Nik's Saga

October 22-24th saw Galilean Nights, a cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy, which aimed to have as many people as possible look through a telescope at the Moon and Jupiter.

Well, I'm a little late but I did manage to get a little Moon-watching done this evening. I haven't really had the time or the oomph on the couple of decent observing nights we've had over the last month, but tonight the stars were right and I pulled out the Galileoscope. First light was on the craters of the southwest around Mare Humorum.

There followed an audible exclamation of Wow! Craters!. Yes, I am an astrogeek. Unfortunately there's a lot of scattered cloud so I wasn't able to bag Jupiter at the same time, but I'll try again in half an hour and see if it's any clearer.
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It's been a fairly busy week, with a fairly busy weekend to follow it.

The week was back to normal teaching after project week. Although as I spent project week running around trying to set up research funding applications it wasn't exactly a mid-semester break. Fencing on Wednesday was very quiet, but as I was on the way to the gym an hour beforehand (I've taken to doing an hour of serious gym stuff before the fencing class) I was stopped by a girl who'd noticed the rapier hilts sticking out of the bag and wanted to know if I was involved with this fencing group she'd heard about. Which, of course, I was. The result of this was that K came along to fencing and then joined us for Álfadans this weekend two days later.

Álfadans seemed to go pretty well. We had three visitors from overseas; Their Graces the Viceroy and Vicereine, who stayed with me over the weekend, and Lord C who stayed on site. There was some fencing, some games, some armoured combat training stuff, some dance and a little bit of illumination, as well as a viking feast. Plus the now-traditional tour of the north and soak in the Nature Baths at Mývatn, followed by a very nice meal at Bautinn (ham, mushroom and cheese pasta). I dropped the V&V off at the airport this morning then it was back into work again. I'd quite like another weekend starting tomorrow, please. :)

I was very happy to learn some new illumination techniques - I now have a basic understanding of how to do acanthus borders. Woo-hoo! I foresee a lot of acanthus doodles during meetings in future. They will take the place of Tudor roses, labyrinths and the occasional bit of knotwork, so I suspect I'll get a lot of practice.
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I came across an interesting use for Twitter today - load-testing a new website.

Amongst the assorted people whose tweets I follow is an organisation with over 50,000 followers worldwide. Earlier this afternoon came a tweet saying We've just updated the XXX website and would like your help in load testing it. Please try to connect to it NOW. So I did, and completely failled to have it load.

Which is not, in my view, a big problem. What fascinates me is that clearly someone at XXX has come up with the brilliant idea of using Twitter as part of their site testing plan. I'm very tempted to contact XXX and ask how it went, as it's the sort of thing that might make a short conference paper somewhere.
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Another first: my office whiteboard is covered with Feynman diagrams and multi-coloured diagrams of quarks in protons, neutrons and kaons.

Yes, it's even more science geeky than the quantum computing stuff. The reason it's there is that I've spent the last three and a half days working on a funding application for a Super Sekrit Partikul Fizix Projekt. We've played host to a visiting academic from Germany, who gave a brilliant talk on the Standard Model, the LHC and the LHCb experiment (which is what the project relates to). Best of all, one of my students came along to the talk and was completely blown away by this whole new field that he'd never come across before. When I saw him after the class I told him that if he had any questions he could come and talk to me, which he did today, hence the stuff on the whiteboard.

It's so good to see someone become excited by Big Science for the first time. I'm going to count that as a victory and find him a reference to a nice popular science book on the subject to keep him interested. :)

All of this project organisation stuff meant that I spent Tuesday in a meeting, Wednesday doing the normal tour of the north (memo to self - it's a waste of time going to the Nature Baths and then going back to lecture, as your shoulders will feel as tight as ever at the end of it). Thursday was the first flight down to Reykjavik and an evening flight back for more meetings.

It's been pretty tiring, but I'm feeling quite pleased with myself because I've managed to keep within my Calorie targets even with a lot of eating in canteens and restaurant. Unfortunately it appears that the salad bar in the staff canteen has become a casualty of the kreppa, which made things tricky. I was also reminded that it can be difficult to diet at restaurants if you're not a big fan of lettuce. With our without dressings. Ah well, I survived.

Now I'm hoping for a quiet weekend to complete the last few things I need to sort out before Álfadans next weekend.
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One of the strange things I've missed over here is pads of 200 sheets of twin-punched, A4 narrow feint and margin paper. That sounds silly, doesn't it? It's up there with file boxes as being stationery products that you don't find over here.

Instead we get A4 twin punched wide feint. Occasionally with margin, but if so then the margin is always on the punched edge of the paper. While I can see the logic behind that - no more having to write around the holes - it just feels wrong to me. Entirely a case of what I got used to at university, and a strange thing to suffer pangs of homesickness about, but life's like that.

Today I popped into the new pound stores in Gleratorg (the 289 kr store - slightly under £1.50) - just to see if they had anything new and interesting, only to find that they had pads of 80 triple-punched 8x10.5 narrow feint and margin with the margins on the right side. That's definitely a couple of steps in the right direction, and I'd have picked up a couple if it hadn't been for the slight problem of the three holes.

There was a time when I had three-ring binders. About five of them. Three of these were cast-offs from the St Andrews Computing Centre, were a fetchng shade of grey and had originally contained VAX/VMS manuals but were then refilled with the Commander's Edition of the Star Fleet Battles rulebooks. The other two were white with the logo of the magazine Natural Living, a New Age partwork of which I bought two copies of part one (this elegant storage folder free with part one!) and immediately threw away the contents, to replace them with the Captain's Edition of the Star Fleet Battles rulebooks. Unfortunately I haven't seen any partworks over here with which I can pull the same trick. Besides, I prefer my working folders to be a little thinner.

So I held off and didn't buy anything. I'll have a look in the main stationery store in town on Monday and see if they have anything suitable, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Yes, I know I could pick some up next time I'm in the UK, but I think I have better things for which to save my baggage allowance. :)
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TS Elliot? I didn't vote for him!

While I will admit that I quite enjoyed Macavity, the Mystery Cat I'm not a great fan of Elliot. When I voted, some time ago, I found myself considering four poets divided into two categories, as it were. WH Auden and Wilfred Owen, as opposed to Roger McGough and Benjamin Zephaniah.

I think of this split as poets for reading and poets for listening to. In many ways it's a matter of the complexity of the poem - I prefer to read silently anything with a complex structure or language so that I can return to phrases and roll them about within my head, trying first one emphasis then another, letting the possible meanings and references seep out. Auden definitely sits in this group. Owen? Owen is similar, but sometimes moves into the other group when he comes over all alliterative and onomatopoeic, as in Anthem for Doomed Youth (one of my all-time favourite poems).

Simpler poems, those with a strong rhythm, I'm happier to hear aloud. Even if I read them silently they sound louder in my head than their more cerebral cousins. This is where McGough and Zephaniah come in. Not only are a lot of their works humourous and a little out of the ordinary, but they are bursting with energy. Particularly Zephaniah, whose works in dialect do occasionally make me stop and think if I read them but which work perfectly if I hear them. Try his Talking Turkey and you may see what I mean.

Anyway, here's one of my favourites from McGough. Try reading it aloud. Preferably with a soft Scouse accent, but that's optional. :)

Goodbat Nightman
by Roger McGough

God bless all policemen
and fighters of crime,
May thieves go to jail
for a very long time.

They've had a hard day
helping clean up the town,
Now they hang from the mantelpiece
both upside down.

A glass of warm blood
and then straight up the stairs,
Batman and Robin
are saying their prayers.

* * *

They've locked all the doors
and they've put out the bat,
Put on their batjamas
(They like doing that)

They've filled their batwater-bottles
made their batbeds,
With two springy battresses
for sleepy batheads.

They're closing red eyes
and they're counting black sheep,
Batman and Robin
are falling asleep.
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Yesterday was another of my astronomy podcasts as part of the 365DaysOfAstronomy series, an International Year of Astronomy programme. The link will open the mp3 file, or you can go direct to it at the 365 Days of Astronomy website.

Measuring Time - A 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast.

Edit: I should really have included the links to my previous two podcasts, so here they are.

The Life of a Proton.

Ptolemaic Cosmology - The Universe Before Kepler.
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This year's Ignobel prizes have been announced. I am most amused by the Economics prize:

ECONOMICS PRIZE: The directors, executives, and auditors of four Icelandic banks - Kaupthing Bank, Landsbanki, Glitnir Bank, and Central Bank of Iceland - for demonstrating that tiny banks can be rapidly transformed into huge banks, and vice versa - and for demonstrating that similar things can be done to an entire national economy.

Sadly David Oddsson didn't attend to collect the prize.
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We now have a new craftshop in Akureyri, and I think I like it.

It's where the old AB-buðin used to be - the old 'girlie' crafts shop that did paints and stamps and papercraft and beads, that sort of thing. That closed about a month ago, which was a shame, but I'd watched it being worked down for at least the last three months. It was also not the cheapest of shops, even for Iceland, so I only tended to use it for last-minute stuff and would get planned projects either online or while I was in the UK.

The new shop is completely different. It's a butch craft shop. There's a little paper, but far more in the way of tools for woodworking, silversmithing, leatherwork and glasswork. I had no idea it was there until S at fencing mentioned it (she's into jewellery-making) so I popped along today to have a look. The old place was run by what I assume was a married couple; she worked entirely in the shop but he also did some framing. The new one might well also be run by a couple, based on the general feel of things and the fact that he1 was wearing the most marvellous wooden bow tie. He2 was very helpful and made sure that I had the right diameter of leather thong to go with the clasp fittings I bought.

I don't think I'll need to go there often, but it'll certainly be handy to have somewhere that does real tools rather than papercutters and embossing templates. Partly because I'd bought all of the interesting embossing templates that AB-buðin had in stock, but partly because I'm now looking at trying my hand at something new. For instance, I'm going to have to buy a few things so that I can finish off the silver pendants that E cast in silver for me a couple of months ago. I really need to have at least one of them cleaned up and wearable by Coronation in January. I'll just have to sit down and make a list of the things I need before I go back.
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