditions on the Earth itself, just like now, were the driving forces in those cases.

Going back to Stuart Clark again (as you can see, I must finish his book - I'm the dreadful kind of person who starts six books at once and falls asleep while reading them, awarding myself an ever-more-toppling booklist!), he has this to say about studying the Sun and its eleven-year cycle:

Like a heart, the Sun pulsates. This is not a visible movement but rather a gradual buildup in strength and subsequent weakening of the giant magnetic bubble that emanates from within the Sun and surrounds all the planets. As befits a celestial body of some 4.6 billion years in age, each one of these magnetic heartbeats takes a leisurely eleven years, or thereabouts, to complete.

So, in the average career of a scientist, he or she can expect to see this happen four times. This makes understanding the Sun as difficult as a biologist trying to deduce the life cycle of an unknown creature by observing it just long enough to witness four beats of its heart. As a result, solar astronomy is a multigenerational science. Each new cohort works to build a finger legacy of observations for those yet to come.

In any case, things are looking interesting. National Geographic says this is the largest flare for some time. Aviation Week has some mind-boggling pictures of what our local star is up to right now:

Pete Lawrence got an astonishing photograph of the flare. You can also watch a quick clip here on the BBC. And check out AuroraWatch to see if it might be worth nipping outdoors . . . please let me know if you see anything!

PS And if you are really into solar storms, you can now join Solar Stormwatch to map them properly. It's concentrating on past ones - but Zooites work through things very quickly, so you never know, soon enough you may be working on them as they happen!

"This avoids the need to prove the science . . ."

2011-02-17T00:03:00.005Z

There was a great deal of laughter on Twitter last night when this panicky e-mail landed in my inbox, leaked by a friend who was one of the recipients, and which I evilly passed on to several dozen skeptics:

Hi everyone

One of the students at college has brought the message below to our attention; so I am passing it on to everybody.

Please read and forward on to people you think may be interested.

Thanks xx Anna

Dear EVERYONE,

This is urgent. TOP PRIORITY!!! The deadline is the 18th of February. The practice of homeopathy by lay homeopaths is at stake, and if the MHRA changes the wording to the document mentioned below, we will ...not be allowed to practice any longer. This will take effect immediately. The new wording which is being suggested by sense against science, and is being considered by the MHRA will effectively put us in catch 22 so that we can no longer give out remedies - basically, it is about the difference between dispensing and prescribing. all homeopaths dispense remedies as a normal part of daily practice. the new rules will mean that it will be illegal to dispense without a license, and only a qualified doctor can make a prescription. without the ability to dispense, all we can do is sit and listen to people's problems, but can do nothing else about it. this will also have an affect on the homeopathic pharmacies, who will only be allowed to dispense licensed remedies (currently, only arnica and possibly one or two others are licensed) unless prescribed by a physician, and this means the potential loss of thousands of remedies. The key words in the version we want, which help keep homeopathy going are "...use within the homeopathic tradition". This avoids the need to prove the science behind prescribing of remedies and allows us to practise as normal.

Could you please send this template to EVERYONE and inundate Ms Farmer with requests to keep the wording as shown below, so that homeopaths can continue to practise homeopathy legally.

Please contact everyone on your database, if you are a homeopath, please send it in yourself and contact all your patients to do the same. we can counteract sense about science with numbers. we just proved we have greater numbers than they do, and that when we mobilise, we can beat them at their own game. last week, they started a poll against homeopathy in an irish newspaper ( see link - http://www.thejournal.ie/do-you-have-faith-in-homeopathy-2011-02/?voted=1) and inundated it with votes against. it was 435 against 67 for. we started a campaign on facebook, and within 24 hours, we shifted the balance of power to what you see here in the link - 67% for 27% against. they gave up and went away with their tails between their legs, and we showed them that people don't want what they have to offer.

Please help us to do this again. many people don't realise this new risk we are facing. it only takes a minute to copy and paste the below template and email it. Apologies in advance if you have acted on this already.

Thank you to everyone in advance - i know if we all work together, we can beat this.

andrea.farmer@mhra.gsi.gov.uk

Ms Andrea Farmer

MHRA, Area 5M

151 Buckingham Palace Road

Victoria, London SW1W 9SZ

Dear Ms Farmer,

I am writing to you about the MHRA consultation document entitled; Review of Medicines Act 1968: informal consultation on issues relating to the PLR regime and homeopathy. As a member of the public who chooses to use homeopathy and benefits from its application/practicing homeopath (delete as applicable), I am deeply concerned by the current orchestrated campaign against homeopathy, which is led by a self-appointed pressure group, Sense About Science, and a number of bloggers.

I consider it to be a fundamental right of any citizen living in a country which purports to be a democracy, to have ready access to the healthcare option of their choice. This includes homeopathy, which as you know is included in the original NHS charter.

I find your statement below acceptable for the new registration labels, and can see no reason to change this statement:

"A homeopathic medicinal product licensed only on the basis of safety, quality and use within the homeopathic tradition"

Yours sincerely,

I'll completely ignore the whole business of competitive polljacking. It's something I find entirely tiresome and pointless - any fool can play at that game and they generally do. As Bertrand Russell said: "The fact that a belief has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not absolutely absurd" - and polljacks are hardly proportional census reports. So I'll start with the fact that I guess I can add two homeopathy proofs:

ARGUMENT FROM COMMAND OF ENGLISH
1) My spelling, punctuation and grammar are appalling.
2) This is because I have been concentrating on homeopathy, which is more important.
3) You only notice because you are petty.
4) And also because you have nothing important on your mind.
5) Therefore, homeopathy works.

ARGUMENT FROM ORCHESTRATED CAMPAIGNS
1) Some self-appointed pressure groups and bloggers can orchestrate campaigns.
2) They are self-appointed and therefore wrong.
3) Therefore, their campaigns are wrong, as is the orchestration.
4) I know if we work together we can beat this.
5) Therefore, our campaigns and orchestration are right.
6) Therefore, homeopathy works.

If I understand right, the proposal that has so upset this student is summarised here (feel free to sign - at the time of writing there is a short time left in which to do so). The actual document, which may be the source of the panic, is here.

The points in question are as follows. Point 23 states: "“The MHRA will review the labelling requirements under the NRS to ensure that these deliver clarity as to the status of products and their composition" (i.e. that the composition is sugar and water?).

And the fuss is, I think, over the next three points:

24. The form of wording currently used on the labelling and in the accompanying patient information leaflet under the NRS is

“A homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of ….”

25. MHRA considers there is scope for this information to be made more specific, particularly for the benefit of those consumers who may be less familiar with the nature of homeopathy. We propose the following more explicit form of wording should be used, on the outer packaging and patient information leaflet:

“A homeopathic medicinal product licensed only on the basis of safety, quality and use within the homeopathic tradition”

26. Information about indications would read:

“A homeopathic medicinal product used within the homeopathic tradition for the symptomatic relief of……”

So as you see, homeopathy is hardly being illegalised. I'm not sure the proposed sentence in point 25 will actually change anything - how many people take the slightest notice of the fact that all adverts for horoscope telephone numbers in newspapers have the disclaimer "For entertainment purporses only"? And that in itself is, in my opinion, a great deal clearer. I fear people need a great deal more education to read label-ese - and if that's taught in schools, I'm afraid I missed it.

That the student ends the first pargraph (the one beginning with "URGENT! TOP PRIORITY!") with "this avoids the need to prove the science behind prescribing of remedies and allows us to practice as normal" rather sums up the whole business.

But what also sums it up is that the whole thing was accepted without question by the professor and passed on just like that. Imagine if a student of any other subject wrote to a professor with a great deal of misinformation, asking for everyone to be informed and to act against the supposed enemy, and the professor, rather than correcting the student or recommending a little more research, simply went ahead! Not only would this be bad practice to the rest of their students and colleagues and the whole academic community, but it would be effectively humiliating the student!

I quote a couple of responses people made when I forwarded on the e-mail to them:

"The MHRA will not change the rules on Friday; homeopaths will still be able to sell their sugar pills. The MHRA are proposing changing the wording for National Rules products. There is ONE such product: Nelson's Arnicare. The changes they (or at least Big Quacka) should be more worried are the revoking of all Product Licences of Right, because with that goes the right to claim it's good for minor and serious medical conditions. She either has not read the consultation document or has completely misunderstood it."

"I'm afraid I saw this as an example of a student getting hold of the wrong end of a stick and leaping into the fray wielding it - even if the fray is entirely of the student's imagining. Very poor that an administrator has picked it up and run with it though. Very professional, right down to the xx. Poor Ms Farmer, who will be inundated with these emails - no doubt many of them still with 'delete as appropriate' in them - and will no doubt form her own opinion of whose is the orchestrated campaign."

You can read more at Zeno's Blog, Don't Homeopanic at Crispian's, and at the Quackometer.

In the kind of democracy the student and the unquestioning professor claim we should have, anyone can dispense any remedy, regardless of what it does - their own faith and shunning of explanations is evidence enough that they are "helping". Is that really the kind of democracy we want? To put it another way, would you want your own doctor to give you whatever vaccinations he or she fancies; your schoolteacher to teach your child any old thing such as religious extremism, rolling down grassy banks or lion-taming? Just the way most people agree on a set of general manners, I think it's only sensible to agree on a set of medical rules - and I'm afraid science, not salespeople's hurt feelings, is the better driver of medicine's progress.

We don't have to be either workers or a drain

2011-02-15T17:50:00.003Z

Today there are enough stories about neglect in our care and health services to make you cry. The NHS "fails to treat the elderly with care and respect," says the BBC, adding four reports by witnesses (workers and patients' relatives) telling condemning stories. "Hungry, thirsty, unwashed . . . Elderly people treated by the NHS were denied even the most basic standards of care," says the Independent.

Before that, Johann Hari wrote a moving piece on the neglect his grandmother went through in one care home after another - and, after the overwhelming response the article received, evidently interviewed many people to search for a solution, which he presents here. And although I loathe to link to the Daily Mail, this account by a nurse of the massive culture change her profession has undergone is infinitely worth a read.

The stories she tells are infuriating - heartbreaking for anyone who might have been through this themselves, or knows anyone else who has - and also, although this sounds less impressive but is true all the same, desperation-inducing to someone like me, who has worked in the NHS and whose immediate family still does. Making people better is something that many doctors, nurses and others give their lives to. Someone in my family is (and has been for many years) on call 24 hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and is often at work ten or twelve hours a day to make sure the patients get everything they need on top of the mountains of unutterably pointless, illogical and ill-thought-out - and immediately forgotten, to add insult to injury - forms the managers demand he spends hours a day filling in. It's aged him rapidly. And nothing distresses him, or the others, more than learning of mistakes or poor care.

Joan Woodcock, the author who wrote the article in the Daily Mail, does not mince her words about where things have gone wrong:

I am sure that many of the new generation of nurses are as caring as we were. But what chance do they have of showing it when the hospitals in which they work are run not by experienced nurses but by bureaucrats?

Too often these managers fail to realise that patients are people, not commodities, and that management skills acquired in banks and retail business don’t necessarily transfer to the running of NHS hospitals.

She adds: "When matrons were phased out at the end of the 1960s and replaced by managers, things soon began to slide. There was no longer any one person in charge of patient care in each hospital, no one with the authority and respect of those like [the strict and demanding matron]."

I've had a couple of good blogs pointed out to me over Twitter. One called BillyNoJob remarks on a conclusion by John Humphrys: "This is not about professional incompetence. It is about inhumanity, lack of compassion, and the most basic failure of respect for other people." Joan Woodcock and Johann Hari's articles amount to the same thing. BillyNoJob adds, unlike them, that he has witnessed many patients treating hospital staff with rudeness and contempt, too. This is especially so when many staff are immigrants, since care is not - as Johann Hari says, too - rewarding or a profession to which Britons are encouraged to aspire.

This shows two problems: firstly that (as Johann Hari also mentions) care is not well-paid, rewarding or a profession to which Britons are in the least encouraged to aspire; secondly the old business of scapegoating. It is a genuine problem when a health worker's English is not very good, not only in medical terms but in euphemisms and non-verbal messages patients are likely to use a lot in terms of their illness and on intimate subjects. This may be a contributing factor; but the atmosphere of distrust and dislike that the tabloids encourage does not get anyone anywhere.

Johann Hari, among others, emphasises the lack of niceness health care workers show - indeed have time to show - to patients who are bored, frustrated, and have nobody to talk to. This lack of time is ruining things for "Militant Nurse", whose outside life and family and doubtless her own health and energy are suffering as she has to work unpaid overtime just to get even the basic jobs done. The ward is horrifyingly understaffed. She is in a state of understandable rage, made all the worse when the patients misinterpret her shortage of time as a lack of caring, and are grateful to the only other worker who is not equipped with the skills of a nurse and as a consequence does have time to make them a cup of tea. Reading her blog, one wonders what keeps any nurse from looking for another job - other than the lack of other jobs available.

Among lack of time and lack of niceness also lies a lack of willingness to take responsibility. Joan Woodcock's article shows how no one person seems to be responsible for any particular task, and various staff are all too keen to say, "That's X's job, not mine" - and therefore it doesn't get done. "Militant Nurse" notes that the consequence of this is that when a problem has to be addressed, whoever happens to be on the ward when the manager arrives gets the blame.

This is a difficult issue, but I'm going to take a stab at it anyway. (And if I'm wrong, it's better that I at least thought about it than that I accepted possibly flawed conclusions.) Ducking responsibility shows nervousness and a lack of empowerment. A lack of empowerment stems from general distrust. I write about that more here. In short, I get the feeling that the emphasis is on protecting oneself and one's job (which is after all usually one's family's lifeline). The point of the job has been lost in the worry about basic survival, and that makes people selfish and helpless. Maybe selfishness and helplessness is rewarded more than doing the job is. Maybe helplessness looks inoffensive to those who don't like their colleagues to answer back.

A few years ago, in Cornwall, I knew a Hungarian lady who was a care worker - and an academic. She was doing the care work to fund the academia, and she cared a great deal about both. She mentioned at one time that it was difficult to get a new job not because of her inexperience, but quite the opposite. "They prefer naive young girls who don't know what it involves, because they think the rest of us will leave," she explained to me. "I know what it involves - it involves a lot of pee and poo." (She looked after adults with mental health problems.)

I mentioned flawed conclusions just now, and it is important to note that the ombudsman's report was based on ten cases. This looks like I'm making excuses, I know, but we can't judge the entire NHS on ten cases, nor on the four highlighted by the BBC. Reports like Joan Woodcock's, I think, are worth taking seriously (though not as all-encompassing) despite being by only one individual, for she has seen several decades pass and umpteen thousand patients.

Doubtless this report will be sprung on by circling vultures: private companies all too ready to take over; probably alternative medicine sellers who'll claim that their product "treats the whole individual" just as these public services evidently are not; and the government itself, to demonstrate that "the NHS is not working". But the NHS did work for a long time and in most cases it still does - good treatment just doesn't make headlines! Privatising would solve little or none of the above. What's so good about being "treated like a customer"? It only means a hierarchy will be created rather than efficiency - the simpler your disease and the fatter your wallet, the better care you'll get. And vice versa.

You may wonder why these issues worry a 28-year-old so much. It may be partly my medical family, but also because I've known long-term illness for myself - the weakness, the helplessness, the lack of knowledge about your future. For some time, I didn't know if I'd ever get better. I wondered if death would be the better option. Therefore, the thought of getting old and going to one of those care homes absolutely terrifies me - yet it's something that a great many of us will actually have to face.

The worst thing about a long-term illness is feeling useless, a drain on other people, unable to give anything, only to take. I'm really not happy when I'm only taking and not giving - and I don't say this because I think I'm a saint or something, I think that's actually what nearly everybody is like (it just makes you look silly or smug to say so). And I think it's something that we feel more the older we get, and the more we get accustomed we become to working and to looking after others. Who wants to rely on others for everything when they've lived 70 or 80 or 90 years and have worked hard and given a great deal for most of them?

It's peculiar how society is divided very strongly into two classes of people now: those who are working and those who are not. Those who are working are seen as the only useful ones. Those who are not are, frankly, a problem, and their numbers should be brought down. If they can't find a job, they're scum - they should do voluntary work not even for minimum wage, or starve. If they're not working because they're studying, they should pay vast sums - the assumption here being that the studying will only benefit them, not society as a whole. If they're not working because they're too young or too old, they are a pest and a drain because they're taking up other people's resources - and we must find ways to economise on this wasteful problem. Carers are treated shabbily enough. Parents are finding it increasingly hard to find somewhere to put their children while they work - and they're being threatened with very severe punishments if they want to look after their children themselves. (This sort of thing has been going on for some time - I recall there was a plan to punish parents who do not get a job as soon as their child turns one, and another once their child turns three, and another once their child turns seven, and another once their child turns ten. Plans generally come to nothing - in autumn 2007, as a trainee teacher, I was told that by autumn 2008 all schools would legally have to be open until 8pm for babysitting purposes, which of course by autumn 2008 had been completely forgotten - but the constant stream of threats and promises is a constant source of uncertainty, inability to plan properly, and doubtless waste and great stress.)

In short, if you haven't got a job, you're an affront ro the economy - and the ratio of people looking after you to other useless people like you should be as unequal as we can possibly afford.

But having a job versus not having a job is not the only definition of useful. Do you remember that children's book from the 1860's, "What Katy Did"? Katy's sick cousin Helen told her that "a sick person can be the heart of the house", and that they have a unique advantage: "she is always on hand". The Victorian era was a time of vast productivity, and it was a time of masses of different roles taken in society. (I'm not saying it was a time of universal good or that everyone was well looked after.) Why should we all aim to be in the role of the worker? - and if we are not, why is it assumed our only role is as a drain?

If we do not assume that the young, sick, studying or elderly are basically society's unwanted baggage - if we think of them as people who want to give, rather than simply want to take and who we "ought to treat with more respect", I wonder if things would change?

I had this idea a few years ago. It's an amateur idea, if that. It's an idea that you may simply laugh off. It's an idea that has so many possible legal pitfalls that I doubt it would ever get off the ground. It may simply be decoration rather than addressing a fundamental problem. And it might really annoy those who know more than I do. But if I don't share it we will never find out. Here it is.

What about combining care of the very old with care of the very young? For example, a residential care home which doubles as a children's nursery by day? Yes, there would need to be separate areas. But imagine how nice for both parties to have the other one around. The children would have someone to run to if they'd made an amazing tower with blocks, or if they'd fallen and hurt their knee. The elderly residents - who had a "daily activity" in one of Johann Hari's grandmother's homes - would have a bunch of ready-made grandchildren to talk to and listen to, to teach to read, to share their memories with. And they need not look after them all the time!

Fine, this idea has a great deal of untested personal bias. People tend to move across the country now - I never got to know any of my grandparents at all well before they died. But when I was little, I adored the elderly. I knew they had to be treated gently, but for some reason I was convinced they were all magnificent and saintly. I have also never forgotten a passage in Torey Hayden's story "One Child" in which she brings a mute four-year-old to meet a nearly-mute elderly stroke victim, who becomes far more "animated" as soon as he is in the room. Once I started office work, my colleagues only had to bring a little one in for me to develop a huge grin and, if the child wanted to talk to me, to have my full attention and have me make paper aeroplanes for them. Teaching and looking after kids brings me joy like nothing else can. Also I have worked at a call centre where the sick and elderly rang me to book hospital transport, and almost all were so very lonely. I know it wouldn't suit all young or old people. But it's an idea worth thinking about, perhaps?

As well as less in the way of wild promises, inconsistent and target-obsessed management, and general inhumanity, I would like to see people who need care being treated more as people - not just in terms of what they should get, but what they can do. It would have vast effects on self-esteem and morale all around. In my idea, the children's education and social development would benefit, as would I hope the elderly people's happiness (and if they get fed up they should surely be able to retreat to a private sitting-room!). It would hopefully inspire a lot more friendships and family links - perhaps children's parents would be interested in how the elderly people are doing, too. It would stop people being segregated into classrooms, offices or care homes where they only people they meet are others exactly like themselves, which would have to be good for generating mutual respect all round.

Wishy-washy-wisfulness, or a lot more radical than privatisation? I don't pretend this is a solution to all ills. I just think it might be worth a try. If nothing else, my Hungarian carer friend thought the idea had promise - and some of the adults she looked after were helpless in some ways, yet able to find some form of in-depth hobbies and even employment in others. If you work in healthcare, or just care - or even if you don't - I'd be interested to hear what you think.

England's forests for sale

2011-01-30T23:53:00.008Z

I declare an interest: I love trees. I don't seem to find that many of them these days, especially not in the same place - and they're often found put there on purpose, or the space around them adapted to our tastes. Here's a little collection, though. Three are in a public woodland, Idless Woods in Cornwall. The others are from Kew Gardens, my old university campus, and a patch of ground near where I live in Wales . . .

This country was not always like that. Once upon a time, it was covered with forests. That was the natural thing. (Is it just me or is our hero in many fairy tales a poor woodcutter?) Have you heard about succession? It was a beautiful little concept I learnt of in first year A level Biology - take a barren area, perhaps rocky, or a beach, with no fertile soil. Start with the faintest sprinkling of a few tiny, hardy plants. As they drive their roots into the ground, they create airholes, a good soil texture (not with particles so large that the water all drains away, such as pure sand, or so small that it clogs and floods like clay), fix nutrients, and generally set up a complex ecosystem. Plants and bacteria and animals - first tiny ones, and later larger ones - find their homes there.

A forest, if I understand correctly, is pretty much the last stage of that. Trees reach for the light. When the rain hammers down from the sky, the trees' leaves break its fall, softening the raindrops' impact on the soil and preventing if from being washed away. Moss grows on trees. Dead leaves provide nutrients for next year. When a tree dies, its dead wood is home to hundreds of creatures. A rainforest is a symbol of perfect recycling and order - evaporation from the plants even often control the weather, and set off predictable and regular cloudbursts - a temperate forest is certainly less dramatic, but the same general processes go on.

But what such a system is not - like so many things ecological - is speedy. A tree takes hundreds of years to grow. Some forest ecosystems have been suggested to be adapted to forest fires. But a wipeout of an area of trees in a forest not so adapted would take years and years to recover. Vast as it may seem, and remote, an ecosystem is a delicate thing.

Gradually, forests were cut or burnt back to make way for farms, and then towns. Gradually, more and more of what is now the UK was invaded by one horde after another, and land became something owned by humans, to do with as they liked. Of course, so many animals have ways of "owning" their territory - by patrolling and spraying it, and chasing off competitors; and I have the feeling from my faraway biology studies there are a great many plant species that barely survive or have been driven to extinction by relentless chomping or wanton destruction by local critters. But ecosystems have had time to adapt to that. No animal, to the best of my knowledge, has the desire or the means to eliminate all plants that grow around it. I think the only time this happens is when a fairly large animal is tethered or enclosed in a small space, and tramples all the grass.

Not that humans generally have, either. We all love to see a bit of greenness. When I was 20 I visited Norway, and my guidebook was pretty exact on how forests were regarded there. (I cannot recommend enough a visit to Bergen on the west coast, and a trek round the forests and up the mountains that surround it. That was one of the most magical days of my life.) A walk in the woods was supposed to cure all stress and misery. There was an indestructable tradition of collective ownership - I think it even had a name (if only I knew where that guidebook was now!) - and of the right of all people to walk through the woods, pretty much anywhere. As long as you were further away than 200m from the nearest fence around a property, you could camp anywhere, too. It's possible that the book was exaggerating or romanticising madly, and I was young and impressionable then; but as I walked through Norwegian woods and met others doing likewise, I felt a sense of almost sacredness, of a collective treasure that nobody could be denied.

This all sounds very woolly and hard to pin down in today's world. Everything has to be owned by someone, and to have some utilitarian, measurable, monetary purpose. To today's government, collective ownership of what forests England has left is something that can be dispensed with. "We're going to make billions of pounds this way! We need to reduce the deficit! Oh, and yes of course they'll be sold to really responsible owners, who'll let you all still enjoy them. In fact, private ownership is a guarantee of improvement. They will be managed more efficiently this way." Or something like that.

I say England, because Wales is keeping out of it for now (I don't know what is going to happen to us, but my hopes are not high) and here is the map of the forests that are up for sale:
(Source)

Just who are these responsible owners? "The controversial decision will pave the way for a huge expansion in the number of Center Parcs-style holiday villages, golf courses, adventure sites and commercial logging operations throughout Britain as land is sold to private companies," reports the Telegraph.

A spokesman for David Cameron claims that "We are not going to sell off our heritage forests to the highest bidder, we are not going to remove public access to forests – there will be strict rules in place to prevent that happening. There is a consultation. We are going to have that consultation and listen to people's views and then come to some conclusions." I'm sorry, spokesman, but I simply don't believe you. Once someone has bought a forest, and it's their property, how are you going to stop them then cutting the whole thing down? You couldn't. And money would have exchanged hands; they'd be your mate. You wouldn't want to upset them. That's the way you people do things.

The government claim the issue is not private versus public ownership, while a large segment of the public argue that it is. Typically, there are the usual howls about how some woods under public ownership haven't managed them perfectly, and therefore privatisation necessarily will. Funny how you never hear the opposite being suggested in cases where private companies do a bad job - apparently, competition is the cure-all to that . . .

(As an aside, this "consultation" about "how we would like our forests sold" is exactly the same as what Labour were fobbing us off with regarding our National Health Service, when they were closing Accident and Emergency departments in the name of efficiency. They designed a survey which asked people all about choice, and then concluded that the public wanted choice. Someone wrote to the Independent to remark that the survey would have failed as A level Psychology coursework. It was like asking, "Do you like tea or coffee?", ignoring those who said "orange juice", and then reporting triumphantly, "Buyers exclusively like hot drinks! Let's dispense with fruit juice in the name of consumer choice!")

OK, I'm stereotyping my head off here, but as another aside, trust them to be going for golf courses. I'd love to see a library, youth club or community centre being the thing to replace a forest. But no, again, if anyone benefits from this sell-off, it will be the ultra-wealthy few.

Our forests are more than pretty trees, more than a nice walk that doesn't get the economy going. They're lifeblood of the biosphere. They're what keeps our soil good, and they help prevent floods. They're the precious remaining homes of millions of innocent creatures. They're a place to keep people sane amidst the stress of a noisy, utilitarian world. They release oxygen and soak up carbon dioxide, maintaining the delicate balance of our atmosphere. They're a tiny bit of our world that has every right to remain. Too much will die if it's lost.

I suppose none of what I've said here can sway anyone who thinks only of money. But I know I'm not alone. About 300,000 people have now signed 38 Degrees's Save Our Forests petition. The National Trust and the Woodland Trust have both made their views clear. I feel horribly conscious that my science on this topic is rusty. And that we'll have difficulty phrasing our arguments in a capitalist, government-impressing, management-speak way. But I don't believe that invalidates them.

It's well summed up here in the Independent, and by a commenter on the BBC website: "Woodland does not 'belong' to people. We are stewards who safeguard it for the benefit of all creatures. The idea of our remaining precious public access woodland being sold off to the super rich to barr families who enjoy being in the woods is totally unthinkable. This government is taking reckless, far-reaching decisions, which will impact on many generations to come. Once the woodland is sold off that's it - there is no going back."

You can catch up with all the media stories here on 38 Degrees - there's quite a bit of history, too, especially on the subject of how the Forestry Commission was set up after the wreck of the First World War. People knew what damage was then. They should bear in mind what damage is now. Modern society needed to progress to a certain extent to realise that human beings should not be put up for sale - perhaps there are other things, and forests fall into that category, that should receive similar exemption.

If you agree, please sign that petition and tell everyone you know. It's particularly interesting that whenever I see it mentioned, or mention it myself, along comes someone else who turns out not to have known and is aghast. Parliament will be making the decision very soon - a lot of people are making their voice known one way or another these days; please add yours!

Update, 12th February 2011: The bill did go through - but now they're rethinking. So there's still time to act.

Update, 17th February: LOOK!!!!!

Doctor Proctor and the Irregular Galaxies

2011-01-29T14:10:00.006Z

Before I write this post, an apology. Formspring, the question and answer site - on which you're all welcome to contact me with an astronomy question (no guarantee I can answer it, but I'll do my best) - turned one of my entries into a blog post here without any form of notification. I always make sure I have the "blogger" tickbox un-ticked, so it shouldn't have been able to do that. Annoyed and caught off guard, I deleted the unwanted blog post - and forgot to save a comment someone had left! Sorry to that person. Please do leave it again.

Back in 2008, when the first of Galaxy Zoo's many projects on merging galaxies got underway, the zookeepers posted a list of galaxies they wanted us to identify as mergers or not. We had a zooite called Waveney, which, incidentally, is also the name of the hall of residence that I was in at university - and which he had been in many years earlier! Waveney, whose real name is Richard Proctor, wrote a program allowing us to go through the list much faster, Galaxy Zoo style - and made quite a difference, by allowing mini-projects to run quickly and enjoyably on the forum.

One area which hasn't been looked at much in astronomy, including in Galaxy Zoo, is irregular galaxies. We've been focussing - especially in the early days - on galaxies with a defined shape we can study, such as spiral or elliptical:

(From the Galaxy Zoo 1 tutorial. Click to expand.)

An irregular looks like neither of these. In fact, I can't really describe an irregular's shape. It might be a cloud, it might be a set of clouds or starforming clumps, it might be a crazy-shaped mass after a merger . . . There's a good sample here and the forum's whole collection here if you'd like to browse. Here's one for illustration, but it's hardly a representative of all of them.

(From SDSS.)

Now, on the one hand, irregular galaxies got more interesting since the launch of Hubble Zoo because it seems to me that nearly every galaxy we get on that is irregular! Hubble Zoo is mostly looking at galaxies much, much further away than those we looked at with the SDSS telescope. That means we see them as younger than our own - and younger than they would be now if light travelled instantaneously. Most of them are, frankly, a mess. It's fascinating to think that these wispy, often unclassifiable things are a prelude to the gorgeous creatures nearby. As an aside, to me, that's a hefty piece of evidence in favour of the Big Bang. I've classified well over 100,000 galaxies by now, and seen how different they look according to age. (Granted, this is not a scientific study.)

And on the other hand, irregular galaxies are interesting because Waveney is going to do a PhD on them.

His irregulars project has been running for a while, and as I write this, the "click count" is 88,488! The largest sample of galaxies looked at by a professional astronomer that he can find is 161; Waveney's project has many thousands. These were mostly collected by extracting all the ones from the Irregulars thread on the forum, and a brilliant, dedicated lady in Puerto Rico named Aida Berges going through the rest of the forum and the SDSS databases to find others. (Have a go at navigating around; it's terrific fun!)

To take part in the irregulars project, I recommend a quick look around Galaxy Zoo or the forum for a few tips, so you know what you're doing. But I don't mean masses of intense study. Galaxy Zoo itself does not require you to be an astronomer; it requires you to be better than computers at looking at shapes, and as (presumably) a human, you therefore qualify. There is an "irregular checking examples" thread where people can ask for advice.

You'll be asked: how clear the irregular is (i.e. how reliable anything is you say about it - some are very faint or fuzzy); whether it's a compact galaxy or whether it's all over the place; whether it has various features that larger galaxies have - a core, a bar, any spiral features; and whether it's alone or among a lot of others, for which there are zoom buttons you can use to help (even so this can be a bit thorny, as galaxies that appear to be nearby can often be millions of light years further away, just in the same line of sight). There are also buttons to indicate whether it happens to be the same as the previous irregular - for the SDSS camera often focussed on more than one point in a galaxy - and whether it's not an irregular at all.

Waveney's initial results show some definite differences between irregulars and other galaxies - their blueness, for example, which is an indicator of heat and star formation. You can also look at their metallicity to see how old they are. For example, are irregulars basically very young galaxies who might eventually evolve into the spirals and ellipticals we know? Or are they simply the cosmic plankton, unobserved amidst the sharks and whales yet a bedrock of the ecosystem - because, perhaps, not enough gas happened to be a round where they formed? (Spiral galaxies, for instance, need to be a certain mass to become the complex rotating disk we're familiar with.)

The method Galaxy Zoo uses to gain a really accurate database is for lots of people to classify each galaxy. For example, 90% of people might think that something's a smooth elliptical; but the other 10% may claim that they can see signs that it's rotating, or disturbed. It's easily possible that neither sample of people was wrong. Although I can seldom resist talking about irregulars as if they're the animals we don't notice because they're small and unglamorous, galaxies do not have particularly fine lines drawn between definite types. There's a lot of argument on the forum over whether or not one type of galaxy turns into another, or whether it's just that some sit on a blurred line!

Waveney uses the same method: get as many people as possible to look at each irregular. You could say that 25% of people think this has some spiral structure, and therefore, in a sense, this is 75% an ordinary irregular and 25% a sort of proto-spiral. That may sound unscientific, but it's less so than trying to force it into a human-defined category when it genuinely doesn't belong to one.

He got the idea of turning this into a PhD thesis from a remark Chris made along the lines of "you've done half a PhD here". " I recognise this means I have done 10%," he writes cheerfully, "but it got me thinking – why not do it properly. I don’t want to do this full time, I have a very full time job – but could I do it part time. Does the Open University do part time PhDs – a quick web search yes it does…" There's nothing like simply looking at what you could do and what options are available!

As I said, he's looking at colour and metallicity, also the irregulars' masses and starforming rates. He's comparing these with equivalent samples of spirals, ellipticals and also the peas, the intensely starforming compact galaxies we amateurs found and studied in 2007 and 2008. None of the irregulars contains an active galactic nucleus, which suggests that they are all of low mass. (An active galactic nucleus is the activity surrounding a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy - where stars and other matter whose speeds around the disk are insufficient to keep them in orbit forever, and which therefore pile up in the middle. When a huge amount of matter arrives in a small place this way, before it enters the black holes, it becomes unbelievably hot, and can outshine the entire galaxy.)

What else? Doubtless he has other plans up his sleeve. I only feel sorry that, in the early stages of the project, when Jules and I were also helping, my part - examining the irregulars' environment, i.e. how close they were to their neighbours - came to a standstill before I even started, because nothing I did with SQL actually worked. Months later, Chris told me that in fact my task wasn't possible with current tools - I am sure there are other avenues, but I am no programmer and am an unlikely candidate to find it out. Waveney has tactfully described me as being "in a supporting role". That does seem to be my role in most citizen science projects, and it does seem to be helpful to at least the people and the communication, if not the data itself. Perhaps one day that'll change. If not . . . well, supporting people are very useful.

You can keep up with what Waveney (who has stoically ignored the nickname of "Doctor Proctor" I couldn't resist giving him) in the Galaxy Zoo Library, and do give him some irregular clicks. If you're interested in the wider issues of citizen science and education, please note that the Open University is among the umpteen bodies whose funding is being slashed. Some of us at Galaxy Zoo, me included, have studied astronomy and (in my case) mathematics, inspired simply by what we're doing and discovering - and it's the only chance for so many people to combine study with their jobs, families, and other real-life commitments. Waveney's PhD thesis will bring new knowledge to the field of astronomy, not to mention be a shining beacon for people who thought their chance to learn and contribute was over. Knowledge is not a drain; it's progress - so let's not let it go.

A speech

2011-01-21T15:28:00.004Z

I did not expect that a speech at a graduation ceremony would make me shiver all over, for a long time, as this did. But if there's one thing I recommend you read today, this is it.

It was by J. K. Rowling at the Harvard graduation ceremony of June 2008. I wonder if they expected her to talk about success and scholarship, maybe fame? Here is what she did talk about.

For those of you wondering, I love the Harry Potter books. (No, not the films. I've only seen the first, and a snatch of the second whilst walking past the TVs on display in Woolworth's many years ago, and I don't plan to see more.) One of the best quotes from them is from Sirius, who, sadly, failed to quite apply it himself - "If you want to get the measure of a man, take a good look at how he treats his inferiors, not his equals." But that's not what J. K. Rowling talked about that day. I'll say no more - just hand you over to her. If you wonder after a few paragraphs what on earth chilled me to the bone . . . read on. As she says, we can think ourselves into other people's lives . . . and we really, really should.

Blaming the Vulnerable

2011-01-13T21:00:00.004Z

Last week I was heavily criticised by someone online for leaving in the middle of a conversation. My willingness to stay and talk to this person were, in their view, proof of my integrity and goodwill. When I explained that I actually did have to leave, because I had to give someone with sight problems a lift, the response was to the effect that I must be trying to use guilt as a weapon, to sidestep the issue under discussion: "Oh, playing the emotional card now are we?"

My last few posts have focussed on science, a discipline in which a mature person accepts that human opinions have no bearing whatever on the truth. This post, I should warn you, while it contains a lot of information and stories, will be opinionated, subjective, and including some doubtless imperfect memories. So please take it with a pinch of salt if such is your desire. (It's sad that I have to include a warning like this, but it is amazing how many grown-up people cannot or do not choose to distinguish what type of argument is being put forward.)

The person on the Internet could not have known the problems the person I was driving had had. They did not know that they were left untreated for months between cataract operations, giving their eyes a sightedness difference of 20. Yes, I do mean the same measurement used for short versus long sight; most people's errors, as I understand it, are under one; my eyes are -7 and -8 which means I basically can't see a thing without my specs. Do try them on if you meet me. People find it quite an experience! How could this person behind a screen possibly know what life was like with such different eyes - the dizziness, the accidents, the frustration, the loss of self-esteem, indeed the loss of one's own identity? Well, they couldn't. I didn't expect them to. But what bothered me was the assumption that disability must be to do with attention-seeking rather than reality. Because I have seen so very much of that when it comes to dealing with vulnerable people.

I was, like so many, bullied at school. When I was 13, a classmate who was a friend - not a very reliable friend, but someone who I could have a conversation with occasionally, so a rarity - told me earnestly: "Alice, I'm sorry, but some people -" nervous laugh "really -" nervous, breath-catching, you-know-what-I-mean sort of laugh - "don't like you." In other words, I simply must be doing something to provoke their behaviour. It just must be my fault.

During university I suffered from a long-term illness. This meant that a couple of times I had to hand in my work a few days late. (It also meant that pretty much all my energy was expended just dragging myself to lectures, but that's another story.) My first set of housemates knew about my illness; sadly, they all graduated before I did, and my second set leapt to the conclusion that I was "taking the piss out of our degree". They were not the kind of people I could even tell that I was ill (or were observant enough to notice for themselves - though I made every effort to hide my symptoms as it was my greatest terror that people would find them, and therefore my company, distasteful). The idea that I might have a genuine reason for working slowly never even occurred to them. As far as they were concerned, it was simply obvious that I was a liar.

Jody McIntyre experienced precisely the same thing when he was dragged out of his wheelchair on the student protests. Despite the fact that he was in a wheelchair, according to many viewers, he simply must have been doing something to provoke this action. Maybe, for example, his wheelchair could be an offensive weapon. Now, I actually work in a charity that hires out wheelchairs and I knew no more about these contraptions than the next person until I started having to handle them. Have you ever tried to lift one of the wretched things up? There is a technique to it - pull up its seat to make it narrow, and get it at either end . . . oh, there's a catch. The person must be out of the wheelchair. They could hardly do such a thing themselves. OK, so his brother could have pushed him into a policeman, which would have been a lot more dangerous for Jody than the policeman and a highly unlikely scenario. OK, so it's pretty painful if someone in a wheelchair runs into your foot on the bus. I'm not sure this was any justification for manhandling someone far less able to fight back than your average protestor, however. Perhaps they thought, as so many do, that he was asking for it, and faking?

Laurie Penny addresses this. "The press has been trying to imply that, because Jody is a revolutionary activist and ideologue who has travelled to Palestine and South America, he cannot be a 'real' disabled person." She goes on to explain, "The attitude is that there are two types of disabled person: there are real disabled people, who are quiet and grateful and utterly incapable of any sort of personal agency whatsoever, and fake disabled people – people like Jody McIntyre, who are disqualified from being truly disabled by virtue of having personality, ambition, outside interests and, in this case, the cojones to stand up to a corrupt and duplicitous government."

Sadly, someone in a wheelchair who I know subscribes to exactly the same line of thought: she knows of people who fake a disability and therefore, she feels, the police were right to assume that Jody McIntyre was one of these and therefore somehow had the right to attack him. I suppose this is the same sort of thing as women who discourage other women from, say, going into science or a high-flying career; I've met or read of many women who say the most sexism they encountered was not from men, but from fellow women.

Or even of a boss I had when I was 18, who had wanted, when young, to be an idealist; but after encountering a great deal of dishonesty on the part of others had given up and decided to conduct himself and his company in line with the assumption that dishonesty is the only useful and even respectable way to do business. He loathed that about himself. And he hated my youthful idealism and was determined that I should become embittered and self-loathing, like him. Just like the prefects at school who bullied younger pupils on the grounds that "they did it to us, so why shouldn't we do it to them?" Perhaps I'm taking the comparison a little too far. To clarify, I'm talking about a tendency to focus on one's own experience and the perceived justice around that, rather than aiming at a higher justice for other people.

I'm not saying people never lie, or that nobody's on benefits for treatable conditions. But that is actually a tiny minority. People like Wagner from X-factor do the genuinely disabled a great disservice, and the consequences of being tarred with the same brush as "fakes" - in other words, to be a needless consumer, whose support can be done away with - can be terrible. Disability Living Allowance is being slashed; the Independent Living Fund which allows disabled people to get out of the house and not rely on full-time care is being slashed - a measure which may be unlawful by preventing a decent quality of life. In some cases, benefits can be a vital breathing space in order for a sick or otherwise troubled individual to recover and thereafter stop needing state help. To be on benefits also does not mean the state is necessarily supporting a person who could and would otherwise work; the money might be vital to get equipment and transport to get to work. By assuming mass fraud, and taking away a little (presumably in order to award further largesse to those who really don't need it, like bankers), you end up making a lot of people not only desperate, with their lives in inhumane crisis, but also wholly dependent on the state and ending up costing a lot more - when this simply need not be so.

But there's another issue here, too. Although that "emotional card" comment was basically any old throwaway insult, I think it reveals another fundamental misconception: that disability is an emotional rather than a practical issue.

Although of course many unpleasant emotions were felt and expressed - understandably! - by the person with sight problems, the very last thing someone with a disability needs is emotion. To be practical is what they need (in this case, to be given a lift - not a very emotional thing to do). The character Midori Kobayashi in Murakami's unforgettable novel Norwegian Wood has to deal with this misconception from relatives while caring for her sick father. Only 19 or 20 years old, her mother already dead and her father dying of a brain tumour, she eats like a horse in the hospital canteen, while the friend she brought to the hospital is unable to eat:

"Not hungry?" she asked, sipping her tea.
"Not really," I said.
"It's the hospital," she said, scanning the cafeteria. "This always happens when people aren't used to the place. The smells, the sounds, the stale air, patients' faces, stress, irritation, disappointment, fatigue - that's what does it. It grabs you in the stomach and kills your appetite. Once you're used to it, though, it's no problem at all. Plus, you can't really take care of a sick person unless you eat properly. It's true. I know what I'm talking about because I've done it with my grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, and now my father. You never know when you're going to have to miss your next meal, so it's important to eat while you can."
"I see what you mean," I said.
"Relatives come to visit and they eat with me here, and they always leave half their food, like you. And they always say, 'Oh, Midori, it's wonderful you've got such a healthy appetite. I'm too upset to eat.' But get serious, I'm the one who's actually here taking care of the patient! They just have to drop by and show a little sympathy. I'm the one who wipes the up the shit and collects the phlegm and mops the brows. If sympathy was all it took to clean up shit, I'd have 50 times as much sympathy as anybody else! Instead, they see me eating all my food and they give me this look and say, 'Oh, Midori, you've got such a healthy appetite.' What do they think I am, a donkey pulling a cart? They're old enough to know how the world really works, so why are they so stupid? It's easy to talk big, but the important thing is whether or not you clean up the shit. I can be hurt, you know. I can get as exhausted as anyone else. I can feel so bad I want to cry, too. I mean, you try watching a gang of doctors get together and cut open somebody's head when there's no hope of saving them, and stirring things up in there, and doing it again and again, and every time they do it it makes the person worse and a little bit crazier, and see how you like it! And on top of it, you see your savings disappear. I don't know if I can keep going to university for another three-and-a-half years, and there's no way my sister can afford a wedding ceremony at this rate."

Midori was dealing with impending tragedy. Disability, though, should not be tragic. It's only tragic when people make it so: by removing a small amount of support, or by regarding a disabled person as someone necessarily pathetic and helpless.

The Social Model of Disability urges a different way of looking at things. Some of it is a little annoying - asking us to change our language (page 5), which to me seems in some cases right and in others roughly as useful as painting all houses white because you happen to have heard that some pink houses are falling to bits. However, it does include something very important: that society and its systems and technology are adapted to make life easier for all of us, and we'd all be stunned and less able if certain things were lost. Take electricity, clean water, or clothing. Manufacturing and providing those is a business lots of us are in. It's only right for everybody to have them. They're nothing to do with emotion, but rather rights, comfort, efficiency, and basic dignity among others.

I wonder if all this sounds very demanding? Even for the most able-bodied, life and other people can be exceptionally stressful and seems to ask, every day, for more than you've got to give. I've worked with learning disabled people, I've cared about them and we've got to know each other. It's only fair; it can be a joy - and it can also be so draining that providing what they need comes at the expense of being myself and all the energy I've got. And believe me, nobody says thank you for that. To someone who works incredibly hard all day, satisfying the demands of people around them, who is desperately worried about their mortgage and is under the impression for whatever reason that disabled people are largely scroungers who are screaming for more money and for sympathy, it must engender real resentment. Even to someone who believes that most disabled people on benefits are genuine, it might be easy to feel defensive. Why are they constantly being told to change their language, when they've never said anything to offend? Why are they always being accused of things like "I take medicine because people like you won't accept me" (a signature on a web forum) and "disabilities are what other people turn your problems into" (a notice in an office) - when they are actually all for equality, often kind to others even while on the receiving end of selfish behaviour themselves? This is a slap in the face; it's hurtful; it makes them out to be hateful and that simply isn't true.

During the worst period of my illness I vaguely knew a girl in a wheelchair. She had a hoist over her bed and a carer who came to her room every day, of whom she spoke very offhandedly, as though the carer was a robot owed to her. All right, I'll be honest, I didn't like her. I thought she treated other people with contempt. Even had she not, it might well still have grated on me that her problems were visible and garnered support and sympathy from every corner, while my own were shameful, invisible, impossible to discuss, and that a couple of late essays made me get seen as a liar.

I grew out of this sort of resentment once I was healthier and had more resources to expend on other people. A few years later I met another girl who couldn't walk and was having trouble clearing out her room on her last day in halls. The university had promised to send someone to help her, but the said someone never arrived. I took it upon myself to help instead and was confused at the intensity of her gratitude; it was only what I would hope someone else would do for me in a similar situation, and it was my pleasure to help out a nice person.

So perhaps one's attitude to disability depends on familiarity, knowledge, and also what emotional resources they have of their own. One can't assume that someone without these is a bad person or an idiot. As I wrote about racism, when you do not meet such people, such a thing is theoretical and seems like an accusation, an imposition - which in turn gives one a very uncomfortable mixture of guilt and defensiveness, all too easy to turn into outright anger.

Last September, SCOPE claimed that disabled people were "invisible". My friend Joely wrote a terrific blog post about this. Was it true? Do people simply not think of those they know as "disabled", because it's a label that doesn't seem to apply to reality? Do they simply not think of problems that don't put you in a wheelchair as disabilities? When my charity had new banners made, the printers did a terrific job - but every single picture showed someone in a wheelchair. We explained to them that disability includes a far wider-ranging set of symptoms and people than this; and they went and re-did it to include people using various types of equipment, including a white stick. That, of course, doesn't include mental disabilities, but that wasn't the printers' fault obviously!

SCOPE wrote of their shock at people being "pushed to the fringes of society" - another accusation - but at least conceded to the BBC that "It's not that people are nasty, but they might not know what to say. The less familiar they are with disabled people, the more the embarrassment. The unwillingness to offend can cause the exclusion," and of course, not all houses have appropriate physical access.

This, again, is the "emotional" problem. OK, I can't speak for anyone but me, I know. But can I just tell you something? Picture me as ill again, unable to do some things, and in constant pain, and therefore by some definitions "disabled". Perhaps, because I've acquired this label, you'll suddenly be more worried about offending me. Let me assure you that such is very unlikely. I will not be offended if you ask me questions about my sickness, or if you bring it up in conversation. When I was too weak to go on particularly difficult walks, I was not offended that others did so without me. When someone cooked curry that was just the kind of fieriness to set my stomach off again, it meant I went hungry, but I was not offended because he had not known and I had not thought to tell him. If someone says "Alice, this food might be too hot for you," I will be grateful that you cared.

All this is easy to write; but in practice? I still worry about offending people by mentioning whatever disability or difficulty they have, unless they mention it themselves or there's a reason it needs to be brought up. If I see someone with a massive injury or physical difference from the rest of us, it's very hard not to look in curiosity and then I'm torn in half - is it ruder to stare or to pretend (probably badly) that you haven't even noticed them, and make them thus invisible and perhaps more alone? I don't know; I haven't actually been in that situation and would love to know the answer.

No, there's a few things that annoy me, but only a few. One is people assuming that I only wear glasses to be annoying, which is rare, but has happened. Women tell me scornfully that I ought to switch to contacts (which I really don't like, and that's my business); men tell me to remove them so they can look at my eyes, and then complain when I put them back on again. I've even been told "I prefer you without your glasses" which one does not realise is just the same as being told "I prefer you without your wheelchair". My landlord in Spain once had to go to do jury service. He had polio when he was young and one of his legs was barely more substantial than a piece of cooked spaghetti - he could pick it up, twist it round and put it next to his head as a pantomime telephone! Hilarious but not much good to walk on. He used crutches. He could prop himself up against a counter but that was it really. Unfortunately, to enter the courtrooms for jury service, he had to go through a metal detector. They told him to just pop his crutches on the conveyor belt and hop through on his own. He told them that was impossible. They affected not to understand. So he left the court and refused to do the jury service. That kind of thing is offensive. Innocent mistakes and curiosity aren't. The only other kind of thing I can think of is being accused of faking or exaggerating, or told that it was somehow my own fault.

That's the most sinister thing of all that can happen: to claim that, if someone has a problem, it's their fault. It can happen to bully victims. It happened to Jody McIntyre. It happens to the unemployed. It happened to the poor the Victorians called "undeserving". It happened to the countries Bismarck took Prussia to war with. It happens to rape victims. It happened - and this is where my imperfect memory comes in - to a woman I think with lupus, or some very unpleasant illness, whose extended family believed in reincarnation and previous lives. They said she must have been evil in one of hers, and this affliction was her reward.

And the reason for such a thing to happen, it seems to me, actually shows the most vulnerable side of the accusers: that they are afraid of having it happen to them. But if it's the victim's fault, then gives you the comforting illusion of control. If you don't do whatever provocative thing the victim did, and especially if you're careful to join the voices condemning whatever it was, the punishment won't happen to you.

That is a fallacy. It's superstition. Disability and sickness are entirely democratic and can and do happen to anybody. They're not for some inferior class of people; here's an article about disabled scientists, a profession that I personally regard especially highly.

But such a fallacy has particularly nasty consequences, which can include not only abandoning the vulnerable, but using them as targets for attacks. Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca Hardwick are an all-too-obvious example. This week, debate abounds about Kenneth Tong's tweets targeted at anorexics. To me, the significant issue is not whether it's free speech or not, but that some of the most vulnerable people you can imagine, those least in control of what goes on around them, were made the subjects of this sustained campaign of aggression. (One could argue, having read the redoubtable Johann Hari's interview with him, that Tong himself is desperately vulnerable, and one less so would not have done this.) I can't help but feel that Jody McIntyre was attacked because he was the weakest person available. As Mark Thomas remarks in his recording "The Night that War Broke Out": "They didn't attack Iraq because they were strong. It was because they were weak."

So many problems, so many questions. You may feel it's all rather amorphous, and that many of the topics I've covered actually have nothing to do with each other. I think they do; but your guess is as good as mine. I may be wrong about a great many things. But at least I have now met dozens through my job at a charity, and for the vast majority greatly enjoyed their company. So I have one or two suggestions, none of which are very earth-shattering, but here goes.

Firstly, both sides need to drop the accusatory and defensive behaviour. The magazine Disability Now for instance is full of furious ranting which - while I can understand the need to let off steam - is often very shocking to read, and immediately makes me feel defensive simply for having a pair of working legs. Similarly, the media and government need to stop all this nonsense about fraud and scrounging. Not only is this behaviour counter-productive but it gives the impression of two opposing sides, "us" and "them", when in reality there is probably no such thing. The "other people" who won't provide this and that, or whose attitudes are wrong - who are they? Don't blame one individual or organisation for all the problems you've ever had. Many's the time when I was teacher training that I was on the receiving end of a flood of grievances about "you teachers"; apparently being a member of that group made me personally accountable for the failings of every single one. If that's not "dehumanising", I don't know what is.

Secondly, I am certain that there is a very real problem of disabled people "not having a voice". This is only too true for many vulnerable groups - take carers, for whom the statistics are horrifying. There are so many questions I have, some of which I mention earlier, which are probably silly - yet even silly questions need an answer. But is "having a voice" - say - more media attention, or is it simply more mingling with others who don't meet you? Familiarity can work wonders.

I have only one further suggestion, vaguer than everything else: don't be afraid. Don't be afraid of disabled people. They won't infect you with their problem, bite your head off or (usually) take you to court if you say "blind" rather than "visually impaired". Don't be quite so afraid of disability itself: if it happens to you, it doesn't mean you're helpless, unable to do anything, or any less of a person - your other abilities may in time grow stronger, to compensate, or as a challenge. Don't be afraid of what society needs to do to support disabled people: it can be done, and with a little goodwill between people it's usually not difficult, expensive or burdensome.

And if I have to leave you because I need to give someone a lift, then I'm not abandoning you, lying, manipulating your feelings or trying to accuse you of anything. I'm just giving someone a lift.

Where did the Big Bang actually take place?

2011-01-09T13:20:00.008Z

I get this question every so often, and it suddenly occurs to me that I haven't used this blog to actually explain any science for quite some while.

In some cases, though certainly not all, the question is used almost rhetorically, by someone explaining why they do not choose to believe in the Big Bang. The most common theme is along the lines of: "But the Big Bang was supposed to be an explosion. Explosions destroy things and create disorder. That's the opposite of what you see around you in this ordered Universe." Or even to claim that scientists are lazy: "Nobody has ever even tried to find the centre of the Universe. Where is it?"

I've heard of an excellent article, I think in Scientific American, called something along the lines of "Seven misconceptions about the Big Bang" which I haven't managed to find (I bet somebody else finds it in 1 second after a Google search now I've said this, but there you go! *Update - check the comments.....). Because there are a lot of misconceptions about that subject.

It is true that not all scientists believe it happened. The brilliant Fred Hoyle, for instance - even though he discovered that elements are made by stars, rather than having been there forever, which does lead to the conclusion that the Universe must change over time. It was he who unwittingly coined the term, intended as a joke, on a radio show: he is supposed to have greeted George Gamow, another guest, with "Ah, it's the Big Bang man!" As occasionally happens with good jokes in science, the term stuck.

The word "bang" gives the impression that it must have been noisy, which in turn gives the impression of somebody outside, listening. This is where it gets very hard to imagine, unless you've had a little quiet time to get used to the idea: there wasn't any outside. Not only was it the moment when all matter and radiation were created. It was the moment when space itself was created.

Nor was it big. It was smaller than an atom. (Oh, when you've a moment, do play with this lovely representation of the size of all different things in the Universe!) At first, anyway. It expanded rapidly, of course. It's still doing so.

It was Gamow who realised how things must have been in the early moments of the Universe: that if it was expanding today, it must have been smaller in the past. His imagination allowed him to play the life of the Universe backwards, to when the Universe was tiny; and he also realised that it must have been unbelievably hot, for everything heats upon compression. Gamow and his students Alpher and Herman did groundbreaking work establishing the conditions there and what elements could have formed. They worked out what particles could have been there - mostly photons, but some protons, neutrons and electrons - and their results showed exactly the proportions of hydrogen and helium that make up the Universe today.

(It is of course a lot more complicated than that, since 96% of the substance of the Universe is not the baryonic matter - the matter we learn about and can touch - that I've described above, and there was that pesky business of inflation and other uncertainties. But if you're new to this subject, you can be forgiven for leaving these subjects for the time being.)

It's been possible to work out how long ago the Big Bang took place - not entirely straightforward as the expansion of the Universe has not been constant - and the best estimate, at the moment, is 13.7 billion years old. Galaxy Zoo's current project, Hubble Zoo, reflects that in its classifications. Take this galaxy:

As you see, they've given us a redshift. (Click the picture for a larger version.) Redshift is the stretching out of a light wave. Since space is expanding, the light waves are stretched out - if you have curly hair or a landline phone cord you can model this yourself! It's possible to work out how much waves have been stretched out because common elements found in stars and galaxies give very exact and recognisable spectra - patterns of light, like barcodes - and their peaks and troughs "move" to a measurable extent. You can tell how far the light's come, and how long it's been travelling for:

And therefore, how old the Universe was when that light left that galaxy:
It is fascinating to see, after thousands of classifications, how the galaxies change over time. Some of the most beautiful, ordered, intricate galaxies I've classified tend to be of low redshift - that is to say, near to us, or older. It does appear to be true that the Universe has got more ordered over time. Perhaps it will get more ordered still. Or perhaps there will be more and more galaxy mergers, and things will look less ordered. Or perhaps there are enough reserves of gas to keep the very disordered irregulars appearing for many billenia (yes, I just made up that word) yet. Or perhaps a great deal more will happen.

Hang on, I often hear, so all the galaxies are rushing away from us? Doesn't that mean we're at the centre of the Universe?

Yes, it does mean we're at the centre of the Universe. But it also means that everywhere else is also at the centre of the Universe. Because other galaxies are not only rushing away from us, but also from each other. From everywhere else. (Except of course their own local groups and clusters, which are gravitationally bound together.)

Take these smilies. You're the one in the middle:

The same five smilies, some time later:

The distance between each one has expanded. Now imagine you're at one of the other smilies. You'd still think everyone was rushing away from you. And at any of the others.

Because there isn't any centre to find, any location of an explosion. We're inside that. Everything is. The Big Bang took place right here, where I'm sitting. It took place right where you are, wherever you're reading this. It took place on the other side of the world. And on Saturn. And in the Sun. And in another arm of our galaxy. And in the next galaxy. And across the Universe.

So, various types of experiment and mathematical deduction give good evidence for the Big Bang having happened. And those who claim that we should be able to see it today are right. But not in quite the way they think.

So when you see a beautiful photo like this, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, you're looking at a Universe much smaller than it is today. (Click for larger version, on Hubblesite.)

It's at this point that it gets quite hard to wrap one's head around a logical conclusion of looking at a beautiful field like this: that such a field will be there wherever we look, in a great sphere, 13.4 billion light years away. (Beyond that, no galaxies had formed and matter was too hot and dense to let light through.) All around us? Hang on . . .

As the Galaxy Zoo Forum admin, and great skeptic and astronomer, Edd, says:

The problem is that the distant universe is the universe in the distant past, when the universe was small. In some sense, the universe is smaller on the outside than it is on the inside. But it still has to go round us all the way. This screws completely with how things get smaller as they get more distant, and above a certain distance, which is not actually tremendously far on the cosmological scale, things start getting bigger as they get further away. This happens for things where light has been travelling for about 10 billion years to get here.

Edd goes into the mysteries of this a lot further than I'm going to; suffice to say, nobody has yet claimed to me that the Big Bang could not be because of this impossible-to-visualise, head-messing conundrum. I wonder if they ever will?

I myself got very confused about something to do with this, relating to the Cosmic Microwave Background. Let me explain first what that is.

I mentioned earlier that we can't see the first 0.3 billion years of the time of the Universe because there was too much stuff in the way. That was a slight oversimplification. To be precise, atoms had not quite yet formed and the Universe was a plasma. This is a state of matter in which electrons have been torn off their protons and neutrons due to extreme heat. The Sun and stars are just such a plasma; and the Universe was, too. That, of course, means that there are a great many more particles rushing around and getting in the way of light. That's just what happened in the early years of the Universe - and we can still see it today. (The discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background itself is a great story which I'll leave for another post!) Galaxies were able to form because of temperature fluctuations in this darkening fog:

(Good old Wiki.)

When the temperature had dropped enough for electrons to combine with protons and neutrons and make normal atoms, that's when light was able to shine through. And that's the point when we can start seeing what was going on.

Back to the confused point. I said earlier that the Big Bang took place right here, where we were. If it took place anywhere else, we'd be outside our own Universe. And that's impossible.

So how on Earth - or indeed how in anywhere you like - is the Cosmic Microwave Background 13.4 billion light-years away?

Bill - a beloved addition to the Galaxy Zoo team - explained it wonderfully simply. Light travels around the Universe. It can't stop moving. But it can't go outside the Universe, and it can't just wink out of existence. We are shown a slice of Cosmic Microwave Background from what to us is 13.4 billion light years away - or 13.4 billion light years ago. Now, if you go somewhere else in the Universe (if only we could!) - if we arrive there "now", we would see a different piece of Cosmic Microwave Background. Or if we go to that galaxy I showed you earlier, 5.931 billion light years away - and let's say that we go back in time 5.931 billion years - we would see a slice of Cosmic Microwave Background 7.469 billion light years away. As Bill put it:

Of course it represents material that was relatively close to us when the light left, but it's taken a lot longer for the radiation to get to us across the expanding Universe. So every location is in the middle of its own CMB sphere. Cosmologists wold love to sample someone else's, because there is a certain statistical error in properie sof the CMB whch is associated with only being able to sample one location in the Universe at one time (so-called cosmic scatter).

The discussion on the thread went, sadly, out of my understanding. I expect this post has at least been partly beyond the understanding of some readers - and, to others, grossly oversimplistic and perhaps with some mistakes of my own. Apologies to both! But I hope that some of it at least was useful and thought-provoking. One of the Zooites has as their signature: "The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine." It takes a huge amount of brain-bending to imagine some of it; but Nature was not created in order to be comprehensible to us. I just find it thrilling that any of it is!

1081 Apostrophes

2011-01-07T12:25:00.004Z

That is, astrophotos, but a friend made a treasurable misread - often those (like lyrics you think you hear in songs) are much more enjoyable and thought-provoking than the original thing.

On New Year's Day 2011, Jules set the Zooites a challenge: that every day for a year somebody must post an astrophoto. And we did it. Here's the result.

(Click for larger version.)

My camera is pretty hopeless in the dark; the best it'll do of the Moon for example is a bright speck in complete blurry blue or black - or, even better, a wobbly streak where my hand moved. I took some of the pictures of the sun though.

As she says, there were 28 contributors - most of whom were far more assiduous and successful than me! - and a great many types of photo were taken of different types of astronomical phenomena. Which, of course, does include the Sun. Every so often, if the Sun is low on the horizon and possible to look at through mist or clouds (health warning: actually, you are not supposed to do even this - and never look directly at the Sun when it's bright; it can damage your eyes permanently), it strikes me very deeply that here is a star, a star like any one of those glittering lights in the skies above at night. And this Earth is what a Sun like that can support.

When every one of us was experiencing a cloudy night, we'd photograph our astronomy books, magazines, equipment, gadgets, Astrofest tickets (yes, we get very excited about things like that) and so on. That made up just over 10% of our total. Two of my favourites - and quite possibly some more once I've gone through the thread in enough detail - are going to be part of an astronomy slideshow I'm going to be showing prior to any Skeptics in the Pub talk I give. Here they are: Orion through the trees by Bill Keel and a gorgeous shot of the Moon by Infinity. Many thanks both for their permission and for e-mailing me their best sharpened versions of their artwork.

Cynical? This kind of reporting could be for you!

2011-01-02T08:50:00.003Z

I don't know whether to be grateful or bloody mortified by the YourCardiff article that went out on 18th November and which I've only just seen - whoopsie! - having been alerted by the extremely interesting skeptic Peter Harrison (who would have been our December speaker had that miserable ice not got the better of him on a flight of stairs).

The author seems, as the comments thankfully point out, to be blissfully unaware of the difference between skepticism, cynicism and pessimism - they obviously weren't there for my nice little rabble-rousing, intended to be uplifting speech about Science is Vital, which included quite a bit of the philosophy from this post (which I know meant a huge amount to at least one reader - I don't know if they'd want me to say more). To say that "pessimism is alive in the capital" makes for a great opening sentence and spectacularly misses the entire point. I hope this is so obvious that I won't waste further words explaining. I'll just do what I often do and tell a story. One girl in the audience revealed during Q&A that she was an atheist from a very religious family, who were horrified at her nonbelief and constantly wanted to change her. She was here not only to learn but to make friends who liked her the way she was - and believe me, she was vibrant, passionate and lovely! Ray promptly invited her along to AHS. I hope the rest of our audience are getting similar enjoyment and ability to express themselves, even if less dramatically! To me, skepticism is quite the opposite of being weighed down by doom and gloom: it's setting yourself free.

I'm intrigued by the first sentence: "They never said it would happen . . ." Who never said it would happen? Well, I suppose "nobody said it would happen" - until Dean and I did - would be true. (Though on the other hand I've heard many comments of "Wales was just crying out for something like this.") And at least we're described as "selling out" our events. There's actually no particular limit; the room can hold 80, but there are far fewer chairs than that. (In fact we're thinking about seeing if we can borrow lots of plastic lightweight ones.) What really mortifies me is my apparently saying "I recruited Dean". I hope I didn't really say that. (To be fair, when interviewed I often get nervous and say things that I not only never meant to, but had never even occurred to me to think. But I don't think I said that in this instance.) I set up the Facebook group, and Dean was there before I knew what was happening. I hadn't a clue who he was, but he was bloody perfect, and apart from the website and networking bit, he does everything really. We're co-founders, but if anyone's essential, it's him. By the way, he's a neuroscientist as well as a comedian.

But then perhaps it's always a shock to read any description of yourself or your activities in print, until you get used to it. I am very pleased with one thing: they not only spelled our names right, but they linked to our webpage, Facebook group and Twitter account. I am sure it was a well-meant article; perhaps the editors rather than the writer wanted the "unpleasant personality traits" twist! I'm determined not to make the "cynical" or "pessimistic" bit self-fulfilling - critical thinking is the basis of the scientific method, and that's how humanity develops its technology, its healthcare, its education, and its civilisation. Yes, that includes pickiness, hence most of this post . . . but should anyone follow the links, they'll hopefully get a clearer picture for themselves.

It's not as if it's a unique mistake to make about skepticism anyway. It's sad how "belief" - whether of a deity, a dictum, a conspiracy theory or an advertised product - is often assumed to mean "happy" and "agreeable", while "disbelief" or even "questioning", "wanting to know more", is assumed to mean the opposite. The why of that will no doubt come into many posts - probably already has. I'll just say that I suspect the love of obedience has a lot to do with it.

Even if our entire purpose has been thoroughly misrepresented, it's nice that Cardiff has noticed we're here. And if anybody comes along and likes what we do, that's always a massive plus.

Vigil for Charlotte Wilson

2010-12-28T18:24:00.005Z

If you're popping in here on 28th December, please give me a miss this time and head out instead to Richard Wilson's blog - he's @dontgetfooled on twitter, responsible for the Banana Cake of Liberty. Or, please or look up his #titanicexpress tweets. He's holding a 24 hour vigil for his sister Charlotte, who 10 years ago today was murdered in Burundi, just south of Rwanda, in a massacre for which the perpetrators have never been punished.

Obviously I didn't know Charlotte, so I will say the minium; but I can see how much she was adored and appreciated by those who knew her. She was on a Voluntary Services Overseas program; having read biochemistry and gone on to do a doctorate in molecular biology - focussing on the cocksackie virus, related to polio, of course relevant to the region she went to - she was teaching science to pupils who were, she was shocked to learn, "always ill". She has just got engaged and was on a six hour journey on the bus named "Titanic Express", to meet her fiance's family in Rwanda.

But as Amnesty International says:

The Titanic Express was attacked on its way from the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to Burundi’s capital city ten years ago today. Those onboard were separated according to their ethnicity. Hutus were released, while Tutsi passengers and 27-year-old British aid worker Charlotte Wilson were killed. The Burundian authorities and other organisations have attributed responsibility to the armed opposition group Palipehutu-National Liberation Forces (Palipehutu-FNL). The FNL denies involvement. Ten years on, no one has been brought to justice.

Richard wrote a book about her and everything he found about the massacre. His family are still determined to get justice not just for their daughter but for the other victims, and also those who have tried to expose injustice in their country. As his blog says:

Tragically, while the war criminals remain free, one of the Burundian journalists who has done most to highlight the Titanic Express massacre, Jean-Claude Kavumbagu, has been languishing in prison since July. He is facing a criminal trial for “defamation” and “treason” after making critical comments about Burundi’s army.

You can read more at Amnesty International, the Justice for Charlotte Facebook group, a moving statement and subsequent interview at the Guardian, and an article about arms that Richard Wilson wrote five years later.

Richard was one of the first skeptics I encountered on Twitter and whose work I admired from the start. I only met him briefly once, but he struck me as incredibly friendly and cheerful. Until recently I had no idea this had happened. This is just a quick message from me, Richard, and a thoroughly ignorant one as I'm only just starting to catch up on this heartrending story - but just to let you know I'm thinking of you. And I admire the bravery and determination of the family, who are determined not to seek revenge, nor in any way to abandon Charlotte's belief that education and independence were the way forward, but to find out what happened, and why, and to let the world know, so that things need not always be like this.

Opening the doors of the heavens

2010-12-27T20:38:00.009Z

It must have been the early 1920's. The Great War was over and Arthur Stanley Eddington had just come back from a voyage off West Africa which had made him "the man that proved Einstein right". He was in his office at Cambridge, perhaps working on relativity or on his next major project, the mass-luminosity relationship in stars, which ultimately led to his groundbreaking "The Internal Constitution of the Stars" - when in came the Second Assistant of the Observatory, a man named Henry Green, who said: "There's a woman out there asking questions."

Perhaps the telescope - or one of many? - at Cambridge. Courtesy Society for the History of Astronomy.

It was a public observing night at the Sheepshanks Telescope. Poor Henry Green had no idea why two stars of the same age should be different colours, or several other things she wanted to know, and had come to ask Eddington for help.

When Eddington arrived, the woman was standing near the eyepiece with a child in her arms. She was holding her up to look through the eyepiece and telling her what to look for, and the audience about the Andromeda Spiral, then not known as another galaxy but thought to be a nebula in our own.

She turned round when she heard Eddington "chuckle quietly". She was a large, tall woman with blue-grey eyes, a broad forehead, and slightly poking-out chin. Normally serious and shy to the point of being thought "comical" and "slow", her fascination with astronomy had just prompted her to talk enough to Henry Green that he "left her in charge" of the talk - and her to talk to Eddington now. She had recently attended a lecture he had given on relativity and its astronomical aspects, which had set her imagination afire to the extent that - as she put it decades later - "I knew again the thunderclap that had come from the realization that all motion is relative . . . For three nights, I think, I did not sleep . . . I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown." She had written the lecture down word for word, and decided to switch her studies (various sciences) to physics.

She told Eddington she wanted to be an astronomer. This was not a path open to women at the time (nor would it be for many years); but he did not attempt to dissuade her, and she asked him what she should read. Every book he suggested she had already read. So he invited her to use the Observatory's library, at which she would find the two journals Astrophysical Journal and the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin recalls that it was that night that Eddington had "opened the doors of the heavens" to her. And she went on, against many odds, to be known in her lifetime as the greatest woman astronomer of all time.

It's wonderful how a small intervention, or series of interventions, can change the future. It was pretty well by chance that, following a series of disappointments during and after university and planning on switching from teaching English as a Foreign Language to chemistry, I had some free time and decided to indulge myself with a return to astronomy, my long-lost childhood love. It was through getting "BANG!" and finding their question and answer website that it really hit home that anyone could write to scientists with questions, not just the professors' favourite few at university. I'd heard talk of students who did that. I never could think of any questions, much less felt I had the right. As soon as I got back into astronomy, I was brimming with questions. And, as I discovered, Chris was happy to answer them. Not just about the book, but about a Sky at Night. Specifically, I asked how on earth painting an asteroid white would deflect its course. He explained radiation pressure to me and, having a handle, I now knew what to go and look up. He reassured me about bothering him. "It's genuinely great to get feedback," he e-mailed. "We often just cast something out into the ether with no idea whether it works or not."

It's that, really, that made me actively pursue astronomy the way I hadn't even figured out how to pursue environmental science, in four years of doing a degree in the stuff. In spring, by which time I was taking a pre-teaching course in chemistry at Sussex University, I did an afternoon practical alone over lunchtime so I could rush off to a lecture in Oxford. Why didn't I do this at university? I don't know. But in any case, that opened the Galaxy Zoo Forum to me (which in turn opened up She is an Astronomer, article writing, and Skeptics in the Pub!). I've felt that I can not only search for, and ask about, whatever I like in astronomy, but I can also make a contribution. Not to science - well, except my classifying. But to the astronomical community. To education. To, perhaps, setting other people on the path to be scientists. Not only do I love doing this, but I can repay.

In a world where sexism was quite respectable, and Cecilia was disregarded for countless positions at universities across England and America because a woman could not be in charge or would be thought unsafe or unseemly or what have you in an observatory, Eddington (and of course others) gave her little helping hands. Not of course with the work, for at that she excelled. But at getting somewhere. At having confidence. She set up public observing nights at that telescope in Cambridge - and placed a book there with instructions that everyone observing recorded what they saw. That's just the kind of co-operative, practical thing a good scientist does. But you need a certain confidence - a certain feeling of permission - before you can do that. If you feel invisible and ground down, these things are beyond your reach.

As you've probably guessed, I'm currently reading Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's autobiography. It's a slim volume, devoted largely to her school and undergraduate education and her early years in the States, with family history at the beginning and philosophical thoughts at the end, and several other essays by her colleagues and her daughter. The passage which contains the story I began this post with was an utter joy to read. I could feel her seizing the moment; I could feel that earthquake of a realisation scientific or personal that sheds light, understanding, and courage.

And I could sense that it might have been a little thing for Eddington. I'm finding there are a great many kind, helpful scientists out there like Chris (and I expect a great many not!), who take the trouble to answer someone's questions, to try and show them things in a new light; and, occasionally, to advise them or to exert influence to get them somewhere else. I can only do these things in the smallest of ways on the Galaxy Zoo Forum - encouraging and sometimes equipping people to write zooite Objects of the Day for example, or passing along their questions or findings to the team - yet I think it does occasionally make an immense difference. Scientists and communicators have an awesome potential nowadays, especially in the age of the Internet. I think it would be harder for some than others. But if you're reading this and you work in science, this is why it's so important to reach the public when you can. It'll get you more audience, more colleagues, and so very much more - joy and otherwise - will come out of your work.

Happy Christmas Blogosphere!

2010-12-24T23:35:00.003Z

I hope everybody reading this has a lovely Christmas and New Year, whether you celebrate such things or not!

This is my nutpuss Izzy last year "helping" us with the present wrapping, and the border is globular clusters taken from Jules's Starcluster Index on the Galaxy Zoo Forum.

Thank you very much to all of you who've read and especially left me comments and feedback - I promise I'll try and write more in the New Year. Special thanks to Dean without whom I could never have started Wales's first Skeptics in the Pub, and to the zookeepers for endless enjoyable citizen science and a very funny Advent Calendar!

Have a great one!

Red Banana in the Milky Way

2010-12-16T17:00:00.003Z

Look what a gorgeous project the Zooniverse has started!

Aren't they beautiful?

These are nebulae in our own galaxy, imaged with the Spitzer Space Telescope and now at the mercy of the zooites - so I have the feeling our entire galaxy will be mapped out in more bubbles than a bubble bath soon.

Remember the barred spirals lecture at Astrofest nearly two years ago? Johann Knapen mentioned then that Spitzer was an infra-red telescope (its webpage says it is designed as such; the lecture, from what I remember, seemed to imply that it could once do shorter wavelengths but its telescope has now warmed up too much to cope with that). I never heard more about the mapping of bars - mind you, we did our own bars project in the end. Anyway, this very same telescope is imaging nebulae in infra-red light - the kind of radiation that we sense as a feel of warmth on our skin.

Not nebulae all over the sky, I should point out. Mostly in towards the plane of our galaxy - the fuzzy pale band you'll see in dark clear skies. It's often impossible to pick out any stars in it because there are so many of them, including a general build-up of distant ones too far away to make out individually but whose collective light stains the sky. (Isn't it infuriating? I tried to find a remotely realistic, recognisable picture, but it's impossible - all of them are ridiculously fancy and long-exposure. Would any relatively normal photographers like to remedy that . . . ?) But that's where most of the nebulae are.

Not all matter is confined to stars. That which floats freely, within galaxies and outside, is not just dark matter, either. A lot is gas, which, if allowed to cool enough, provides fuel for star formation. Ironic that it needs to cool to form such hot things, isn't it? That's because heating gas up makes it fly all over the place - and in order to clump, the atoms and molecules need to be still, close together, and undisturbed. Where enough gas or dust is present to block or scatter light, or indeed to emit its own light, that's a nebula.

There are a great many types of nebula, which I think I'll leave to another blog post; you can check out Hubblesite for an overview. What the Milky Way Project is looking at is those involving star formation.

Stars initially form coccooned in dark gas; their births are therefore invisible to us, mysterious, though we are learning to see through their shrouds. The Pillars of Creation are a well-known example. Here they are as the world knows them:

. . . and here they are at the Milky Way Project:

But once they start shining, their solar wind blows off the remaining clouds, leaving a bubble like this:

This is the same thing as the solar wind that our Sun creates - a constant thin but powerful wafting of hot charged particles, which extents pretty much halfway to its neighbours (and which Voyager is leaving round about now). It's these charged particles that cause the aurora - and why, without a magnetic field to divert or otherwise channel them, planets such as Mars make biological life difficult on the surface.

(The Aurora over Noway. From, as ever, APOD.)

The Milky Way Project FAQ - a very informative page! - reports that the green and red parts of bubbles are different. In fact, you'll notice that the pictures are mostly red and green. The green light is 3 to 8 µm long - this is, on a logarithmic scale, only just longer than visible light, visible red light being about 0.7µm. The red light is a lot longer and therefore coming from weaker-energy (colder) sources - 24µm.

Different materials emit radiation in different, very specific wavelengths. That means, of course, that two different materials are being looked at. Zookeeper Rob (a.k.a. Orbiting Frog, and an exceptionally amiable person!) explains here that red is general warm dust, such as tiny silicon particles; and that green is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Do you remember those hexagonal carbon-based molecules from chemistry, where we were first taught to write two lines on alternate faces, and then not to? Polycyclic aromatic carbons are large structures of these, looking a little like strips of chicken wire. Actually if you click the link and scroll down you'll see a sight now getting familiar . . . These are effectively "soot" from stars - star formation bellows out as mixed a bag of by-products as cigarette smoke, but these complex carbon molecules fluoresce in ultra-violet light. Hot young stars of course will produce plenty of this (its wavelength is just a little shorter than visible light, just as the infra-red Spitzer is seeing with is a little longer). So they're an excellent general gas tracker. Zookeeper Chris's current non-Zooniverse research involves star formation and the use of sulphur compounds to track it - they are another good tracer.

I mentioned earlier that gas needs to cool in order for gravity to shrink it and start starforming, for heat and light and stellar wind from stars generally throw things around everywhere - that's why red spirals shut down, as we discovered two years ago. One mystery the Milky Way Project is hoping to solve is why the dust doesn't seem to be being blown around as much as it should be: why is it still there? But knowing what the Zoo projects are like, I bet a large host of unexpected and possibly even un-thought-of questions end up getting answered too!

For example, here's something I found as one of my first images: what is this red banana?

"Some warm gas I think," replies Rob. "A classic, if oddly shaped, fuzzy red object." Damn! Oh well. Only a few get lucky at once. Science is fruitful, but it usually takes a while . . .

Ooops! Once the bad jokes start it's time to get my coat. Please hop aboard, draw bubbles, and join the discussion!

Flabbergasted

2010-12-04T16:54:00.005Z

I planned to have a nice, lazy Saturday today. Then I found out about this.

It's the stuff of complex political thrillers, possibly set in a fantasy world, such as George R R Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. And it would probably sell pretty well, if it was a novel, and if it had a slightly less messy, drawn-out, utterly inhuman and unsatisfying ending.

Because he was unlucky enough to share a name with a suspected terrorist, Khalid El-Masri - a German citizen - was secretly seized by the CIA, held for many months, tortured, malnourished, and generally treated hideously. And this went on even after US authorities knew it was a mistake.

He was interrogated again and again. He began a hunger strike. One day before 4 weeks had elapsed he was granted an interview, at which he was basically told that they did not care if he was innocent; he was staying. All this time, nobody, not even his family, knew where he was or what had happened. It took an intervention from Condoleeza Rice to get him released. And when he was released, he was secretly dumped in rural Albania with no means of getting home. They, too - understandably given his condition - thought he must be a terrorist.

And even though everybody knows now that it was all a horrible mistake, he will never get any kind of compensation, or even an apology.

Apparently, an apology and compensation would require a lawsuit, which would break US secrets. And evidently, procedure and paranoia matter more to the powers that be than the most fundamental decency.

I cannot even begin to comment. I just have no words.

It all took place several years ago, but re-emerged on Wikileaks. Jack of Kent makes the reasonable point that Wikileaks itself, by making itself unaccountable, does not entirely fit the definition of liberal - but at this tearing-my-hair out point, I have to say: so what? It's at moments like these that I feel like I am transported into a nightmare world where everybody fights dirty. Wikileaks is not entirely what I would call honest; but I have more admiration for them than I do for those they expose. In a better world, Wikileaks could be open, as could more of politics . . .

The hideous thing is that while people can campaign admirably on so many issues, I fear that on this, our cries will fast turn to whispers. Largely, I suppose, because there's nothing we can do. We can't change how secret, powerful organisations work. I doubt they'd take much notice of protests or campaigns, other than perhaps to find ways of dealing with those who they think started them. We could try to elect governments who don't support them; but, again, the secrecy prevents us finding out who does - although, as I guess many of us suspected, both Tory and Labour are falling over each other to be first to kneel before the United States.

A friend once told me earnestly, "Countries are like people." I don't think that's true at all. Countries, even dictatorships, are run by many people; and while individuals can be brave and self-sacrificing, entire groups are less likely to do that. If all countries in the world were one person, enough of them would finally gang up together and turn on even the biggest and most frightening bully. But with countries? Catch any diplomat saying to several others, "Let's all tell X we've had enough", unless, of course, X would be a suitably small and weak victim, as Iraq was - and as human rights are.

And so all Germany needed to be silenced was this: "Our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the US".

It is unbearable to do nothing; if anybody has any ideas, I want to know about them.

(In the unlikely event that this blog ever gets important enough that I should conveninently vanish for typing these words, please could somebody save them?)

Celebrating Ice

2010-12-03T19:43:00.008Z

I see that, just like last year, a bit of water in its solid form on the ground has, well, ground things to a halt again - apparently it's making even more news than the coming Royal Wedding. It's not stopping the students demonstrating in the open air, though! Oh and I hear we're out of grit? Come and sweep some off Haverfordwest's streets, there's so much I mistook a huge puddle of it for the results of an over-enthusiastic night out . . .

All right, sarcasm over (head over here for more from me if you like that sort of thing).

I have to say a personal thank you to the ice that froze on the inside of my car's windscreen, because it finally cleaned it. I'd dried off some condensation with a cloth bag weeks before, and it had been mucky ever since - despite umpteen cleans with tissue paper, towel, ice scraper, glass cleaner, and you name it - which made driving in the sunset a particular eye-watering nightmare. But every bit of that dirt fell off with the ice!

But look what came out of our bird bath a few days ago . . .

The leaves are actually less obvious to the naked eye than to my mobile's not-very-good camera. I think the ice actually expanded away from them, but retained their veiny patterns, so that it looked like a laser cutting into a piece of glass. Sadly, it's melting now . . .

I noticed that when I arrived home in the rain . . .

Off the topic of ice for a moment, I had one of those headache-inducing-ly annoying days at work today. It was supposed to be my day off, but of course certain people (who don't usually work in my office) decided to summon in me, and someone else who's disabled and doesn't come in on a Friday, all the same for our delightful monthly meeting. What happens in these is that we provide a lot of tea and biscuits, shove all our stuff off our information table for our guests, get yelled at for not doing it fast enough and generally criticised because our desks aren't empty (doh . . . believe it or not, we do do paperwork in my office), put the table somewhere stupid, arrange chairs for those who demand to be waited on hand and foot, apologise when the phone rings because somebody actually needs us, and take minutes while the same two people (neither of whom work at our office) go on and on and on about how sleepless they are about our future and how many idiotic irrelevant things they demand we must do instead of look after the people we're supposed to be serving. You get the picture. Pretty typical office meeting, I should imagine. To be fair, it isn't half as dishonest, unprincipled, bullying, or generally stressful and soul-destroying as the meetings I sat in on when I was teaching . . .

Anyway, today the person who generally takes the minutes and provides the records in my department hadn't turned up. So this task fell to me, as did taking the prolonged public kicking for not knowing the things this person knows, who has been here 15 years longer than me, and because somebody didn't know something that I thought they knew and that wasn't part of my plans so not my job to tell them . . . Again, you get the picture. I'll shut up now.

I then had an icy walk to the car and shopping to do, and my head was pounding. On the roads leading away from the town I work in are signs to one of our local beaches. They point right, while my home lies left (roughly speaking).

So today I thought . . . I will follow those signs.

As soon as I'd parked the car and got out to hear those waves between the still, silent cliffs, I felt better. The wind was painful around my un-scarfed face, it got in under my coat, and the clouds were dark; but the sea was a surprisingly bright blue-green.

This is Broad Haven according to the holiday websites . . .

This is it earlier today . . .

. . . yep . . . lots of water had frozen right there on the stones and sand. I walked on ice puddles which made wonderful noises but did not snap, merely created bubbles and pushed the sand around! (I'm actually really cheesed off - you see that blurry bit on the bottom right? That was an amazing ice puddle in which stones were nestled, but I somehow managed to delete that photo when I got home).

The ice had fascinating effects on the sand. It was wonderful to see where there was both solid and liquid water, and the alien landscapes it was managing to produce . . .

If someone had told you this was a satellite photo of Mars, would you have believed them? I'm afraid I might! But it's just ice and sand. Look at the effects . . .

. . . and just next to the image above:

It's a funny thing, ice. Most materials - as far as I know - contract when they cool. But the water molecule is a very special thing. It's sort of Mickey Mouse shaped, two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. The oxygen atom is much greedier for electrons than the hydrogen atoms are, so they spend, on average, more time with the oxygen - or to put it in another way, their "probability cloud" or where they will be is somewhat skewed towards the oxygen. This means that the oxygen has a negative dipole, the hydrogen a positive one - so, like a magnet, they will be attracted to each other (this wonderful article mentions an old description of two hydrogen atoms desperately in unrequited love with an oxygen atom). But this affects other water molecules too: the oxygen will also be attracted to hydrogen atoms of other water molecules, and vice versa, which makes the general structure stick together very nicely. Most molecules so small, and made of such small atoms as hydrogen and oxygen, would be gas (think of nitrogen, methane, carbon dioxide . . .). But water's a liquid, because of this dipole. And although they slip under and over and around each other a lot, their strong bonding also causes capillary action - just watch rain falling on the window and notice how a new drop will leap into the track of an old one, rather than make a new trail.

But once water goes solid, the molecules form hexagonal lines. Russell Stannard, in his book "Ask Uncle Albert", describes ice molecules (water molecules below freezing point, if you will) as being like long, long lines of people all sitting on each other's laps. This rigidity leaves plenty of gaps between those lines, which is why it expands. That's why, when water trickles into rocks and soil and then expands, we get weathering. I believe that's probably what's happened in the last picture above.

It was also very satisfying scientifically to notice that the water that remained liquid seemed to be coming from under the stones or sand - since ice expands, it's lighter than liquid water, and so it rises. Again, this isn't true of most liquids. But it's made pondlife and icebergs possible. Without this characteristic of water, I bet a lot of Earthly life would be hugely different.

And meanwhile, something's a bit wrong with the cliff . . .

But after only a short time of tramping across the beach I was starving. So I went to the cafe by the road. It was closed, but another was open. I bought scampi and chips and a hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows. While I waited, I chatted with a family already scoffing chips there. They had two utterly adorable and very well-behaved dogs, who let me stroke them like cats, one hand on each. I honestly cannot recommend a better remedy for awful meetings!

Anyway, yes, I took my scampi and chips and hot chocolate and two sachets of tomato ketchup straight out there to the beach again. I went closer to that cliff . . .

And mostly stayed away from the water; can you imagine how slippery it was there? I plonked myself down on a rock, found a little well-like bit to put my hot chocolate in, and gobbled scampi for a while. It was raining slightly but I decided I didn't care. Surprisingly it really wasn't that cold.

Nevertheless, although the huge icicles hanging from the cliff were shedding water and indeed a few chunks of ice onto the sand, clearly the ice wasn't going to melt very fast!

What a sight!

While a chap nearby did a crazy dance, I photographed and photographed, my hand over my mobile to shield it from the rain - also to put it in shadow, since the picture went especially dark whenever I tried to include a bit of sky. I wondered how long it had taken those icicles to form. I remembered a phrase I'd heard in my first year of university, describing Antarctica, which really tickled me: "thermal inertia". I think the gist was that an increased amount of water vapour in the atmosphere would increase the size of Antarctica to some extent, since the water molecules would be likely to stick to it. If the size of Antarctica increases, that will increase its albedo - in other words, it will reflect away more sunlight. Of course, it will also raise the average temperature of Antarctica, too, just the same as if you pour warm water into a bucket of ice.

Another beautiful characteristic of water is its high specific heat capacity or enthalpy of melting. Heat is basically molecules wriggling about frantically due to having plenty of energy. (Absolute zero is of course when they stop moving altogether.) Now, because of the strong attractions between water molecules, it takes quite a lot to make them separate, or wriggle away from each other. That means that you have to put an awful lot of heat in before it'll warm up. The converse is true, too: water will take a long time to freeze, because it's got so much spare energy you had to put in to warm it up in the first place.

And that is why the Earth's surface is (contrary to how it often feels) remarkably similar in temperature all over. OK, OK, so hot countries seem incredibly hot and cold ones seem incredibly cold, but that's because we're adapted to a narrow range of temperatures, and what cosmologically speaking is only a slight variation seems extreme to a biological entity. When water evaporates from the equatorial regions, it carries plenty of heat to the poles. And those cold deep currents that start at the poles and head towards the equator remain cold, which again is useful, because more oxygen can dissolve in cold water - so cold water upwellings are particularly useful for marine and coastal life in the equatorial regions.

In short, if the Earth's oceans were oil, the heat would be far less evenly distributed around the globe!

I love the water molecule. I actually fell in love with it during A level Chemistry, and kept up with it for my A level project and several of my university units. If you want more of what it can do, check out this site - I've linked to it before, but it has some desperately gorgeous close-ups of snowflakes!

I'll leave you with the most spectacular photos of that cliff . . . and by the way, it was very nice to get home!

A letter to the students

2010-11-26T13:26:00.008Z

Dear students,

I am writing from a dark memory of a time when young people did not do what you do today. I was a teenager in the nineties when the mere mention of politics, or indeed anything that took place out of the classroom or the charts, was considered worse than discussing homework. In 1997 I was 14 and, I now regret to say, very excited about Labour's victory - my classmates could not tell the difference between this and "fancying Tony Blair". To speak up about things that happened outside one's life was "sad". It was just not done.

So I suppose, if we have one thing to thank the Labour government for, it was annoying people enough to make protest a do-able thing. Or, perhaps the introduction of the Internet. Or even better education. Who knows?

I don't know why you are doing things that my generation was too cowardly to do. But well done, and for God's sake don't stop. Democracy is precious, and easy to lose. (I later went on to live in Spain, but abstained from voting for student leaders because I didn't understand enough of the language to make a choice. I didn't feel I had the right to bias the voting with an uninformed opinion. To my fellow students, whose parents probably remembered Franco, my not voting was shocking and distasteful, letting down of a hard-won value.)

I notice you're having to put up with the usual remarks - "these kids are too young to be out of school", "they just wanted to bunk off and have a fun day out", "it's just £7.50 a week once you're rich anyway", and so on.

Why go to school other than to prepare yourselves for the world? Not just to be a consumer, not just to get a job: but to be part of society, to change the world for the better, for nobody else will if you do not. As well as to partake in the greatest joy I know - that of knowledge. As a professor of teaching pointed out to a group of trainee teachers, there are only three groups of people who we tell where to go: criminals; the insane; and children. But you are not in school simply to get you out of the way until you're a grown-up. I know if often feels that way, and that's what you've got to fight. Your education is for you, and for other people too. It is not only your right but your responsibility to fight for it. To those who did - I am so proud of you!

It may be true that the fees would not, in theory, prevent anyone from going to university (the BBC page has a good set of questions and answers you should check out). The MP Tom Watson, and those who agreed with him, got a lot of kicking for "misrepresenting" the situation by pointing out that, if he saved £100 a month for his 5-year-old son, that would still not pay his tuition fees, for they are not upfront. A loan hangs around your neck for many, many years; but it's still better than paying upfront. No, what's going on here is a subtler but pernicious ideology.

Even before it's time to apply, there'd be the worry whilst growing up about whether or not it's worth going anyway. "It won't help you earn back the money you'd spend on it. Such-and-such went into banking without a degree and is now earning so-and-so." It's an off-putter from the start, especially for poorer families. Incentives for poorer students (see that BBC link) sound good but might create a divide, turn it into a situation of charity, and also would not help students whose parents of higher incomes discourage or refuse to help their offspring who want to learn (yes, there are those).

And during, the thing itself: it's become a market. Introduce the market and what matters is money, not education itself. Education becomes a "product", your degree is something you've bought, no longer a labour of love. And it must be paid for in the end. So if you never earn that £21,000 a year, then what? Who does pay? Would your course leaders spend their time preparing you for jobs that do earn this figure, and perhaps throw you out if you're likely to end up on a job that pays less? And what about the marketplace atmosphere itself: as businesses compete, would universities have to work against each other rather than together? Would the corporate branding, the package, the adverts to try and "sell", become the focus rather than what's inside them? More simply: would people concentrate on what looks good rather than on what's to learn, and learning, as a result, suffer? It's hard for a non-economist like me to explain. Perhaps some of you economics students can tell me whether or not I'm right. My feeling is this. We have the National Health Service and I'm bloody proud of it. We do not treat people on the basis of whether or not they have money. A sick person is a human, and a normal human helps another person; end of story. Markets interfere with straight humanity from the heart. I wanted to be a teacher and give education as a gift - no, not even that, for child-rearing is not a gift but something a mother simply does, and that's how I saw learning.

Maybe this is a bad patch before we reach a very different future. Have you noticed those occasional articles about virtual schools and everyone learning online anyway? Maybe that's what'll happen; maybe university will one day no longer be about leaving home. The cost of accommodation and living has risen too. I lived in a cheap hall which I thought was part of the experience; but these were knocked down one by one and more and more students around me spoke snobbishly of their expensive quarters, expressing horror at the idea of sharing a bathroom. Well, these things do have to be paid for. That should be a choice; but what if the cheap choice is no longer available? Tuition fees aren't the only thing to worry about. Actually, going back to myself again (and I probably seem pretty ancient to many of you!), I noticed the lecturers mourning how their courses had to become easier and easier, and only an MSc would be taken seriously, and thought - for goodness sake, university just seems to be a pampered boarding school. That probably is a waste of your time.

But back to this week. Whether your worry is education cuts, or tuition fees, and whatever people think about those: well done. You have to do two things to really make a difference: one is to check the facts, and the other is to make your voice heard. If you only do the former, no amount of learning will make any difference. If you only do the latter, people will continue to get things wrong. (Actually, that'll happen even if you do both, but you know what I mean.)

I want to give some special well dones now, but please don't feel miffed if you simply didn't have the opportunity to do anything heroic; these things often come to you by accident.

I want to especially congratulate these brave girls. The Guardian shows the van being damaged, but the BBC caught this photo, and I do recommend a look through this entire photostream. I notice they've been insulted as much as anyone: "The van had already been smashed up, what are these silly little girls going to do ? Turn back time?" Sadly, the idiots in your classroom may remain idiots for life; believe me, grown-ups can be unutterably stupid too. This grown-up missed your point, I think. You were standing up for peace and responsibility at your own risk. You were being human shields; you made an inexpressably important gesture.

"If they smash it up, it just proves the point that teenagers are out here today for violence," said one of the girls amid the chaos, her eyes darting left and right looking for the next vandal. "If we let the government portray us as violent then there is no way they are going to listen to us."

Well said, young lady.

After watching videos like this, I guess many of you will, understandably, distrust the police for life. Wasn't there supposed to be a time when they wore tall funny-shaped helmets and were helpful, pulling boys' heads out form park railings? (No, I wasn't around then, but I've read about them in books.) I hope things like this won't lead to a complete collapse of any trust between those with authority and those without. That won't get the country or education anywhere. But this is largely for authority to decide. Yes, there certainly were from the sounds of things a few morons and violent people at the protests, who ruined your cause and did nobody any favours but the paranoid. Make it clear those were not the majority.

Young and old learners, students, school pupils, all those who want to learn - I've been reading article after article of what you've been doing. I'm smiling at the BBC's list of your activities around the country, and am intrigued at the UCL takeover (Update: They have a fantastic blog, do check them out!). Honestly, when I was your age I'd given up on my peers ever getting off their navy-blue-skirted bottoms and doing a thing - you have raised the profile of humanity. (Did you know that Paul Lockhart describes you as "the ones most often blamed and least often heard?") But most of all I'm moved by the words of Laurie Penny, who was in the kettle with you and wrote in the Guardian and the New Statesman. I was scared for your welfare, yes. I wish I'd been able to get to you all with food and drink and warmth, not to mention miraculous toilets and medication for those in need. It horrifies me to think of you being out there for so long, essentially deprived of things even a prisoner cannot legally be denied. The humiliation for some, as well as the cold and hunger and other discomfort, must have been terrible. But even then a lad told Laurie Penny not to add a book to the fire to keep you warm, because you're not Nazis. Let safety and comfort be secondary. You knew that, and I expect many of you would do it again.

As a last resort. If you can't go to university, don't stop learning. Something has happened which I hate, and that is the all-or-nothing situation all learners are in: you cannot leave school early, as some people want to do as much as others want to stay, but once you have, that's it. Adult education is very difficult to get into and often terribly expensive. But people have been doing something long before David Cameron came up with his "big society" ideas: they've been learning informally, alone, or together, online. I run Cardiff Skeptics in the Pub and the Galaxy Zoo Forum, both of which are essentially movements for people to discover things together. (Obviously what I say here is from me alone, not from either of these movements. We grown-ups have to clarify these things for each other's benefit.) You can be in on either of these - young Rhys Morgan is a 16-year-old skeptic, and we have young people who learn to classify galaxies and contribute to real science that goes in papers. There are many, many movements like this, peaceful organisations, cheerful groups of people whose brains are filling with beautiful things and who can do a great many things as a result. You'll be welcomed in. If they have to take over education for a time, that's not a good outcome, but it's better than nothing.

Let's all do what we can, our different things, to keep education going.

Much love and praise from Alice, who wanted to be a teacher, and hopes she can be a teacher in other ways.

How to Prove you're Inclusive: Be Slick

2010-10-28T02:01:00.008+01:00

A couple of years ago, as many of you know, I was doing the science PGCE - training to be a secondary school science teacher. As many of you also know, I didn't complete the course. But many things happened during it which I'd still like to share. Here's one of them.

A well known trick to get people thinking in science lessons is to give them a surprise. For example: Here are the four fundamental forces, which do you think is the strongest? Put them in order. Then, once everyone's claimed that gravity is the strongest, put a magnet on the table and use another magnet to make it jump up - demonstrating that magnetism is stronger than gravity.

(At least, that particular strength of magnetism is stronger than Earth's gravity. Do the same experiment on a neutron star or with a really pathetic little magnet and you might get a different result. *Update: how embarrassing. I'd missed the point of the experiment. The Earth has a much larger mass than the magnet and that is the important thing. If you put 1kg of magnetic stuff and 1kg of non magnetic stuff next to each other in space, the magnetism will - for this given weight - carry much more force than the gravity. Anyway, back to this post.)

I witnessed a similar method of teaching in a PHSE lesson (Personal, Health and Social Education) for a year 7 group (11-12 year olds). It made an excellent point. The task: get into pairs and draw what a bully looks like and what a victim looks like.

The pupils spent some considerable time at this task, getting the angle of the cigarettes and baseball caps exactly right, showing teeth and stubble, paying attention to the way people were standing. The pictures were detailed and graphic. They took a great deal of trouble over them.

The form tutor then went up to the board and drew two identical stick figures and said: "Exactly the same."

The point being that you can't tell that someone's a bully just from what they look like. And they went on to discuss what to do about bullies.

The problem with that was that those kids had really put a lot of effort into their work, only to have it universally rubbished. Next time they might be a lot more cautious about going to so much trouble. They might start fishing around for what the teacher's not saying. Get into the habit of that and lessons become a game of "Guess what is in the teacher's mind", as well as "Avoid taking any trouble, you'll only look stupid." Neither of these attitudes are conducive to learning. I don't recall there being any discussion about why bullies were perceived to be big and scary-looking, let alone the teacher acknowledging the work the pupils had done.

The very same week, I attended a day at college focussing on people whose English was not their native language. It was not taken by our regular professors, but two ladies from a public project dedicated to helping such people - I forget the exact details. Some of their demonstrations were excellent, such as one of them playing a gypsy lady who only spoke Spanish trying to get her kids enrolled in a local school, and the other playing an indifferent council worker who shoves a long complicated form at her, is embarrassed by her half-English-half-Spanish attempts at asking questions and keeps her head down hoping she'll go away. I enjoyed a lot of the day and felt even more determined to help the (very few) non-native pupils in the schools I worked in.

A complication was that this was an area with an almost exclusively white population. One of the demonstrators was brown-skinned and there was one Muslim girl in one of the classes I taught, and I think that was about it. We did have a lot of Eastern Europeans - I was living with three of them, and they were the nicest housemates I've ever had - but all of them were pretty fluent and generally I think doing fine. For me, a born Londoner, who'd spent the previous six months in Brighton, this was not my natural environment at all; and the acute, carefully-worded, self-conscious discussions about it made me extremely uncomfortable. It was like suddenly having to be incredibly conscious of the fact that the sky is blue, and that if for a moment your mind happened to drift into thinking of the sky any other way, that was morally wrong and everybody would know. And for the locals who did not venture far outside their area, this whole business was theory, not practice.

In fact, the area was so homogenous that in many schools, ESL (coded term for English as a second language) pupils often had to be protected from trainee teachers struggling to pass their course - you have to provide evidence that you have done specific work on these pupils in order to get your teaching certificate, but there were far fewer of them than of trainee teachers!

What also worried me was that the demonstrators did not seem to be offering realistic strategies to help non-native speakers. They seemed to be coming from an all-or-nothing perspective - these people need to be with full-time interpreters, for example. They also spoke at length about how gypsy children were legally entitled to a third of the year off school for "cultural reasons", but were unclear whether or not this level of absence would lead to the school being penalised for the effect this would have on the league tables. All in all, asking this much from people unused to anyone remotely different from them was, I could sense, engendering resentment and indeed jealousy, rather than being constructive.

But I may have been biased, for these people dealt me a humiliation that still stings today, two years on.

They set us an activity and sat us all down at tables of ten or so people. They kept us in strict silence, and then they went around with one of those sheets of star stickers. (I loved those when I was tiny.) Reminding us to keep absolutely silent, they put one onto each of our foreheads, not showing us what colour it would be. One guy whispered to his partner, "What colour am I?" and was told. Once they'd finished doing this, they cried out, "Now, still without talking, sort yourselves!"

"Into what?" somebody asked.

"No further instructions, just sort yourselves!"

Yes, it did dawn on me that these stars were supposed to represent skin colours. But I immediately dismissed the idea as too childish for a professional postgraduate course. For one thing, everyone knows their skin colour, but we didn't know what colours our stars were - presumably, we were supposed to find out. And they'd just done that wonderful demonstration about the poor lady unable to ask any questions. So I concluded this must be about non-verbal communication.

I waved my hands at two girls who both had green stickers on their foreheads and mimed them coming closer together. Immediately their eyes lit up, everybody else caught on and that was how most people did the experiment. I promptly found out this way I had a green sticker.

Yeah, you can guess what happened. Because I agreed to be sorted by colour, and because I had started it, I was shown up to be the racist, the enemy of everything they were trying to do. All right, not in so many words. "You started it, and that was good," they said in that uniquely ironic tone . . . and went on to ask two people how they'd felt - one had been the only silver sticker, and one hadn't got one at all. They played their parts beautifully, mourning how left out they'd felt.

The other science teachers to be (most of whom I didn't feel liked me very much, and who I generally avoided) had been at the back, and had seen exactly what was coming and simply all sat together. They claimed they'd sorted themselves "according to our subject" and were publicly praised and held up as an example to us all.

Ranting about this to a friend that evening, she nodded wisely and said, "Oh yes, there have been psychology experiments about that."

Can you imagine how I felt? Duped. Stupid. Mortified. Hopelessly, hopelessly guilty, as if I'd committed a crime against a sector of my fellow human beings who were already being victimised. I'd always hung around with the international students at university. I'd chatted with my Ghanian housemate in Brighton about Steve Biko and how unbelievably stupid some people could be; he'd always cheerfully told me what it was like to be black - no big deal except when people made it so. I'd lived in Spain for a year, and experienced not understanding a word of lectures, failing most of the exams through my bad Spanish, having chalk thrown at me presumably because I looked different, and having to correct hilarious assumptions about England such as that we all live like spoiled lords and have breakfast in bed (yes, really!) . . . and, on the other hand, much more importantly, I'd experienced people genuinely taking me under their wing, slowing down their talk, not minding my mistakes, lending me their notes and not expecting any major gratitude. How could I defend myself? Anyone who says "I'm not a racist" is usually about to add "but I wouldn't want my daughter to marry one."

And the main thing I learnt was: never believe what other people say. If they tell you to do something, they probably mean you to do something else.

And, even if the possible trap should be far too childish and basic to be the focus, that doesn't mean it isn't.

Hardly healthy.

Also, I learnt that theory and models that bear no relation to reality are still very prevalent. What has a suddenly and arbitrarily placed star sticker, whose colour you don't know, have to do with permanent skin colour? Nothing that I could see. What was the big deal with sorting ourselves into groups, when groups are how both pupils and trainee teachers did most work and how people congregate socially anyway? It would have made a lot more sense to say "Don't you dare talk to anyone with curly hair/blue eyes/who wears glasses" and then afterwards, if they must, "How did that make you FEEL?" Would I have wanted my fellow Spanish students to feel guilty that I didn't understand the lectures, that I was very pale in comparison to them? Don't be so ridiculous! Did I want a full-time interpreter? Splutter! What sort of person could possibly want that sort of thing?

Not at any point during the day did we ever get near discussing the classroom or realistic situations. Not once was the issue raised, for example, of "What do you do if some kid makes a racist remark?" or "How do you go about getting such-and-such some help with something you can't deal with alone?", let alone "What if someone's being bullied for the colour of their skin?" No, the day was about legalities, and an in-depth examination of ourselves, after which I felt unable to face the others - and which I'm still embarrassed to write about. I can hardly tell if I'm more embarrassed at being so publicly conned, or in case anyone really thinks that I would seriously split children into skin colour groups or something.

To be honest, while I've learnt to be very skeptical of claims, I'm a very straightforward and trusting person. That makes it easy to set traps for me. But it also makes other people feel safe when I'm there. They don't have to dig for extra meanings, or worry that I want something different from what I say. In the context of the classroom, I suppose that would mean it would be easy to lie to me about why you haven't done your homework - but it would also be setting a good example. As in: don't be slick, don't be devious, don't show off, there's no need. Just be curious and nice to others. That's how I try to run the Galaxy Zoo Forum, and that was how I tried to run the classroom, and it seemed to work all right. There are plenty of things I don't like about myself, but my trusting nature is not one of them. I like myself that way. Why should I become distrustful and suspicious and see tricks everywhere in order to avoid being labelled a racist? How does that make sense?

The more people start setting traps for each other, the less honest we can become with each other - and, frankly, the less we'll then be able to talk about real problems and what to do about them, for all energy will go to defence. And how can you enlist a group of people to help you deal with something when you're frightened of what they're going to publicly call you? That's how to get everyone to keep their head down and not draw attention to themselves - and when something needs sorting out, it wouldn't get done.

And is worrying and worrying about whether or not you're a racist really productive? Does guilt, self-consciousness and an avoidance of certain words really improve the situation for other people? Or does it just make you feel scared and them feel awkward? Here's an extreme example. For another, I've heard of people being condemned for saying "black coffee". That, dear friends, implies that there is something wrong with being black, but that you as a white or whatever else colour person are too sanctimoniously polite to say so. I cannot think of anything more isolating and humiliating than to be thought inferior, but for those around you to smugly think the better of themselves for using elaborate language to avoid saying so - and probably wanting a receipt, too. Get lost.

Myself, I like Allan Sandage's quote: "All humans are brothers. We came from the same supernova."

(From Hubblesite.)

Oh, and as a parting shot, that group of trainee teachers who were publicly praised for spotting the trap and therefore being non-racist? One of them, the very next morning, referred to one of the demonstrators in disgusted tones as "That Paki".

Whether you're black, white or bloody rainbow coloured - what do you think?

Book Review: "Big Questions - The Universe" by Stuart Clark

2010-10-26T04:00:00.000+01:00

I'd better start this post by declaring an interest.

A few months ago I was contacted out of the blue by a friendly lady named Marta from Flint PR, inviting me to review a book, and asking me if I knew of any more bloggers who'd like to review it. I'm always up for getting a free book in exchange for writing a review, so I naturally said yes and alerted my astroblogging friends. I fear that by now she'll have put me on the blacklist as someone who nicks their books and doesn't carry out her promises, as I was probably supposed to do this in July - and you know what it's like, the guiltier you feel the worse it gets, like writing birthday thank you letters. Anyway, Marta, look, I've done it - though I'll understand if you don't want to bother with me again!

The book was from the "The Big Questions" series, subtitled "The Universe"; the others (so far) are Philosophy, Physics and Mathematics. I declare a subsidary interest: it's by Stuart Clark, who also wrote The Sun Kings and of whom I am a great fan. He's a very friendly and interactive Twitterer, happy to answer questions and generally a very encouraging sort of person.

He's divided up the topic into 20 questions, ranging from the obvious "What is the Universe?" to the basic "Why doesn't the Moon fall down?" to the contemporary "Why is 75% of the Universe a mystery?" to the uncertain "Do other intelligent beings exist?" to the downright brave "Is there evidence for God?" He chose the questions himself. You can see more of them in the link above.

Now, if you ask for my opinion, I'll give you my opinion - as some people have been rather shocked to find out. My opinion on the design and format of this book is that it is ghastly. The cover is made of that criss-cross stuff you get on nasty cheap folders. The pages are rounded at the edges, looking like a dreaded office diary, and smaller in the middle, so you can't riffle through them. There is no space between the heading of a subsection and the first paragraph, but there are spaces between the paragraphs. (This blog does that automatically too. I hate it.) The introduction paragraphs and the diagrams aren't aligned with the text and huge areas of paper are wasted, which does my eyes in. Stuart has inserted beautiful, illuminating, carefully chosen quotations to go here and there in chapters, and those appear in boxes with only the corners showing, as if the words are trying to burst out like parasites and escape.

Well, I did warn you. (Cumbrian Sky has more positive comments about the book's appearance if you want balance!) I suppose it would suit an ashamed closet astronomer who wants his or her colleagues to think they're reading something else. However, may I also add that this is a good moment to mention not judging a book by its cover?

Because it's a gorgeous book! It focusses heavily on the facts, the science, rather than trying to awe us with pictures. It presents the science that's been discovered so far, as well as what we don't yet know. Sometimes Stuart starts a chapter with a historical anecdote. Other chapters he starts by setting out the basics, or describing a method of measuring something to do with the question. You get a very gentle introduction to each issue, even when the issue itself (and the rest of the chapter) is enough to make your head spin.

The book is not afraid of uncharted territory (as scientists say, if you know what you're doing, it's not research). Kepler invented his laws of planetary motion before we knew what caused the planets to move. Pauli invented the neutrino, as Stuart writes, as "a desperate remedy" to account for lost mass in nuclear fusion - twenty-six years later, neutrinos were discovered. Stuart discusses dark matter and dark energy, but also modified Newtonian dynamics, "quintessence", and the idea of overturning the cosmological principle, as means to account for the 96% of mass that we cannot see and the expanding acceleration of the Universe. I can't pretend to have understood it all, but the nice thing with this book is that it's broken up into lots of little chunks you can go back to several times. Actually, that's one thing that kept me reading it for so long. I kept going back and looking at things again. Although each section is independent of the others (there's very little "see such-and-such a chapter" business), my mind got a lot clearer when I re-read and re-re-re-re-read, trying to take difficult concepts in.

There's a great variety of subject matter. In the chapter "Are we made from stardust?" we get taken into the world of biology, of the definition of life, of the intricate complexities of amino acids, of experiments and fireballs and meteorites and uncertainty. So taken in, in fact, that the "stardust" bit, of which we are reminded at the end, comes as a bit of a jolt.

One chapter really threw me and left me feeling very frustrated: "Can the laws of physics change?" We began with the story of cave in Gabon which is, as far as I know, the site of the only natural nuclear reaction that ever took place on Earth. I remembered a very pro-nuclear power lecturer at university telling us about that site, remarking that the products of the reaction haven't moved since (therefore, his point was, nuclear power is safe). How the uranium built up due to being carried along by water and deposited, and why it set off a chain reaction, was clear - until this bit:

The nature of the nuclear reaction appeared to have changed and that could only happen if the laws of physics had changed too. Research conducted in 2004 showed that the strength of the force governing the nuclear reaction in Oklo had been different by a tiny amount, less than five parts in 100 million, from what it is today.

That's all we learn - unless I've managed to miss the explanation every time I read the book (possible, I suppose). What aspect of the nature of the nuclear reaction had changed? What laws of physics had changed? What force governing the nuclear reaction? Different how? I'm hardly going to care what year the research took place in if I don't know that, or who did the research or what they were doing or what they found, am I?

And yet even from that paragraph you'll probably see how clear and easy Stuart's style is, how gently he takes us along - his text is not hideously condensed or full of jargon; he doesn't rush us; he explains exactly what he's talking about. Except in this one chapter, and one out of twenty isn't much to complain about. In any case, he's spurred me on to try and find out for myself, which if I was a bit less lazy I might have done by now.

I think some reviewers have wondered what the chapter "Is there evidence for God?" is doing in that book, but I found it very useful. It goes into the dilemma of exactly how fine-tuned the Universe is for life. There are a lot of terrifyingly exact coincidences that have allowed matter to exist, and carbon and oxygen to form readily in stars, and solids to form . . . But would slightly different conditions, perhaps, have been even more suitable for life, perhaps a different sort? Are there a lot of alternative universes which have these different conditions? As Stuart explains, the Universe keeps throwing surprises at us, and showing us systems (such as Jupiter-sized planets orbiting very close to their stars) which we thought were impossible - perhaps similar surprises will come on the subject of life. There is a lot we don't know yet. But Stuart clearly sets out what we do know, and there is definitely plenty to please both sides!

I'd recommend this book to anyone who knows a bit of physics and cosmology - and especially to those many people who know enough to start thinking up lots of fancy theories but have no way of testing them, other than to appear on the Internet and usually get refuted by scary mathematics they don't understand. Actually, I'd recommend it to anyone who likes reading astronomy but doesn't get much time, as it's perfect for dipping into and out of, or to anyone with lots of niggling questions and uncertainties. There's plenty I still feel I don't know after reading it, but that is of course always the way.