Why the BBC is wonderfully British
In the last week the BBC have gone through an exercise in proving they are austere; on radio, 6 music and Asian Network have their heads on the blocks, on TV, purchases of foreign imports are going to be toned down (popular one with the home county conservatives), more wholesome documentaries and drama. I never listened to 6 Music (apart from Russel Howard and Jon Richardson's podcast, which does not include their musical selections) nor Asian Network, but lots of people have spoken out in support of the station and I agree with their sentiment. BBC has its charter because it can provide quality that will suit the minority and majority in different ways. The average listenership for Asian Network is higher (36,000) than Radio Five live sports extra (28,500). 6 music has a higher listenership (108,000) to Radio 7 (100,000) but is significantly more expensive since Radio 7 is primarily repeats of comedy and drama.
I don’t have the money or the energy
"Are you feeling tired and lacking in energy?" the tabloid magazine cover will ask in garish letters, superimposed over a picture of Jennifer Anniston for the 3rd month in a row. But what is energy, in this situation? It sounds like a commodity which can be bought, bartered for or comes free in a cracker. Admittedly it is quite a difficult concept to grasp. Thinking back to my school days it was probably among the most familiar words and also one of the most complicated concepts. From friends who are teachers I gather that it is still something that they are continually looking for inventive ways to describe. So I thought I would give them some ideas.
Gregynog Hall and students who don’t like beer
I've spent this week living in a stately home. Its a stately home which is leased to University of Wales, is freezing cold, has terrible coffee, and smells slightly of dog, not wet dog just smelly dog. These things just add to the charm of the place. The house was given over to be used the University of Wales in 1963 by its owners, Margaret and Gwendoline Davies, the granddaughters of Victorian tycoon, David Davies Llandinam. It is stipulated in their wills that the house be used for educational purposes. The estate is still owned by the trust which the Davies sisters imparted the house to, and the University of Wales leases it, using it primarily as a conference centre.
There are all sorts of strange ghosts of the house's previous existence subtly propping up dark corners. I spend about half an hour playing on a Steinway piano, which was remarkably well tuned, in a medium sized concert hall (which also contains a lesser make of piano and an organ that is badly in need for restoration. There is a Gregynog Festival of Music and Poetry in June every year and has been carrying on since 1930's where big names in the English music scene were often present, such as Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Holst and Britten. This year I noticed that Emma Kirkby, Catrin Finch and the Tallis Scholars are among the headlining acts.
Goodbye Bute Park, hello Howells Highway
I've written about this subject before but it is worth keeping it in your minds because Bute Park is being carved up under your very noses. Those of you who live in Cardiff will have had some council propaganda through your door over the past day or so. This propaganda is called 'Capital News'. There is a competition called Britain's Best Parks, which until Capital News pointed out in a bilingual way (hands up if you are Welsh speaker but read bilingual signs in english, shame on you) I was completely unaware of. Bute Park was awarded the accolade, Best Park in Wales.
Moblin: Netbook OS of the future?
We bought a netbook (Samsung N310, if you must know, in blue) just before Christmas. It wasn't on the spur of the moment, because I'm not that impulsive but it was without a huge amount of preparation. I knew right from the start that I could not live with Windows. Honestly, I don't know how all you PC users don't throw your computers out of windows, into the path of trains, or snap them over your knees; thats how I feel after using Windows for 10 minutes.
I won't be using the netbook for anything fancy, but I wanted to be able to browse the internet, watch BBC iplayer, and possibly dip into the command line for a few bits and pieces (you know its good for the soul) - but only if I absolutely had to.
So the options are:
- I could try to make the netbook into a Hackintosh and install Mac OS X on it. Its quite a heavy operating system and since my needs are not exhaustive probably not worth the effort of fiddling around with kernel patches and other black magic
- Install Linux. There are lots of trimmed down versions of linux. Remember what you see when you turn a computer on and what works behind the scenes are very different. Lots of Linux distros have made very nice graphical interfaces which are specifically tailored to the small screen of the netbook (typically about 10.5 inches)
Linux it is! You can get distros free from almost any breed of linux. Ubuntu is particularly popular. Reghardware have a really good article comparing 10 different versions.
I chose Moblin, which is based on Ubuntu. You download a 600 mb file which installs onto a USB memory stick. Boot up you netbook with the stick in it and bish, bash, bosh Moblin starts up.
Moblin is very different to Windoze or Mac OS X, which I think is a good thing. Netbooks are fun little things which you take with you when you don't want your normal heavy computer, to lug around
It has a bar across the top of the screen which auto-hides where you access your 'zones'. These zones correspond to the different ways you might use your moblin netbook. There is one for 'People' which pools together all your instant message contacts onto one tab, one for internet, networks, battery, your status updates (at the moment these are limited to Twitter and instant message), your profile page and miscellaneous applications (which there is a separate application to help you download more, without any fuss and nonsense). Each zone zips up and down like a little roller blind.
Everyone I have shown my Moblin netbook too has really like the cuteness of the interface and the compact size of the netbook. Amazingly everything worked straight from the installation. No fiddling with patches or command lines.
The only issue I have with Moblin, is battery life. A full charge (once you turn off bluetooth) will last about 1 hour 40 mins. I was really hoping that my netbook would last for about 4 hours, although it was advertised to last for 3.5 hours when we bought it. It may not be entirely Moblin's fault. Apparently there is a BIOS update that can only be done through Windows (glad I kept a separate partition with all that junk on it), which will fix the screen brightness control (the only thing not to work straight away).
Final Word
If you are thinking about going away from Windows for your netbook, definitely give Moblin a chance. It takes 10 seconds to boot up (unlike over a minute for Windoze), takes almost no disc space (compared to the 30 Gb Windoze takes up), is continually developing at a rate that Windoze could only dream of, and its open source (and thereby rather lovely). Its perfect for my needs .... go on, you know you want to.
Star Trek: Not all Black Holes are evil
I love Star Trek. I used to be a proper, full blown, badge wearing, pointy eared Trekkie. Now I am one of those people who can, if the situation demands, cite episode number and obscure species name, without being obsessive. My first introduction to Star Trek was 'The Corbomite Maneuver' - the first episode of the 'original series' (well it was the first to be aired, the first episode was called 'The Cage' and Christopher Pike was the captain of USS Enterprise). We found that a wibbly wobbly alien was really a puppet being operated by the really ugly boy in Gentle Ben. That was first aired in 1966 on US television but I first watched in at the age of 12, in 1990, on UK television. I was hooked from that moment. I wanted to be an engineer like Mr Scott or a scientist like Mr Spock.
In my opinion the new film, directed by JJ Abrams (of Lost and Cloverfield fame) was a triumph. It had all the slightly camp touches that the original series had. The production even managed to make the retromodern technology look believable. However this blog is not a critique of the film. There was a cheeky bit of Cavalier physics, and you know how grumpy I can be about that.
dot Astronomy – Video conference proceedings
Back in December last year, I was lucky enough to be among the participants at the 2009 .astronomy conference in Leiden. Instead of conference proceedings, I made a video of the week because it seemed to embody the spirit .astronomy. And after all, who ever reads conference proceedings....
Have a look at some of the fun we got up to. I haven't included all of the drunken shenanigans
Teapots from Space – the final abduction
Over the past year I have been working on a series of science video podcasts (or vodcasts), with Jon Yardley and Olivia Gomez. There are lots of vodcasts available in the world of science but I wanted to make some which were fun and accessible but did not turn down the volume on the science. The idea of the Teapots from Space came into being as a vehicle for telling different scientific stories. The Teapots are like a cross between a sci-fi B-movie and Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Fortunately all the scientists involved had good senses of humour and didn't mind being abducted!
The story of Bute Park and the money grabbing council
Wednesday 15th October 2008 will go down in the annals of Cardiff's history as the day that the city's council voted to destroy Europe's largest traffic free park.
Bute Park for those of you who don't know is an enormous area of green, beautifully landscapes parkland which was bequeathed to the people of Cardiff by the 5th Marquis of Bute. This is the same benevolent aristo who commissioned the famous architect, William Burgess, to rebuild and remodel Cardiff's castle into a the attractive, swanky, and slighty camp Victorian-Gothic landmark.
Twelfth Night? I don’t believe it!
Last night we went to see Twelfth Night, an RSC production in Duke of York theatre, London. This has to be one of my favourite of Shakespeare’s comedies, largely because it was my first foray into the world of acting. Actually that’s not true, I was a non-singing named character in a school musical called Damn Yankees, and I wrote several skits over the years which I performed at annual comedy evenings. The sort of comedy evenings which probably would not be at all amusing without large quantities of alcohol. Fortunately these were well before the days when poor students could afford video cameras and you were lucky if you even had a phone in your house, let alone in your pocket.
The plot of Twelfth Night is partly about mistaken identity, asking the audience to be generous with their disbelief of ‘identical’ but different gender twins, and partly about gulling an authority figure who thinks he is chocolate. In the warm, open-air, Everyman Summer festival of 2001 I let loose on the amateur theatre going world my Sir Andrew Aguecheek. In this production, my counterpart was James Fleet (who also played the idiot son, Hugo Horton, in the Vicar of Dibley).
Twitterings
- Mikefest drinks party where @telescoper jealously guards the last drinkable bottle - http://moby.to/wjyzxg
- Want to go home in the next 5 mins, the sunset looks beautiful.
- Nicholas Daniel is a *genius* on the oboe. Seriously gob-smackingly impressed. Previously hated that Mozart concerto... @on_radio3
Baaaaaa
- Why the BBC is wonderfully British
- I don’t have the money or the energy
- When Celia was learning
- Gregynog Hall and students who don’t like beer
- Goodbye Bute Park, hello Howells Highway
- Moblin: Netbook OS of the future?
- Star Trek: Not all Black Holes are evil
- dot Astronomy – Video conference proceedings
- Teapots from Space – the final abduction
- And I prithy hold thy peace
Tags
3G network, astronomy, austerity, BBC, black hole, bute park, cardiff council, cards, catch, christmas, chromoscope, computer, dot astronomy, drinking, energy, event horizon, film, gravity, gregynog, herschel, IAU 260, international year astronomy, IYA 2009, language, leiden, linux, moblin, multitrack, netbook, netherlands, O2, Orange, physics, port, public engagement, ravenscroft, religion, review, schwarzchild radius, science museum, shakespeare, singing, star trek, swearing, teaching, theatre, torchwood, traffic wardens, video, Teapots from Space
- Episode 4 - Dr Andy's guide to exploding stars December 16, 2009
- Episode 3 - How to spot Astronomers July 11, 2009
- Episode 2 - Close Encounters with Herschel and Planck May 21, 2009
- Episode 1 - Attack of the Space Junk March 29, 2009
