The Science and Technology Facilities Council in the UK has managed to create a terrible situation which could destroy fundamental research across the country. This would have a devastating impact on not just the lives of people who have dedicated themselves to their fields, and not just to the UK’s reputation, but would be a massive loss for everyone.

One institution, Jodrell Bank (where I used to work), is listed as “threatened” (BBC News), and this story a great showcase for what’s at stake.  What’s really at stake isn’t even visible, so I’m going to use JB to give tiny insights into what this could mean for a broad community of brilliant minds and projects, and what we might lose that we can’t imagine and can’t measure.

In true British fashion, Jodrell is an example of how spectacular scientific endeavour is completely under-represented and unappreciated in the UK.  We have a world-class, thought-leading, inspirational, world-changing, unique facility, and it’s not considered as an imperative to sustain.

Jodrell (with MERLIN) is as powerful as the Hubble Space Telescope. It has been for over 15 years. (I believe Nasa spend more on marketing the HST than Jodrell’s entire budget).

I went to visit some friends at Jodrell a few years back and as they we updating me on some of the progress a few nuggets dropped into the conversation - like the fact that more data was flowing across the MERLIN network than the WHOLE of the UK internet. One of the engineers showed me their own self-build multi-gigabit router (because nothing commercial was quite cutting it).

Jodrell was instrumental in Apollo missions. It was the only instrument in the Western Hemisphere that could track Sputnik. It led to the discovery of Pulsars. It helps us map the entire universe. It finds new physics.

The people who work in this field, using instruments like Jodrell,  help not only to literally uncover the mysteries of “life, the universe and everything”, but to create fundamentally new technologies, push boundaries and inspire generations to drive innovation - they do this as a side-effect to their daily work. One colleague wrote 100,000 lines of PERL to help with data processing tasks, so they could carry out their own astrophysics research.  I was part of an international team of about 10 people managing about 1 million lines of Fortran that carried out data and image processing.

While I was there (in 1993-95) I helped to set up their first website. We did this in our lunch breaks, as a means to an end - helping to share information.

Of course it’s not just Jodrell, it’s all the fundamental research that we use to fuel  our innovation, which ultimately fuels our economy, and could help us address the many global issues that we face as a species.

To find ourselves in a situation where this level of innovation is threatened is, at best, atrocious, at worst immoral.

Interesting2008 lived up to its name today. I gave a rather rapid (7 minute!) summary of Acoustic Cosmology. As a few people mentioned afterwards that they would be interested to know more, here’s a few links;

Acoustic Cosmology (Interesting2008 presentation PDF)

Acoustic Cosmology: Summary essay

My own music

Lovely stuff.

STEAD James, age 107 (b. 1901), passed away peacefully in his sleep on Sunday 8th June 2008 on his beloved Isle of Arran. Loving father of Moira; grandfather of Gavin and Sheena, and great grandfather of Thomas. Funeral service 12:30 Monday 16th June at Kilpatrick, Whiting Bay, Isle of Arran and thereafter to Lamlash cemetery. All are most welcome.

This photograph is from 14th July 2007, when he was 106 years old and Thomas was just 3 weeks old.

As the UN sets out its food crisis measures, and setting aside the climate change, population growth and other globalisation issues, this image caught my attention

and made me wonder, what colour *should* it be to start actually balancing trade “balances”.

One very naive photoshop crayon trip later, I coloured in a different perspective.

I wonder what the outcomes would be…

The Long Now essay by Daniel Hillis on “Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine” contains some fantastic, inspiring nuggets, which I couldn’t resist quoting from … they really remind me of conversations at Jodrell Bank.

“… we planned to connect the processors in a 20-dimensional hypercube …”

“In retrospect, if we had had any understanding of how complicated the project was going to be, we never would have started.”

“… he distrusted abstractions that could not be directly related to the facts.”

“Since the only computer language Richard was really familiar with was Basic, he made up a parallel version of Basic… “

“Like many physicists who had spent their lives going to successively lower and lower levels of atomic detail, Feynman often wondered what was at the bottom. One possible answer was a cellular automaton. The notion is that the “continuum” might, at its lowest levels, be discrete in both space and time, and that the laws of physics might simply be a macro-consequence of the average behavior of tiny cells. … If the universe in fact worked this way, then it presumably would have testable consequences, such as an upper limit on the density of information per cubic meter of space.”

“… a typical Richard Feynman explanation … on the one hand, it infuriated the experts who had worked on the problem because it neglected to even mention all of the clever problems that they had solved. On the other hand, it delighted the listeners since they could walk away from it with a real understanding of the phenomenon and how it was connected to physical reality. “

Balancing vast complexity with the ability to genuinely communicate ideas is a remarkable skill, and very hard to find. As someone who takes quite a long time to understand the complexity, I’m eternally grateful to the handful of people I’ve met who can do this. The chasms between science and its representations in business, politics and the media are intensely frustrating, and very hard to navigate.

Has anyone documented best-of-breed examples (like Feynman) to try any cement those bridges? Why don’t we have better communication? We have great examples of interconnected silos, but no real cohesion…

(image from http://www.longnow.org/about/)

Blogs are very useful to gratuitously vent one’s disappointments out into the Ether…

Dear Bicycle Thieves,

As a thief you’ll never consider that you are taking peoples belongings, not just “objects” to convert into cash.

I don’t even consider myself particularly materialistic, but I did love my bike.

You’ve not made me angry - you’ve made me sad. The amount of inconvenience you’ve just caused me is huge.

The bicycle is my main mode of transport - I don’t own a car (never have).

If I could give you the cash that you’ll no doubt make from selling it, I would - it’s worth that much to me. In fact if anyone does help return it in good order, I’ll offer a £100 (no-questions asked) reward.

I love cycling. My bike was fabulous to ride. Very comfortable, light, strong. Front-suspension.

It had a beautiful form and I loved the colour. It weighed under 9kg.

I bought it last year for a substantial sum - £900. I bought my last bike in 1993 so this was a big update (I was lucky enough to have saved enough to afford it at the time).

Of course, I don’t have insurance. Why? Well - at £110/year plus the most ridiculous restrictions on what constitutes a claim makes it wholly unrealistic for anyone who actually rides a bike. At least I know I had a good lock - you had to remove the steel fixings from the brick wall that I was tied to and take the lot. Looking at the Terms of some of the insurers I don’t think this would even have been fully covered.

I have the bike shop searching for another, but they don’t make this one any more - Koga are based in Holland.

A Koga Miyata Terraliner with carbon wheels. Whoever ends up with it will be quite noticeable.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

For (mostly my own) reference, here’s a scan of the printed version

Thanks to Wendy.

Some people are too clever by half.

(to the dopplr, batbit)

Flying with radar, gaming trashes the internet, passively.

The core of dgen, 30th April, 22:54:19 up 370 days.

#reboot complete

A bit like my brain feels.