Big Plans
So, over the weekend Rita and myself made a big step. We both sent in resignation letters for our jobs in France! Neither of us likes living in Montpellier and, although Rita’s job is more interesting for her than mine is for me, she wants to have a change of career and is trying to get a place to study occupational therapy in Innsbruck.
For me, my current post-doc hasn’t really worked out the way I wanted it to, and I don’t want to apply for a permanent job with CNRS in France, so I’m going to branch out a bit and try to get some freelance contracting work, either programming or writing (or more likely, a bit of both), spend some time working on open-source and personal projects, and learn to make beer and wine and schnapps!
We’re going to spend the summer at Rita’s parents’ place in Ravelsbach, so as to have a bit of time to configure our brains for a complete change of scene. We have lots of things to do over the summer, and we both have that feeling you get when you’ve made a big decision, that you just want, in some sense, to move on to the next thing. We’ll have three weeks more of work in France when we get back from holiday to clear everything up and get all our projects into a state where they can be continued by other people, then we’ll be packing up and moving here to Austria.
We’re both kind of excited by the whole thing. Even if it does mean that I really really have to learn German properly this time!
Holidays in Austria 1: Vorarlberg
So, we’ve come to Austria on holiday for a month. We drove from Montpellier and stopped off in Vorarlberg in western Austria for a couple of days of mountain climbing before coming here to Ravelsbach, where Rita’s parents live.
The drive from Montpellier through France and Switzerland was fine, and Winnie was well-behaved. We stayed in a village called Hittisau, just over the border into Austria. Navigation was no problem until we actually reached the village itself, which probably has a population of about 2000 people. All of whom appear to be called Hagspiel, which was the name of the family who owned the place we were staying. It took three goes and a phone call to other family members to locate exactly which “Pension Hagspiel” we were booked into. Confusion was compounded when the people at the first place responded to Rita saying “Hello! We have a reservation for two days: we’re the couple with a dog.” with “Are you sure? The couple with the dog already arrived this morning!”. Obviously a different couple with a dog arriving the same day as us at a different pension owned by different members of the same family...
Technology is weird
I was up at our experimental site at Puéchabon the other day, installing a new PC to collect images from our webcam. The previous one had been stolen by some local yokels, along with all the solar panels and the electronics to go with them, and a load of other hardware. The technicians who maintain the site have made a Fort Knox-like enclosure for the instrumentation in our little cabin, and I had a shelf in there to put the Eee PC that collects the images from the camera at the top of our flux tower. (We’re monitoring colour changes in the foliage to see if we can use these not-very-remotely sensed data to detect important phenological changes.)
I got the computer attached to the Ethernet cable and the PoE box going to the camera, connected to the power supply in the cabin, and checked that I could see images from the camera on the live web page view (we’re using a StarDot camera). That all worked fine, so I just needed to set up the regular FTPing of images from the camera to the laptop.
Oops. I’d forgotten to install an FTP server on the laptop. The laptop is running Ubuntu Linux, the camera runs an embedded Linux distribution, and there’s a cron job on the camera that takes an image and FTPs it to an archival server at regular intervals. Of course, the “archival server” in this case is a little laptop in a shed in the woods, and it needs an FTP server. Which I hadn’t installed. And I was off in a shed in the woods, far from an internet connection...
I swore at my stupidity for a couple of minutes, then had a rummage in my rucksack. Yes! USB cable. Two minutes later, I was connected to the internet via my smart phone and a USB tethered network interface on the laptop. Wow. I had to hold the phone up in the air to get decent reception to download an FTP server package, and it wasn’t the fastest, but it was a moment that made me think about how weird our constantly connected world has become. We may not have electricity at our experimental site, but we can haz internets!
Playing with the Simplex Algorithm
I was originally planning to write a quick-and-dirty implementation of the simplex algorithm myself to demonstrate some of the gritty details, but I decided to leave that kind of thing for later, since there are going to be other, less well-known, constraint solving algorithms that I want to look atThe Cassowary algorithm is also a tableau-based algorithm, like the simplex algorithm, so I might spend a bit of time thinking about that in a bit more detail.. There is a Haskell implementation of a simple version of simplex algorithm in the Matrix.Simplex module in the dsp package, although that comes with a comment that says “I only guarantee that this module wastes inodes”, so let’s view this more as a way to play with some interface issues than a serious attempt to implement any kind of constraint solver! The code that goes with this article is available here.
Caterpillarpalooza!
Caterpillars!
We saw something cool on the way to work this morning. It turns out that they’re considered pests in this part of the world, but a five metre string of nose-to-tail caterpillars counts as cool in my books even if they are pests. Apparently, these little critters make nests high in pine trees (we think we saw the nest– looked like a big ball of spiderweb), then troop down the tree and off into the world to make caterpillary mischief of one sort or another.
PhD Attempt Number 2
My second attempt at a PhD went off rather better than my first. It was all done, dusted and examined in the allotted three years, without too much psychic suffering. Even more remarkable was that, in a period of four years, both my partner Rita and myself finished, wrote up and graduated. Without any domestic bickering at all (well, more or less).
Link Round-up
Here’s a rag-bag of entertaining things...
Whatever: John Scalzi’s blog
John Scalzi writes entertaining science fiction books and is also an all-round good egg. His blog, Whatever, has been around since forever (in internet terms). Scalzi has a magic touch when it comes to moderating comment threads: Whatever must be the politest place on the internet, all without threats or banning or rudeness from John. Scalzi’s books tend towards the light and funny, but his blog posts are sometimes more serious. Here are a couple that really stray dangerously close to thought-provoking: Being Poor, Things I Don’t Have To Think About Today.
Mathematical Fiction
Yes, everything is there to be found on the internet. Even a page detailing more or less every work of fiction involving mathematics even tangentially, scored for “Mathematical Content” and “Literary Quality” (although they do need some graphs to show whether there’s any sort of correlation between these scores!). There’s some good stuff on there, and it’s quite interesting just to browse along the “similar story” links to see where you end up.
Structured Procrastination
I’ve never been a fan of the Getting Things Done type of self-help/self-organisation book, but John Perry, a philosophy professor at Stanford, has what sounds like a perfect recipe for making progress on all those tasks that get pushed aside in favour of more interesting things. The key idea seems to be to make a task list with tasks at the top that you’re never really going to do (“Write novel.” “Learn Icelandic.” “Found religion.”) then use your other tasks as excuses to avoid these. That way you can trick yourself into actually doing things. It sounds like a great way to go, and it fits very nicely with the way that a lot of natural procrastinators already work. We don’t do nothing, we just do something more interesting and perhaps less important that what we’re supposed to be doing...
How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy
Finally, here is one of the freakiest things I have heard about for a long time. You think you have free will? You think you’re in control of the decisions you take? Maybe you should think again. Rats infected with the parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which they pick up from cat faeces, exhibit a strange mix of behavioural changes, the most striking of which is that they no longer fear cats. Male rats infected with T. gondii find the smell of cat urine sexually exciting. Result: infected rats get eaten by cats and the parasite goes on its way to explore the next part of its charming life cycle. Big deal, you say. Who cares about freaky rats? The big deal is that T. gondii is a zoonose–it infects humans too. There’s not a perfect match between the parasite and human brains, since T. gondii evolved to jump between cats and rats, but the parasite has enough affinity for human grey matter to cause significant changes in behaviour in some carriers. It gets a little scary when you hear just what those changes are. One is increased recklessness (particularly in males), leading to detectable differences in car accident statistics for carriers compared to non-carriers. Another is schizophrenia, which shows strong correlations with T. gondii status. How weird is that? A parasite that lives in cats and rats may be at least partially responsible for one of the most mysterious and terrifying of mental illnesses. There is still a lot of work to be done on this, but there are some serious people involved in the research, and it sounds pretty solid.
For me, I guess there are two separate “whoah!” moments that come out of this. The first is about the power of evolution. The coevolution of parasites and their hosts is already strange, even before you get to mind-altering parasitic cysts that make one of the parasite’s carriers more likely to be eaten by another. I find it quite hard to get my head around this: it’s like the parasites are farming the rats and cats (albeit unintentionally). The second thing is the idea that schizophrenia in humans may just be collateral damage in the T. gondii/Felis catus/Rattus norvegicus arms race. It would be one thing for humans to suffer the by-blows of some cataclysmic war of the gods, but these are cats, rats and protozoa!
If you want to get even more scary, think about the fact that T. gondii is just one environmental parasite, one of the relatively well-studied ones. There might be dozens of other little suckers shaping you to their ineffable monocellular will. Still think you’re the one driving up there?
Mediterranean Climate Blues...
To compensate for the psychopathic driving habits of the French, the Mediterranean climate is often offered up as a benefit of life here. For those of us who are not all that keen on temperatures in the 30s for weeks on end in the summer, that’s not much of a compensation. However, today, I would offer another piece of evidence that this “Mediterranean climate” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Here’s the swimming pool in our residence, with a nice layer of ice all across it. And yes, Rita is wearing a down jacket, an article of clothing more common on the ski slopes and high mountains than the Mediterranean coast...
Red Plenty
by Francis Spufford
How do you make a book about central economic planning in the Soviet Union into an entertaining page-turner? You do what Francis Spufford did with Red Plenty, a book that is almost impossible to classify, a mix of fact and fiction and dramatised might-have-beens, plausible if not quite verisimilitudinousA little like that word I just invented. narratives populated by a melange of real historical personages and imagined characters.
PhD Attempt Number 1
I spent the period from October 1998 until November 2001 as a graduate student in the atmospheric physics department in Oxford. This all started out swimmingly.
Thirty Day Challenge: The Stats
Over the course of the month of January, I:
published 24 blog articles. Less than thirty, but not a crushing failure.
had 13 days when I didn’t write anything, compensated by two days when I wrote 3 articles and 3 days when I wrote two.
wrote about 17 articles that I would consider “proper” articles, i.e. involving some actual writing. The others were just links or photos.
was ill for a few days, which could be a viable excuse for around 5.5 missing articles, which means that I (morally) only missed my target by half an article. Compared to people who liveblog their gall bladder surgery, I feel kind of small. Maybe it’s not so much of a moral victory after all...
So, was it a useful thing to do? Did I learn anything? I certainly did:
It’s quite hard to come up with substantial and substantive articles every day. I could wiffle on about random subjects without too much difficulty, but things that involve thinking take a bit more time.
The writing, in terms of putting words down one after another, isn’t something I find too hard. (I think I knew that before, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.)
Writing reviews of other peoples’ work (books, papers, etc.) is an order of magnitude easier than generating original ideas yourself. There’s an in-between stage that’s quite good for blogging, I think, where you get some interesting ideas from reading or thinking about something, not substantial enough to turn into a longer piece of writing, but perhaps enough to blog about. That provides quite a nice incentive for working through my enormous literature backlog...
Ultimately, the most satisfying things for me to write are more meaty. I didn’t manage anything I would consider in this category this month, mostly because of the perceived pressure of at least thinking about producing something every day, but I have a few ideas I’m going to work on.
Given the other things that I want to do with my (limited) time, I think a more reasonable goal is 2-3 articles per week, and that’s what I’m going to try to stick with for the next couple of months. We’ll see how that goes.
What about other 30-day challenges? Well, I have one lined up already. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to try to do 20-30 minutes of German study per day. We’re going to be moving to Austria in a few months, and I’d like to be able to do a bit more than order beer and pretzels once we’re there!
Common sense and the well-designed child
I recently read an interesting article by John McCarthy that set me thinking. The paper is called The Well Designed ChildJ. McCarthy (2008). The well-designed child. Artificial Intelligence 172, 2003-2014. Free online version here. and talks a bit about about the old nature versus nurture debate: to what extent is a newborn child a blank slate, and to what extent are human intellectual capabilities intrinsic and instinctual?
To me, the whole question of nature versus nurture has always seemed odd. It’s clear that both aspects are important. We are all limited to one extent or another in what we can do purely by the physical parameters of our existence: as much as I would like to teleport myself to Europa to frolic in the sunless sea beneath the ice, I can’t, and never will be able to. Equally though, the potential that exists in all of us at birth can be squandered, and without education and opportunity, none of us can make of ourselves all that we might. So, we need a bit of both.
Trident Homeless?
Trident is the UK’s independent nuclear deterrent. Except that it isn’t independent and it doesn’t deter anyone. It is nuclear though, so we do have that. Apparently, Trident is our ticket to sit down with the big boys, to strut around as part of the Nuclear Club, to be on the right side of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (the side that does all the shouting about non-nuclear states and quietly does nothing about its own disarmament obligations). Narrow-minded political commentators on the right in the UK regularly pull out this argument as a reason for keeping or renewing Trident, despite its obscene cost and highly dubious (at best) morals. And that tells you more or less all you need to know about international politics at the highest levels. It’s just Playground Bullies Redux. He who has the biggest stick wins.
Trident isn’t independent (the missiles are leased from the US, the warheads, although assembled at Aldermaston, are based very firmly on US technology, the re-entry vehicle navigation software is American, and so on), but Scotland might soon be. Which might pose a tiny little problem for the Royal Navy, since the only places in the UK where they can harbour and replenish their missile boats are in Scotland. Oops.
From the Guardian this morning:
Asked during the referendum debate in the Scottish parliament last week whether the government of an independent Scotland would do a deal to keep Trident, the first minister Alex Salmond replied: “It is inconceivable that an independent nation of 5.25m people would tolerate the continued presence of weapons of mass destruction on its soil.”
I don’t know if it will really happen. People tend to get all serious about nuclear weapons, and there might be some sort of “deal” done, backed by threats, but I honestly love the idea of Alex Salmond wagging his finger at David Cameron yelling “Oot! Oot, ya wee eejit! An’ tek yon dam’ missals wi’ ye!”.
My Freude is quite quite schaddly tonight...
Puéchabon webcam
One of the things I’m responsible for in my day job is a phenology webcam at our experimental site at Puéchabon. The idea of this is to observe colour changes in the canopy of the forest up there, with a view perhaps eventually to replacing manual phenological observations with information drawn from digital photos. In this sense, phenology means things like when flowers come out, when fruit forms, and so on. The Quercus ilex (holm oak) forest at Puéchabon is evergreen, so you don’t get the same spectacular seasonal changes in leaf colour that you see in deciduous forests, so we’re not sure whether this is going to work–the changes we’ll be looking at will be a bit more subtle.
Academic publishing
After referring to a paper in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology in the last post, I remembered something I read on Crooked Timber the other day. Many people have a pretty good idea of how toxic the world of academic publishing is–if you don’t, take a look at this recent Guardian piece by Mike Taylor, who lays out the issues pretty clearly.
But what can individual researchers do to fight the power and toxic influence of the big publishers? Personally, I only submit papers to journals with an open-access policy (the EGU journals like Biogeosciences are good here, especially with their “open peer review” process), and try to encourage co-authors to do the same. But I am among the tiniest of tiny fish in a very big pond, so what I do has an influence barely measurable in pico-SeldonsA Seldon being the commonly accepted unit of historical influence. Difficult to quantify precisely, but whatever the scale, I don’t have many of them.... Now some of the big fish are taking an interest, and have started a movement! You should sign up if you’re involved in publishing scientific results and care at all about the free dissemination of knowledge.