Hello, you. I am sort of moving back to my old domain now, so from now on you’ll find me over here. See you there!

I ran across this article (via @rogerhighfield) in the Guardian the other day discussing the boom in interest in astronomy that is happening in the UK right now.

It says that amateur astronomy is undergoing a “big bang” (oh my sides) in popularity in Britain largely because of two things: Stargazing Live (particularly with Brian Cox) and GoTo telescopes. One interesting factoid that it cites is that sales of telescopes on Amazon have gone up 500%!

OK, so nominally, as a quasi-astrophysicist and occasionally enthusiastic amateur astronomer myself, I should be overjoyed at this news. And I am, because not only do I think it’s great that people are getting outside and finding the beauty and sense of perspective that the stars have to offer each and every one of us, but also because it means that nowadays I am the instant queen of dinner party convo the instant it turns to science. You are interested in spacey particley stuff? Here Let Me Explain That For You!

But there are two things that make me sad about this news:

1) Wouldn’t it be great if science funding were a beauty pageant and the most popular girl won? Because if so, funding for astro- and particle- physics would be burgeoning right now, instead of being cut left and right. If the planned cuts continue to go ahead, astronomy funding in the UK would have 50% less money overall by 2014/15 than it did in 2005. And this in turn would be the reason why I will most likely never find myself a place on a PhD course. It is sad and ironic to me that in a time where interest in the UK for astronomy and particle physics is at an all-time high, the ACTUAL astronomers and particle physicists (and even the aspirational, like me) are left scrabbling for grants to do their research, or even to fund PhD places to train the next generation of researchers.

2) And this is where it gets even more personal: I am not a fan of GoTo scopes for beginners. I believe that one doesn’t really get to know the night sky without going outside in the freezing cold with a red flashlight and a star map and a pair of binoculars or a fully manual telescope. It’s the only way to get the inside knowledge of the secret geography of the night sky, to know that M57 is in Lyra halfway between two particular stars, that there is a knack to spotting the Andromeda Galaxy with the naked eye. When I was a child, I knew the stars as well as I knew my neighbourhood. I made index cards, one for each constellation, hand drawing them meticulously and highlighting all the deep-sky objects that my little refractor could possibly resolve.

This is why I think GoTo should be considered harmful (for beginners): because if I had a flash automatic telescope as a child, the only star I would have bothered to have learn was Polaris so that I could align the telescope. I am not saying that it is a necessary life skill these days to know the constallations like I do, but it sure would make life easier for ANY observer, no matter how inexperienced they are, to know when a certain constellation rises or sets so that they can have a look at it. Or to know where things lie in relation to each other in the actual sky as opposed to on the Messier list.

What IS a necessary life skill is reading a map, and much like I fear a generation that relies solely on satellite navigation, I feel a sense of loss for a generation that only knows how to find M57 using GoTo. Because a map doesn’t only tell you where something is, it also gives you a sense of perspective, which is the main reason why I ever got into astronomy to begin with.

So there’s my curmudgeonly screed about GoTo for beginning astronomers. I feel that GoTo, ultimately, lacks soul and discipline. Automation is the killer of poetry. Part of the triumph of telescope astronomy, especially with small scopes, is the struggle of locating something that is so faint and indistinct that you begin questioning your own eyes. Is that fuzzy thing it? Do I trust my own eyes? And then the moment of zen: Ah, yes, that is it, I have found it, this nebula, this tiny faint fuzzy that is in actuality 1000 light years away and 12 light years across. Without the challenge and joy of discovery, a GoTo telescope is just another punchy-buttony gadget that will end up another expensive dust-collector in the garage.

So don’t go fly fishing with dynamite, my fellow astronomy geeks. Yes, it is effective, but the fun wears off too quickly. I recommend the more scenic route instead.

My recommendations for lovely NON-Goto anti-gadget-faffing telescopes for beginners:
* Edmund Astroscan
* Orion ED 80mm short tube refractor
* Any decent Dobsonian telescope

Toms, for warm weather

3-dollar Walmart Uggs, for cold

I got sunburned and rained on and frozen and the whole lot. Don’t judge my Uggs: I keep a miniwardrobe of clothing staples at my parents’ house, things I buy on the cheap from Dirt Cheap and TJ Maxx and the like. On this trip, I added a nice black wool coat and a lovely forest green trench to the closet there. It means I can go for a fortnight with just carryon luggage, although my plan was foiled when I got requests to bring back valentine candy and whatnot, so I also got a new hardsided suitcase on the cheap from TK Maxx, which I needed to replace my wheelie rollaboard that recently gave up the ghost after 20 years of service.

Can you tell I love TK Maxx? The one splurge I made on this trip was buying a lovely buttery gold leather Michael Kors clutch for less than half of retail. I was just amazed that they even bothered to send such things to a store in BFE Mississippi. But, truth be told, Mississippi is GREAT for bargain hunting, because all sorts of weird crap ends up here on discount, so I always find a treasure on every trip, and my parents are terrible bargain-hunting packrats. My mom recently went to Unclaimed Baggage a few hours away in Alabama and scored some amazing deals, so believe me we will be hitting that up on my next trip over.

Mostly I spent my trip at home doing things like cooking and studying and going running with my mom, just usual stuff. I did drive her to the Mississippi Blues Marathon over in Jackson, where we stayed the night and did a little shopping. I went to J.Crew but nothing really caught my fancy in the sale stuff, but Mom bought the farm/a new iMac.

The next day was the best day of the trip, a glorious sunny and 70F, so while she was running her marathon I walked all over downtown Jackson and took photos. I hadn’t been there since I was a small child, and it is a weird town, where the downtown is an utter ghosttown on weekends because apparently it is only home to offices. It just seems generally a bit vacant and derelict. There is a whole 60s motel just boarded up and abandoned barely three blocks from the capitol!

I made a point of going to the Mississippi Museum of Art, because we Mississippians are a funny bunch: we come from a poor and ignorant state, and somehow we have this…thing…this talent that so many of us can channel into artistic expression that is uncommonly good. We have a long tradition of producing extraordinary music and literature. Shelby Foote once said, “There’s nothing else to do down here, so you write.” (God, the oppressive boredom of my childhood looks like an outright luxury to me these days and contributes heavily to those times when I long to repatriate to the motherland.)

Given the high stature of our writing and music, I was hoping that the visual arts would be similarly blessed (as a field it is relatively new in our parts, I mean, art is a bit ladidah and newfangled and all that). I truly was not disappointed in the least. The Mississippi Museum of Art has the Invitational exhibit on right now, featuring thirteen artists from around the state. The collection really was impressive and inspirational. It could have been easy to go down the facile path of rustic folk art, but the only artist that even approached this style was Steve Shepard, whose work was more of a funny political commentary than anything else.

Another work that deeply impressed me was “Aggregate of Past Events“, by H.C. Porter and Gretchen Haien. They went down to the coast and took photos of the ruined foundation slabs of the houses that were washed away by Katrina. All that remains of these houses is their cracked and ruined flooring, broken tiles and lino, jumbled up wood parquet. A mosaic of these photos are arranged as a grid on the floor so that you can walk across the images of the ruins. The effect reminded me remarkably of the tile mosaics that I have seen in Roman ruins in Rome and Cyprus, despite being separated by two thousand years in time and five thousand miles in space.

When I left the museum and walked up Farish Street, I got a similar feeling of walking among the ruins of a lost civilisation. Once upon a time, not too long ago, this street was alive with juke joints and theatres and soul food cafe. It would have literally throbbed with life, but now, barring about three places that are still operational, all of the buildings have been left to go derelict and fall in on themselves. You can literally walk in the brick shells of these gap-toothed buildings, since they no longer have doors or windows.

The whole district is supposed to be renovated to become Jackson’s answer to Beale Street. The southernmost block of Farish Street is nearly restored, so the buildings there once more have panes of glass in their windows and rooves over their heads and a fresh coat of whitewash. But I couldn’t help but wonder if that is all it is…whitewash. Once again a cultural appropriation of black culture by white property developers. I have conflicted feelings on the matter, and I sincerely hope that some of the original owners might make some money off of the deal. It would be a huge improvement to the otherwise dead downtown Jackson scene to have a street that comes alive with music once again, since like Basin Street and Beale Street, Farish Street was home to recording studios and blues performers whose names lit up marquees across the nation. I suppose I will just have to watch these developments with interest, but god forbid there is anything like a Hard Rock Cafe vibe about it.

After having a nice long walk downtown, I settled down to the blues brunch at Parlor Market, which was divine. I sat out on the sidewalk and sipped my mimosa and sweet iced tea as my mom ran by towards the end of the marathon. She finished in a time that made her happy, and I took her my leftover biscuits and boiled peanuts. We drove back home that afternoon under gathering clouds, but made it home before the rain broke.

Overall, it was a good trip home. It’s funny how when I was a kid, I used to be ashamed of being from Mississippi, but now, as an adult, I have deeply rooted and unseverable ties to the culture of the state. It forms the benchmark by which I hold all things to be holy, namely good food, good books, and good music. If I don’t go home for about six months or so, I start going through withdrawal, and the only treatment is to go home and drink sweet tea and eat fried chicken livers like a girl is meant to do. I am not sure how I am going to manage this subdivision of identity in the future: I feel displaced in the UK, but somewhat at home, and I feel at home in Mississippi, but somewhat displaced. But deep down, no matter how many passports I hold from whatever countries, the deepest one within is stamped Mississippi.

I also like their wedding dresses because, frankly, they are simple and reasonably priced. I am not and never have been interested in dropping thousands on a dress that is worn once. My first wedding dress was actually the very very first J.Crew wedding dress — it wasn’t called as such but there was no mistaking the glorious simplicity of a pure white floor length strapless cotton cady column.

For my somewhat hazily impending nuptials, I will again either wear a J.Crew gown from their now much-expanded bridal collection, or have something made. I have been to the bridal shop on Madison Ave., and actually have two gowns that I got on sale or ebay for a sum total of $300, I suppose as dress insurance if needed.

However, I always check back for new gowns, and both my mom and I saw the Sararose gown and went “ooh”. And it was in Tricotine.

My wedding gown really must be in flowy drapey silk this time, either tricotine or charmeuse, and the two extant gowns are both tricotine.

So both of us got excited and thought about ordering it up for a try-on, when the fabric description caught my eye: Polyester. But lined in silk. WTF? Who makes a poly dress and lines it in silk? And why would J.Crew change their gorgeous silk tricotine to polyester and piss everyone off?? Surely this was a typo. Only a lesser retailer would go for such underhanded bait and switch cost-cutting tactics.

But no, I rang and spoke to a bridal consultant, and she confirmed that it was polyester.

So much for all that.

Time to short J.Crew stock.

An image of a cornea before and after Ortho K treatment

Recently, I got Ortho K contact lenses, which are basically like Invisalign braces for your eyes. This is quite a new sort of technology that involves wearing special gas permeable hard contacts while you sleep, and upon waking you take them out and enjoy good vision all day lens-free. The Ortho K lenses reshape your cornea in a strange kind of ocular terraforming so that they help your lenses to focus images correctly on your retina.

Ortho K is generally used for people with myopic vision, because the lenses work by flattening out the central part of the cornea over the pupil. Since they can’t do the opposite as well, they are only meant for the nearsighted. However, my flawed vision is mostly due to my astigmatism, since my vision is actually quite good and only needs about a diopter of correction in the left eye. Because of my astigmatism, lights have been quite glary and intense for me for years, and I have been especially sensitive to sunlight, thus continually squinting or wearing sunnies despite the fact that I *adore* sunlight.

Apparently, it is somewhat common for schoolkids in Hong Kong to get Ortho K lenses, because it arrests the worsening of myopia in developing children. They start them with wearing the lenses from ages as young as 9, which is pretty intense if you ask me. However, kids in the western world are also getting them, largely because it is very complementary to playing sports and not getting bullied for being a speccy git.

Most people when I tell them about my crazy lenses are shocked that I would wear contacts while sleeping, because their optician told them never ever to do so. Well, it’s okay in the case of Ortho K, because first off gas permeable lenses are quite good at letting oxygen through these days, and secondly your eyes get less oxygen at night anyway due to having your eyes closed. By not wearing lenses during the day, my eyes are allowed to breathe and get lots of air before being tucked in for the night.

The cool thing about Ortho K is that it is completely reversible. Your cornea will hold its new shape for about a day before it starts reverting back to its old ways. This means that if you ever decided to get LASIK or just preferred plain old glasses, all you have to do is stop wearing the contacts and things go back to normal.

The downside of Ortho K is that the lenses are really quite uncomfortable to wear, no messing about. You can’t just plop them in and slide them into place like soft contacts, no, you have to pry your eye open and tap them directly onto the cornea, which is really hard for someone as flinchy as I am. Getting them off isn’t trivial either, as you have to sort of pop them out by squeezing your eyelids in a weird way. And once in, for the first few minutes, it really feels like there is something horrible in your eye that you want to get out, but you have to just suck it up and get through it. They are much better if you keep your eyes closed, which also makes them okay to sleep in.

When I first got the lenses, it was especially hard to settle in because you have to train up by wearing them a few hours a day every day for the first week. I got through this time by staring at the telly and trying to move my eyes as little as possible so I couldn’t feel the lenses as much. I also got through this time by telling myself that if little kids in Hong Kong can do it, so can I.

I actually welcomed the first night I slept in them, because it was much easier than coping while awake. My routine now is to put the lenses in and then read for a bit before going to sleep, and then take the lenses out as soon as I wake up, and it is all going fine. I have a checkup and topography scan the morning after my first night, and the scan indicated that my eyes were nearly totally corrected. My vision does seem a little different, especially up close, but I was told that I would probably get some haloing issues for the first week or so while my corneas continued to be landscaped. I go for my next checkup and scan in a week, but so far so good. However, I haven’t attempted to use my new eyes on my telescope, but I will give it a go soon to see how my focus is when my pupils are dilated. Otherwise, it is really a medical technology worth exploring if you are myopic.

Of course, this was all very interesting timing because tomorrow TOMORROW there will be a press conference held at CERN to probably announce findings about possible signs of the Higgs Boson. I can’t say with more certainty because the staff at CERN were very canny.

After arrival, we had barely an hour to walk around Geneva itself, due to our tight schedule. I looked in the windows of many jewelers to admire their bling, but then we had to get back to the hotel and quickly get ready. We were being treated to drinks and dinner with the Director General of CERN himself, Rolf-Dieter Heuer. He was a very charming and personable man, and when I asked him which was more difficult, particle physics or international relations, he mulled it over a bit and had to confess that they were both equally hard.

It was a lovely dinner, with my favourite dessert, chocolate fondant, and lots of conversation around the table about physics (some time was spent discussing superluminal neutrinos) and social media and whatnot, and as a result we didn’t get to bed until quite late.

I had some trouble waking up early the next morning, even struggling to eat my room service breakfast, but we finally got ourselves sorted out and ready to go to CERN itself by 9am. When we got there, Prof Heuer gave us a quick talk about what we were about to see and the significance of it, and then we were whisked off to go to see the CMS detector facility on the French side of the LHC ring.

The only reason that we were being allowed to go on this tour is because the LHC was shut down for its periodic maintenance only a couple of days before. When the LHC is running, it is impossible to go down into the tunnels because of the radiation and magnetic fields, so our timing was perfect.

When we arrived at the CMS facility, we were shown the control room and the panic buttons for emergency shutdowns. Then we were given hardhats and put on the lift down to the tunnels while being given a very quick safety briefing. We had lots of guides to show us around, so as long as we didn’t touch anything we would be alright.

First we were shown into the main tunnel itself for the LHC. What was most interesting to me about this was that people perceive the LHC as being a perfect 27km circle, when in actuality it is a series of line segments connected by curves, like a big octagon (as you can see in the photo below). Also, the LHC tunnel was not dug so that it is all at the same depth, but rather varies from 50 to 175 m deep, due to trying to avoid damp geological features. For comparison, the deepest part of the tube below sea level is on the Jubilee line at barely over 30 m.

Some more amazing facts about the LHC beam pipeline:
* It is emptier than interstellar space.
* It is colder than interstellar space (a full degree below the CMB temperature of 2.7K).
* It is also the hottest place in the universe at the localised sites of particle collisions (such as CMS and ATLAS).
* The superconducting magnets that guide the particles around the ring operate at around 8 Tesla. For reference, a refrigerator magnet has a strength of 0.005 T.

With a strong background in physics, I was initially interested in the actual particle physics ideas that were being tested, but what really impressed me was the sheer engineering technicality that went into developing the LHC and the detectors. The technical feats of being able to create such high vacuums and magnetic fields are staggeringly complicated, and that’s before we even got to the CMS detector itself.

The CMS is smaller than ATLAS, the most photogenic detector that you have probably seen Brian Cox wittering about. However, CMS is really quite huge and I struggled to get a good photograph of the detector assembly (if you look closely you can see that there is a nice little worker bee person in the shot) because it is 15 m in diameter.

In order to understand how a particle collision detector apparatus works, you’ll probably want to get your own physics degree or ply me with drinks because I doubt you want a long and boring explanation here. Roughly speaking, it is not totally different from ballistics research. You shoot a bullet into a big block target that stops it. You can tell from the length of the path of the bullet its speed (you’ll need to know its mass from weighing the bullet). You can tell from the angle of the hole it made the direction. Particle detectors are made of layers of 4 different types of detectors that enable researchers to know the momentum, charge, etc. of any interaction products that are born from the collision of two protons in the LHC beam.

One type of these detectors are the electromagnetic calorimeters (which detect how much energy the particles are carrying, roughly speaking) which are made of Lead Tungsten crystals that absorb the resultant particles. The amazing thing about these crystals is that despite the fact that they are perfectly clear and look like glass, they weigh MORE than lead. Also, they have a limited usable lifespan of 10 years, because as particles hit the crystals and have their energy absorbed, they disrupt the lattice structure of the crystals, making them cloudy with inclusions (think about cheap diamonds, a bit like that). It isn’t possible to go in and replace the crystals without completely shutting down the LHC for several months and dismantling the layers of the CMS to get to them, so they are not designed to be replaced at all.

Every aspect of the design of the LHC and any other project at CERN had to deal with the intricacies of engineering in this manner. It was truly an impressive feat, really the only experiment of its type on Earth and utterly irreplaceable.

After our very exciting grand tour, we paid a visit to the public visitor’s centre, then went back to building 500 of CERN, where I had one of the coolest experiences ever. The Director General met us in the lobby and then guided us through the incredibly packed and noisy cafeteria full of postgrad particle physics students. It felt like everyone stopped and stared as Prof Heuer and his oddlot entourage passed by en route to his private dining room, truly a sort of rock star experience.

We were all amazed at the time and care that Prof Heuer showed us visitors, having personally met and dined with us twice in the space of two days. I was truly impressed by the hospitality of CERN and am grateful to both them and the Science Museum for allowing us the opportunity to have this (probably) once in a lifetime experience. Sometimes you truly don’t realise what humanity is fully capable of until you go and see it with your own eyes.

First off, I would like to thank you for always having a range of American junk food treats on offer in your Food Hall, as it is truly a lifesaver for those of us who grew up on that stuff and suffer insatiable cravings as a result. I am a frequent customer, especially for red velvet Duncan Hines cake mix.

However, there is one thing very obviously missing from the American shelf: Velveeta, which is nominally American cheese…sort of. It is a processed quasi-cheese substance that is stored on the shelf, not in the fridge. It is vitally important for Americans, because without it we can’t have our tasty nacho cheese sauce or macaroni and cheese. There is no substitute in the UK market. I have been looking for eight years.

I went to Selfridges today to look for Velveeta based purely upon a vague rumour that was passed to me from the London trading floor of a large American bank. I was told that it cold be found in all of its orangey splendour on your shelves. Alas, I left empty-handed and bereft of cheesy goodness. If the entire trading floor of this bank, and half of Kensington, and little ole me are all clamouring for Velveeta, then surely it is worth stocking?

While we are at it, there is also a notable absence of Cheetos, but the crunchy kind please, not the puffy kind. They are especially tasty and I can find nowhere in London that has them. You do stock Goldfish crackers, which are marvellous, but Cheetos are about 1000 times more addictive. I promise we would keep coming back for more.

Please help out the ex-pat community and fill the gap in the market for American fake cheese products. I know this might sound like a crazygram, but I am actually quite serious. If you Google ‘Velveeta UK’, you will see that I am not the only one searching!

Kindest regards,
c

You know, at this time I was also cycling to work, about 50 miles a week, and doing a full time job and studying physics in the evenings. Yeah, no wonder I collapsed.

Anyway. Since then I occasionally go and run a bit. Just a couple of miles. I just do 20 minutes or so, lately it has been once or twice a week (according to my Nike+, anyway). Nothing too aspirational, and yet the day after running I am absolutely dead to the world and usually get ill somehow. Fabulous. I probably feel like my mom does after one of her marathons.

So I think I’ll start slower. Instead of my 21 minute 2 mile clip with hills, I’ll slow myself down and make myself stick to the c25k plan. I tell you what, anything that starts with a ‘brisk 5 minute warmup walk’ annoys me already because I like to hit go on my ipod to start my Nike+ and just…go.

Yes, a new approach. I’ll try that 5 minute walk followed by interval training. I’ll try not to sprint the intervals. I’ll tell myself to do this three days a week, and that’s the trick: if I do it hard, I won’t be able to do it three times a week (plus one pony lesson a week which is pretty cardio intensive, plus yoga). So let’s take it easy.

I am downloading the podcasts now.