Postgrad Party

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Another day, another party. This time it was the turn of the postgraduate students. So it was out with Rock Band and the rest, and another set of specially "Jon Purdy proof" quiz questions.

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These folks came first, with a rather impressive score, in spite of the horrid questions.

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One point behind came this crew.

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..and we had three teams that tied for third.

Well done everyone. Great stuff. And I still managed to get away without singing. And managed two ace serves in a row at Wii Sports Tennis.

Open Day Fun and Games

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What a great audience looks like...

Today was the first University Open Day of the season. Some people had journeyed from as far away as Plymouth just to see what Hull has to offer. I hope we were worth the trip.

Anyhoo, we had a really good turnout and thanks to all who came along. I mentioned some good links for those that want to get on and write some games. Take a look at:

http://creators.xna.com/ - free stuff for writing games for PC and Xbox 360

http://verysillygames.com/ - a site of mine for budding programmers and games writers

..and to find out more about our department and student life:

http://www.wherewouldyouthink.com/

Party Time

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Today was the day we had our welcome party for the new first year students. Seemed to go OK, in spite of my quiz. I promise never, ever, to have any more "Simpsons" questions.

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This team managed to win the quiz. Jon Purdy is wearing the "Departmental Happy Lights".

We had free beer and food, Rock Band, Wii Sports and Xbox 360 action. I think it is fair to say a good time was had by all.

Not So Splendid Isolation

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Came in to work today and none of the machines in my office had a network connection. Wah. Anyone walking past my office and glancing in through the window in the door will have seen me sitting scratching my head and looking forlorn. It looked like my little box had broken.

The little box in question provides a nicely isolated link to the campus LAN. It is how I manage to connect my varied and disparate systems to the outside world. I love the idea of a physical firewall between my stuff and everyone else's. Except when it breaks.

Essentially, the lights came on but there was nobody at home. All the network ports were lit up, but not showing any traffic. Trying to ping the device didn't work, and neither did the web configuration. So I tried to reset it. That didn't work either. Double wah.

I was all set to bin the thing, and try to get by with actual links to the real network (which scared me a bit), when it occurred to me that this was a DLink device, and therefore it had a lousy power supply. I opened my "magic cupboard of bits" and, what do you know, there was a spare 5 volt 2 amp power adapter which I'd put aside for no good reason ages ago.

And it works. And I can type this. And you can read it.  Go me.

The New Session

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Today brings the start of a new Academic Year at Hull. There are of course lots of things to worry about. Sorting out all the paperwork that a new session brings, Finding all the lectures on the sprawling campus. Getting on with all the new people that are bound to be there. Keeping up with the material in the courses.  And worrying about fitting in.

But that's enough of my problems.

Welcome to all our new (and returning) students.

Abseil in London

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Today was the day for number one's daughter to dangle from a rope in a good cause (actually the day was a few weeks back, but it was cancelled due to inclement weather). I was actually quite pleased when it was put off, it gave us another excuse for a trip to London.

Today the weather seemed anxious to pay us back for last time, it was the best we've had in ages. After the early morning mist the day was an absolute belter. We had a walk round Oxford Street before the off.

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I liked these reflections.

Then it was time to go up to Guy's Hospital and the main event. The building looked even higher than last time we were there, but daughter gamely went off to do the deed.

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Well, would you abseil down this?

This time there were no hitches, and they even had a height immune cameraman at the top to record things properly.

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View from the top

If you want to sponsor number one daughter retrospectively, (and after seeing this picture you must think she has earned it) then visit here.

Loud Music as a Cold Cure

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I've got a cold. A rotten one. I'm surrounded by used tissues and I'm hoping I've got enough clean ones to last the day. I've fallen back on the usual treatment. Loud Music.

One the way to work I had Beautiful Garbage on pretty much full blast all the way. Great stuff, although some of the cyclists did look a bit surprised as a somewhat distorted rock band seemed to be sat next to them at the traffic lights...

And the best bit? The track ended just as I pulled up in the parking space. I love it when that happens.

Money for Old Rope

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We were in the pub, putting the world to rights, and were talking about the recent turmoil in the stock markets where people who don't actually produce anything have just discovered that you can't do this indefinitely without something bad happening.

Anyhoo, conversation turned to the way that it seemed to be possible to earn vast sums of money by not actually doing anything. I mentioned that I would feel kind of uncomfortable in this situation, in that I would have got paid for no reason.

"But you still collect your paypacket from the university at the end of each month..." said Ian.

Thanks for that.

First BBQ of the Year

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We had our second barbeque of the year today. This is a bit late (the first one was on Monday. Snag is, we have just not had the weather for standing outside admiring the miracle that is fire. Anyhoo, it went well enough.

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Firelighter power

In the field next day they were getting in the harvest.

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I wanted to complain, because according to all the research I performed at the age of five, a combine harvester is red. Not camouflaged. I had a play with the macro lens whilst the burgers cooked.

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I think this is a thistle.

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And this isn't.

Friday on the Road

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Spent today driving. Mostly on the right side of the road. Had to go to London to fetch number one daughter. Her sojourn in the smoke has finished and she now has to come back to Real Life(tm) in Hull for a while.

The M1 was actually quite kind to me on the way down, but threw in a half hour delay on the way back. But we did get back to Hull in time for Friday Fish and Chips.

Off on our hols tomorrow, which will probably be a cue for even more driving...

Mastering Mailing

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All I wanted to do was build up a little mailing list. I had a bunch of incoming mail messages and I wanted to take the address of each sender and use it to construct a list of recipients I could send the same message to. Common sense left me thinking that there would be something in Outlook that would make this easy.

Common sense (at least mine) was wrong.

Outlook let me laboriously create a mailing list from the addresses by hand, and then hid the list in a place where I can't actually find it. No kidding. This is obviously a variant of the highly secure "Write Only Memory" devices that we invented years ago.

Google mail sort of let me do it, but I had to laboriously insert the names one at a time, and it informed me, just enough times to be irritating, that it already knew some of the addresses anyway.

Finally I got the messages sent off, only to find that some of them ended up in spam filters. Such is life.

If anyone knows of a tool or trick that makes what I want to do easy, then I'd love to know it.

Thoughts on the Large Hadron Collider

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Today might be the end of the world. It seems that mad scientists have created a machine that could destroy everything. Or could it?

Before worrying too much about the safety of the experiment, it is worth spending a bit of time on why it is being performed. It is all to do with something called "The Standard Model", which has been created to explain how the universe works.

If you try to hit a tennis ball really hard you have to work hard. This is because the ball has mass, and you need to put in work to make that mass move. You have to work even harder with a bowling ball, because that has greater mass. Take your bowling ball to pieces at the lowest possible level and you find a bunch of particles inside the atoms that it is made of. The Standard Model has to explain how all these particles work together to give you something that behaves like a bowling ball. We can prove the Standard Model by finding evidence of all the particles that it says must be there.

Thing is, one of the most important particles, the one that makes mass work, and makes a tennis ball behave differently from a bowling ball from a mass point of view, has not been observed in the wild yet. This particle is called the "Higgs Boson", after Peter Higgs, who suggested it as a way to make the Standard Model work. Unfortunately you can only observe the existence of these particles at very start of the universe, when things are compressed really tightly together. The rest of the time they fade into the background and we can only infer that they exist by the fact that the universe seems to behave in the way the Standard Model predicts.

So, to prove that the model is right, we have to create the same conditions as the start of the universe by bashing some bits of atoms together where we can look at them. Then this magic particle will appear, we will see it and we will know the Standard Model works. Or it won't appear and we'll know that it is duff. Or the universe will end, and we will not know anything....

The danger is that when you bash these particles together you can't be absolutely sure what you will get. You might compress them so much that they turn into a black hole, and suck everything in. You might create particles that haven't existed since the origins of the universe, and these might combine with everything around them and turn all matter into a new state, which could be grey goo.

The bad news is that since nobody has done this experiment in this way, nobody can really say what will happen when we do it. Scientists are very hard to pin down. They will never say "That won't happen" they will say "That is very unlikely to happen". By "very unlikely" they probably mean things like "hasn't happened in the last 13.7 billion years", but it still rings alarm bells. The weatherman sometimes says that rain is "very unlikely" and then we get wet anyway.

As far as I'm concerned, I feel quite safe. The kind of collisions that are going to happen in the experiment are taking place all around us all the time as high energy particles from space bash into the earth. I find it hard to believe that the people around the device are prepared to risk the future of the universe just to prove a scientific point. And if I'm wrong, nobody will be around to sue me anyway.

Media Rivalry

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Hah. Just as I am basking in the reflected glory of my item in the Hull Daily Mail yesterday, news arrives that Paul Chapman has got an article about the Venus Project in today's Guardian. On page 17, nearer the front than mine.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/sep/09/archaeology

Ah well. I'm on Radio Humberside tomorrow morning talking about the Giant Hadron Collider. I expect Paul will be on Radio 4 on Thursday.....