On Writing

What kind of idiot tries to combine a hard-science PhD with writing a novel?

This one, apparently.

Since it’s now finally heading vaguely toward a denouement, I thought I’d write down some of my thoughts regarding something I’ve been writing.

Alternate worlds … with the power of PHYSICS!

This is just me playing with an idea.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the ‘generic fantasy story plotline #1′, which involves people from our world travelling to someone else’s. It’s never usually too clear ‘where’ exactly this ‘other’ world is, but the implication is generally that it’s somewhere external to our universe. (That is to say, it’s located in a region of spacetime such that cosmological expansion will never bring inside the visible region of space, even after infinite time has elapsed.)

Usually, perhaps with a few exceptions, these ‘worlds’ at least appear to have the same sort of physics that we have here on Earth.

A Possible Drawback?

Is the Freedom of Information Act conflicting with academic freedom?

I ask this question after reading this article:
The Guardian – Climate scientists “contradicted spirit of openess”

There is (or was) a notion that universities should serve as a source of new ideas, criticism and innovation, as well as academic training for students. It is (or was) held that part of this requires a ‘license to dissent‘ – essentially, the freedom to openly discuss and freely-research controversial issues. However, this ideal is arguably out of step with the modern ’suspicion is proof’ society that the current Government have been working hard to create.

The Freedom of Information Act was one of the few genuinely liberal things the Government has done in the last few years. (Even then, it is in some respects a rather weak entity. NuLab’s heart was never really in it.) In general, I think it’s been a good thing and we’re certainly better off with it than without it. However, I think it has some weaknesses.

One, oddly enough, may be related to science.

It seems that so-called ‘climate sceptics’ have been using it to demand access to data. Now, access to published data is, of course, perfectly laudable and unexceptional. However, I’m not too sure that this should necessarily be the case for pre-published, unanalysed material. The information watchdog appears to be taking the position that raw scientific data should be treated in exactly the same way as (say) public policy documents – despite them having nothing at all in common.

Let me see if I can offer a clearer example.

Sat on my desk at the University of Hertfordshire, I have three shiny, shiny disks in boring white plastic boxes. They contain the raw data for a large number of T-dwarfs. Essentially, the DVDs have on them the numerical water that sprays out of the telescope’s tap. As the data hasn’t been processed, flat-fielded, bias-corrected, cosmic-ray subtracted or anything else, there’s a lot more than just T-dwarf spectra on there. 99% of it, frankly, is useless rubbish. And there’s a lot of it – many, many gigabytes.

In principle, it seems someone could put in an FoI for this.

But, the raw data is pretty close to meaningless. Prior to cleaning up, you can’t even see the object in some of the images. There’s really few useful things that the untrained person could do with it. But suppose they decide they require access to this abstract entity, ‘the data’. What does this mean, legally? Just the disks? Or what they would eventually reveal? Would one actually expected to extract usable spectra (a job which would take hours, maybe days) so that someone else can then misinterpret them?

Also, it seems to me that this situation is wide open to abuse. Suppose you’ve just come back from an observing trip. You’ve devoted months of your life to getting the telescope applications together, you’ve had to take a huge amount of time out to travel, had to put up with the inconvenience of airports etc … and then what do you find waiting for you the moment you get home? An FoI request from an unscrupulous colleague, who is planning on using your work to beat you into publication.

That would kind of suck. But, it seems to me that it’s legally-possible under the current legislation.

Also, there’s an issue regarding e-mails. Apparently, the interpretation seems to be that all e-mails sent from a ‘public sector’ computer are also automatically public property. But … people don’t just talk about science in their e-mails. Does a climate change sceptic have an automatic right to know the background details of one’s private life, too?

Also, what about work-related e-mails sent through third-party clients? Can your Gmail be FoI’ed?

In addition, it seems to me that, this could hand an excellent tool into the hands of opponents of scientific research. (There are lots of them out there – anti-vaxxers, the no-climate-change fools, Creationists … our current society does not seem to welcome new ideas very warmly.) If you don’t want people doing evil Commie Godless science!!!11!eleven!, then just bog them down in thousands of pointless FoI’s.

It seems to me that all of these conflict with academic freedom. Also, if everything you exists in a panopticon, then what about the license to dissent? If you’re not even able to exchange a few ideas privately with colleagues, without the whole world looking in, then what does this imply for discourse? Nothing good, I suspect.

In summary I should say that I am not arguing against the FoI either in whole or in principle. In fact it’s one of the few things the current Government have done that I actually approve of. I also feel that open access to published data is entirely good and proper. However, I don’t feel that the pre-processing stages should happen in a glasshouse; researchers need to be free to do their jobs!

NASA Cuts

Moon return cancelled – BBC News.

Evening Edit: Actually, on further research, it looks like the budget might not be the descending axe that had been feared after all. Constellation is still gone, but in fact, basic science seems to have been something of a winner. There’s actually been a net increase in funding, and in fact half of that money has in fact been earmarked for actual science, rather than management shenanigans or ‘personnel’.

So things might not be as bad as feared. I’ve left the original post up (below the cut) for reference.

Absent Aliens?

Just a quick thought…

The Anthropic Principle – from an intellectual point of view, it’s largely useless. It makes few genuine testable predictions – Fred Hoyle is about the only person I’ve heard of who managed to get something usable out of it. And not only is the Anthropic Principle a useless bit of psychological fluff, at its worst extreme it can actually lead to some very, very silly intellectual places. So, on the face of it, the Anthropic Principle seems really a bit pointless.

However.

It occurs to me that it might, just might, conceivably tell us something about the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life. The argument is this – we as human beings are an intelligent species, and we exist. Therefore, the logical inference is that intelligent life is definitely possible, and a basic scientific principle is that if it can happen once, it can happen again, given the right conditions.

So, this means that the debate regarding ‘aliens’ shouldn’t be ‘can they exist?’. Rather, we should be asking questions about the likelihood – and thus the spatial and temporal distribution. (10,000 civilisations at any given time in a galaxy the size of ours? Or one every billion or so years on average?)

And the nice thing about questions like this is that it should be possible to put at least some upper bounds on these numbers, even with today’s technology. The argument would be, if we can reliably detect (say) radio wave signals out to X parsecs, and we don’t, then we can argue an immediate upper bound as ‘no more than one civilization, i.e. us’ per X^3 cubic parsecs.

Divide the volume of the galactic disk by that number, and you have your estimate.

Linkspam Time

XKCD makes you feel really sorry for the Spirit rover. This is an example of a device that has performed well beyond any original hopes, though – it was only designed to last for 90 days and it’s been going for more than 2000.

Here is a Supreme Court decision from the file marked ‘Batshit Insane’. It came in the same week as Obama’s healthcare initiatives finally died a painful, slow death. In the long run, this decision may well be just as bad for America as the reform-failure. It won’t kill anyone directly, but by putting elected officials even further into the pockets of large financial institutions, it will distort the decision-making. This will hit things like infrastructure projects – like electricity generation, or water supply. Or indeed healthcare policy. And these are things that can hurt people, very badly indeed. (Also, expect the RIAA to get a lot more powerful.)

Worst of all, it doesn’t appear to be particularly-controversial, either. During the Bush years I formed an impression that American democracy is at-best sickly, and more probably dying. I wonder if all that November 2008 brought was false hope? Oh well, at least it’s not my country.

Oh, talking of our country? A certain man has been at it again – almost as if he feels he didn’t spread enough poison during his term. It only strengthens my opinion that the Chilcot inquiry has been little more than a painful sideshow. Was anyone seriously expecting that it might lead to the truth?

In less blood-pressure-raising news, the paper that I’m on has been picked up by the Bad Astronomy blog. Admittedly I’m only 8th author, but it’s still kind of cool!

Ah. I said something about infrastructure, didn’t I? Well, what about step wells? A fascinating and ingenious solution to the problem of storing water between monsoons in India, and also one that happens to look visually-stunning. They’re fascinating structures, as much works of art as infrastructure projects, and all the more amazing because they were built before centuries before the start of the modern age.

Habitable Planets in Unlikely Places

Every now and then, the researcher’s life throws up the odd cherry or two. Today was a case in question.

I’ve been interested in extrasolar planets for a long time. Like a lot of people, I’ve been particularly interested by the idea of potentially-inhabitable exoplanets. I actually do research on brown dwarfs, though, as they’re pretty much as interesting and they don’t involve staring at radial velocity periodograms (eurgh). Anyway, literally several years ago, I wondered in passing if it was possible to have an inhabitable planet around a brown dwarf. And these days, I realised, I have the technical knowledge to attempt an answer. Hurrar!

The short answer is ‘Yes’.

Swirly Things

If there was one thing Avatar did do, it was fill my head with images of big, stormy gas giants. So, here is a piece of Rayleigh-scattered, bluish-gas-planet goodness. (Note: it isn’t intended to be Polyphemus, rather ‘just’ some random exoplanet in the Neptune/Uranus mass range.)

There is a much higher-res version over here, on my ‘proper’ gallery.

Avatar

Well, I’ve seen it. And I have a few thoughts. (Needless to say, the SPOILER LAMP is lit.)

Unfortunate Implications

I’m prone to over-analyzing things. I do like to play with my food, even if some of it is the intellectual equivalent of gristle between the mental teeth.

One such example comes from the ‘Halo’ series of computer games.

I’ve read several interviews with Neill Blomkamp, about the now-aborted Halo movie. He said one thing in particular that stuck in my head. He described the Master Chief as a ‘victim of the military industrial complex‘. This is interesting – as it’s very probably true.

Why don’t we dig into this a bit?