I still love this job

We had some "Good News" at work the other day.
Jodrell Bank Observatory has been selected as the home for the Square Kilometre Array Project Office. The SKA will be the world's largest radio telescope and it will be located in either Australia or South Africa. It is a global effort by astronomers and engineers from many countries, so being chosen as the place where the whole project will be managed is quite a coup.
Inevitably, news like this generates media interest...

I was working a Day Shift on Monday when the 'phone rang.
"Control room?..."
"Oh, hello. This is Kate from the BBC. Could I speak to Professor Simon Garrington?"
"I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't transfer you from this 'phone. It's a dedicated line just for the telescope control room. Hold on a moment, let me give you his office number."
"OK.Thanks."
I checked the internal directory and gave her the number, she said "Thanks" again, and that was that...
Until I realized that I'd given her the wrong 'phone number.
"Oh great," I thought. "That'll make a good impression. I wonder if I can ring her back with the right number." I quickly called "1471", got her number and gave it a ring.
"Er, hello." I said. "This is the Controller at Jodrell Bank. You called a couple of minutes ago, but I've just realized that I gave you the wrong telephone number. Look, sorry to have messed you about ,but I've got the correct number now, if you still need it."
"That's OK. I'm almost there now. I should be arriving at the Main Building in a couple of minutes."
"Oh. I didn't realize you were en route. If you park right outside the front entrance, I'll buzz you in."
"Thanks."

Simon met the lady from the BBC in the foyer, so it was about half an hour later that they both came into the Control Room to do a short TV interview about the SKA news.
"This is Kate Simms, from BBC North West News. And this is Kim our Duty Controller for the day."
As we shook hands I said "I'm afraid we've already spoken. I'm the bloke who gives out duff information and wrong numbers."
Honesty is usually the best policy.

Kate Simms is charming. Considering that she was working to quite a tight schedule, she was impressively down-to-earth.and calm. There was no visible trace of the stress or terseness that occasionally reveals itself when media folk are working to a deadline.
She singlehandedly recorded a short TV interview with Simon at ground level, then she lugged all her camera gear up into the telescope bowl to shoot a second interview, before returning to the Control Room to join the crew who had arrived with a satellite communications truck, to prepare for a live interview which was seamlessly dropped into the lunchtime news.

You've got to say it's a good day at work when, not only do,you get to hear some good news, but you also meet a genuinely charming celebrity.
 
SKA Image Credit: Swinburne Astronomy Productions/SKA Program Development Office

Talk to the organ grinder, not the monkey

I wouldn't normally post about something that is so far from my personal experience, but the plight of the people in parts of Japan is impossible to ignore.
To experience an earthquake or a tsunami is hard enough for any nation, but to cope with both of these natural disasters and then have to respond to the threat of a meltdown at  a nuclear power plant and the prospect of an uncontrolled release of radiation represents an exceptional challenge.

As if the effects of this compound disaster aren't enough to contend with, the people who are part of the rescue effort, or trying to get things working again, or trying to find missing members of their family, or simply just trying to stay alive also have to put up with the world's media arriving by the planeload, looking for ever more dramatic things to film for the rest of us to watch on our 50 inch plasma TVs.

Every news crew wants an exclusive, so the temptation to squeeze more drama into any report must be hard to resist and it would take a very special kind of news editor to lead with the facts from a well informed source when they have some grim video footage, accompanied by an apocolyptic commentary by "their reporter at the scene of devastation", to open their news bulletin with a doom-laden splash.

Well I don't trust them. I don't believe that  they can bear to let the facts spoil what, to them, is just another story. I particularly don't trust news-mongers to tell us anything reliable if it involves science.
I don't want to get my news from these monkeys.

If, like me, you want to find out what's really going on at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, you might like to take the advice of Charles Stross, and have a look at the International Atomic Energy Agency site. The situation is clearly presented, without any tabloid melodrama, by people who are a whole lot better qualified to explain this complex and continually evolving situation than a bunch of TV journalists who know more about camera angles than containment vessels.

The Speaking Clock is 4 seconds fast

Yesterday I discovered that the BT Speaking Clock was approximately four seconds fast.
But before you rush to your 'phone to check, remember that it is not a free service. I don't want to encourage anyone to increase the income of BT whilst proving the inadequacy of their service.

I spent a fairly frustrating time trying to report the fault, but as anyone who has tried to report a problem using an automated, multiple choice 'phone reporting system will appreciate, as soon as you have a problem that falls outside the normal options, you are snookered.
Eventually, I managed to negotiate my way through the various layers of, "Press one for Billing, press two for Broadband, Press three if you are losing the will to live...", until I was speaking to a human being.
I knew that she was almost certainly not the right person to deal with this particular issue, but I hoped that she might be able to contact the appropriate department.

It did not go terribly well.

Although she was not actually rude, her reaction when I tried to report the problem was somewhat terse. I explained that I realized it was not really the sort of fault that she would normally be resposible for dealing with, but as there appeared to be no other way of getting in contact with the service provider, I was hoping she could either pass the message on herself or refer me to a more appropriate department.
Her response was, "What business is it of yours to tell us that the Speaking Clock is wrong?"
"Well, it is a service that I'm paying for, and it's supposed to be reliable... and not four seconds fast."
"How do you know it's wrong?"
At this point, I decided to keep it simple.
I could have explained that as I was in the Control Room at Jodrell Bank, I had access to two independant Global Positioning Satellite Clocks and our own on-site Atomic Clock, all of which were telling me that the Speaking Clock was wrong.
Instead, I just said, "I checked it against the Greenwich Time signal "pips" at 9 o'clock, broadcast by the BBC. And before you ask, that was the analogue service, not digital."

Now I have no idea whether this has been passed on to anyone in BT who is interested or capable enough to sort it out, but at 7:45 this morning it was still wrong.

I'll let you know when it's been corrected.

 

The "Station Clock" at Jodrell Bank

The view from my window

I was talking to one of my brothers the other evening, on the 'phone, and he asked me,
"Just how high off the ground are you in the telescope control room?"
When I told him that the Control Room is in a building at ground level, and not actually on the telescope itself, he seemed quite disappointed.
If he'd been the first person to ask this question, I might have been tempted to give him a hard time, but it's not uncommon for people to think that we drive the telescope from a control cabin, perched high up on the structure like the operator of a building-site tower crane.

The working environment is a lot less spartan than that and although the view from the Control Room windows is dominated by the dish, we are a couple of hundred metres away from it.

In the Google-map view below, you can see the Control Building down and to the right of the Lovell Telescope, at the end of the straight path.


View Larger Map

For any astronomers out there, the position of the dish in the Google image would be typical for pulsar observations; generally South and close to the horizon.

With apologies to Father Ted

Here's a splendid thing that might make you say, "Cor blimey, that's smart" or something similar.
Follow this link, and then simply drag the slider beneath the image.

It's on the University of Utah website and there's no way I'd have normally come across it, so thanks to Tateru Nino for bringing it to my attention.

Taking it to the streets

I am indebted to Heather Lyon, for drawing my attention to a feature of Google Maps that I hadn't come across before, on her Blog 'Puicini'

The very idea of being able to 'virtually' walk along a street is simply wonderful. As yet, we have no coverage in the UK, but there are a few places in mainland Europe and most of the USA that have street level images.

If you follow this link, it should take you to sunny Australia, where you can get a glimpse of one of The Lovell Telescope's close relatives.

Where are the Science Police when you need them?

I've got a feeling that I'm soon going to need a new battery for The Tractor. It's doing an unsettling sort of st-stu-stu-st-stuttering thing when I start the engine on cold mornings, and although it is only a shade over three years old, I have a suspicion that items like batteries, windscreen wipers and clutch pedal rubbers are where Land Rover do their cost reduction.

Anyway, I thought I'd have a quick look in my local branch of "a well known national motoring superstore", and see how much a new battery would cost. 

Very nearly a hundred quid, as it happens, but this was not what tripped me into rant mode.  

Take a look at this Specification:

Guarantee: 3 Years

Startup Power: 510 Amps

Type: Lead Acid

AH Value: 68

Bench Charge: 6.8 Amps

Dimensions (LxDxH): 187x127x227mm

Reserve capacity: 125

Weight (kg): 16.69

There are at least two things wrong with this apology for a specification. 

Firstly, it doesn’t tell you the voltage of the battery. OK, most car batteries are 12 volt, but to leave out the voltage is absurd. 

Then we come to the real crime.

“Startup Power: 510 Amps” What the . . . ?

Amps, are the unit of electrical current. If you want to describe power, you cannot use Amps. The unit of power is the Watt.

I’m sure that the value of 510 means something, but it cannot be ‘power’.

This is fundamental science, and there is simply no excuse for getting it so hopelessly wrong.

[RANT ENDS]

On a lighter note, I was tickled to see that there has been a natural history series on TV, called “The secret life of elephants”. Suggesting that something as blatantly obvious as an elephant, could do anything secretly, is just perfect.