Imperial Physics Interview / Religion Debate

Two relatively bloggable things happened yesterday so I’ll make some attempt to reconstruct them here in words.

Imperial Physics Interview

I think I’ll do what Farhan did last year in the spirit of open source (kinda) and say something about my interview.

I arrived at 12:30 in time for the tour after just about managing to find the mysterious room 306 (hidden in a sort of conference room). There was someone who had made it all the way from Poland for this and various people who had made arduous journeys from all over the country, so I almost felt guilty about having had such an easy trip – 20 minutes on the No 10 down HSK. We got given a general walk round and free lunch (always a good thing) and were even (jokingly) offered a pint by the tour guide before our interviews!

The 12 of us with interviews that day were split up into three groups of four – I was interviewed with the three others applying for the four-year ‘Physics with Theoretical Physics’ course. We were first all sat together and had the course run past us – it all sounds pretty awesome with ‘complex analysis’ and ‘mathematical analysis’ both being taught in the first year (GL said once the sign of a good maths course is mathematical analysis being taught in the first year). We all went off for a quick (free) tea session in the lunching area (I was hoping to catch some of the ion trapping people from my work experience but they had probably by then left) during which we discussed relativity and space-time diagrams and the concept of ‘now’ which was pretty interesting.

Then we were all sat outside the room and were called in individually for interview. I was the last (a consequence of alphabetical ordering) and the people who went before me seemed to find it OK – one said she had to sketch ’some graph’ and explain ’something physics-ey’ and everyone seemed to have got two questions – so I didn’t think it would be too bad.

So I went in and immediately saw a Newton’s cradle sitting on the desk in front of my interviewer. Her research interest was quantum gravity and was being shadowed by someone who was interested in explosions and generally breaking things Mythbusters style, which is cool. She didn’t mention my personal statement at all and just asked me why I wanted to do physics (as opposed to maths) and why I wanted to go to Imperial. I said I liked being able to see concepts happen in real life, to which she pointed out relativity isn’t exactly the average real life situation. I said something about being able to touch and feel and see stuff in action, and applying maths to stuff and seeing it work, which she seemed satisfied with – ‘I know exactly what you mean’.

She then gestured towards the pad of paper and asked me to differentiate 2^x. Following standard procedure I just rearranged it into e^xln2 and differentiated that, though I didn’t / forgot to turn (ln2)e^xln2 back into (ln2)2^x at the end. She seemed happy and said ‘yup that’s right’ then asked me whether I knew what the thing on the desk was. I successfully identified it as a Newton’s cradle and explained that each collision is elastic and that this results in the inboud ball stopping and the next one going forwards with the same velocity as the inbound one, etc, with some support from a fumbling demonstration.

She then asked me a question about a ping pong ball and a golf ball being dropped such that the former is directly over the latter from 1m, and she asked me how high the ping pong ball would bounce. I invoked the coefficient of restitution and said let the velocity at the bottom be v. Golf ball bounces, goes up with v. Ping pong ball bounces against this, goes up with 3v. Invoking conservation of energy twice the answer came out to be 9m – which was right, apparently. That’s quite high…

She then asked me how long it takes a photon to get from when the universe became transparent to now. I looked confused and for some reason tried to resist the temptation to ask ‘from whose frame of reference?’, though it turned out that’s what the question was asking. I drew a space-time diagram and made a pretty dreadful estimate of the age of the universe [my estimate turned out to be about the age of the earth; note to self: learn some of these numbers sometime...] and asked for clarification on the question. She said it was a trick question and said it’s about frames of reference, at which point I realised it was indeed a relativity question and said ‘zero’ with a slightly botched-up explanation using t = yt’ [note to self: try to remember which side y is on!]. I guess I should have drawn the thing with the axes changing angle on the space-time diagram but nvm…

At the end she said she can’t tell me whether I have an offer and if so it will be with an A* (I *think* I heard that correctly, and it’s possible ‘further maths’ was mentioned in the same sentence – so that was a bit of a surprise). Apparently the school wrote me a good reference, which is good.

EDIT: should probably also say offers/rejections in several weeks

It was all over by 5pm as promised so I had some time to kill before the religion debate at 6:45 (next part of this topically bimodal post).

Intelligence Squared Debate: Religion

More specifically the motion was “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. Matthew, Theo and I, the proud founders of the SPS Sceptic Society, were once again reunited to watch Christopher Hitchens (Writer, broadcaster and polemicist, author of the bestselling book “God is not Great”) and Stephen Fry (Actor, author, comedian and television presenter) debate against Archbishop John Onaiyekan (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria) and Rt Hon Ann Widdecombe (Conservative MP and Catholic convert) (descriptions taken from the I² page). As always I tried to write some notes – here they are in pretty condensed form. {curly brackets} indicate words external to what the speaker said, e.g. comments. I’ve also abbreviated names slightly, and nothing is word-for-word

1st speaker: Archbishop – For

• General stuff about his father and him and all his family being Catholic {Matthew suggested this sounded like the start of a sermon}
• Questioned what sort of ‘force’ the debate was about. He thinks the ‘force’ is a spiritual message, spread around the world, and the force is what this message teaches etc.
• Comments about the sheer size of the ‘force’
• Said that if you ask anyone in Nigeria they’ll tell you the Catholic church is a force for good {according to WJB if you ask 80% of people in Europe they’ll tell you that only GM food has DNA…}
• Quotes statistics about what {I would describe as satisfied customers}
• {Actually I have to say, it did sound like a sermon}

2nd speaker: Hitchens {to much applause!} – Against

• Started with some witty banter
• Said the opposition should have started with a list of apologies {to much applause}
• Started listing crimes against humanity the Catholic Church has committed {a couple were incorrect I think, and also the debate is the present – lots of his examples were from centuries ago. Still valid though, as we will see later}
• Child abuse – the church tried to excuse itself for it instead of apologising
• Said something about antisemitism {lots of audience tuts}
• Religion goes against the method of free thinking and scepticism
• Quote’s Stephen Fry’s situation {Fry turned out to be a really strong speaker because of this later}
• Talked about the ’sale’ of remuneration – paying for people to pray for you
• {I thought Hitchens would be stronger – he was, of course, as always pretty harsh and blunt, but he wasn’t as fired up as he was in some of his previous debates}

3rd speaker: MP – For

• Claims Hitchens misrepresented the Catholic Church {sarcastic applause from Hitchens!}
• Picked up on Hitchens talking about the past, not present
• Picked up on antisemitism thing
• Quotes WWII – helping Jews
• Quotes christians having to renounce faith to join SS {considering Nazism was pretty anti-christian anyways I don’t think this is a particularly valid point}
• Torture – last time’s standards were different so everyone was guilty, not just the church {Fry and the audience tear this apart later}
• Talks about child abuse – church ‘powerless’ to do anything, magistrates etc. also at fault
• Charity – $Bns given to charity {I wonder how much this is in comparison with the church’s wealth…}
• Hope argument – church gives hope to people
• she said ‘I knew condoms would come up’ – tried to make a joke of it {general audience tuts, someone shouted “how dare you laugh at that!”}

4th speaker: Fry – Against

• Started completely differently from Hitchens – said he’s fine with people believing and seeking enlightenment etc. – shows no hostility towards them
• Attacked MP’s point about past vs present – MP basically said ‘history is not important, so let’s forget about it’
• Talked about purgatory, people paying to bypass purgatory / go to heaven; referenced South Park’s version of purgatory (!)
• Quotes ‘outside the church, there is no salvation’ being used to excuse horrific deeds
• Church commands people to be ignorant, prevents them thinking for themselves
• Catholic Church deems itself the only owner of the truth and bullies people into believing
• Current Pope on child abuse: “We do not have the power of a nation” <- yes you do
• Commented on women’s equality
• Apparently the pope wrote a letter / made an announcement to child-abusing priests: [paraphrasing] “do not talk to the police, keep it secret, talk to me instead”. Pope claimed solution is to stop “homosexuals from entering the church”
• {either Hitchens or Fry made this following point} The church ’sentenced’ one child-abusing priest to ‘a lifetime of prayer’ instead of several months / years in prison
• Church doesn’t need to exacerbate existing gay stigma
• Stephen Fry said: “I find it ridiculous that I am being called a perv by such extraordinarily sexually dysfunctional people” {*huge* applause + laugh, proposition looking really pissed off}
• Pope spread false lie that condoms makes AIDS spreading worse – instead of making useful suggestions
• church obsessed with sex. Comparison with food – church equivalent of anorexic and obese {more huge audience support}
• Proposed solution: pope gives back all of Vatican’s wealth to those from whom the church has stolen {even more audience cheer}

Before the debate the audience had pre-voted thus:
FOR: 678
AGAINST: 1102
ABS: 346

Questions

• Catholic Church broke 5 UN conventions on child abuse – should not be allowed to get away with this
• To Archbishop: Q “which Catholic policy are you most ashamed of?” A “I am ashamed of none of them”
• To proposition: “do you need the Vatican’s wealth?”
• To proposition on torture: “even though the standards of the time are xyz, isn’t the truth of the Church doctrine ‘eternal’?”. Church had changed mind on slavery for example. Seems like church in constant state of limbo. MP says “limbo = ’second light’” – {only huge audience groan in entire debate}

Conclusions

Stephen Fry

• MP groaning: “I knew condoms etc would be brought up” – a bit like a burglar groaning in court “I knew my burglary would be brought up” {audience cheer}
• Constantly wasted opportunity for Catholic church to do something by giving away lots of its wealth – until then, not force for good

MP

• Reason for people having children in Nigeria is they need someone to look after them when they are old {relevance?}
• Says no statistical evidence for condoms preventing AIDS {so pope justified in spreading lies?? Theo and I agree she’s crazy}

Hitchens

• Thoughtcrime argument – catholic church essentially enforcing regime of thoughtcrime

Archbishop

• Basically said history doesn’t matter again {even though point previously successfully rebutted by Fry}
• Said he cares about his own relatives and he is happy for them to be Catholic etc. {urgh. There were two parents who fed their baby a litre of salt to punish it. I’m sure they cared about their kid, they just didn’t know giving it salt would be a bad idea. This point isn’t really valid.}

After the debate the results were thus:

FOR: 268
AGAINST: 1862
ABS: 334 {I think – it might have been 34. Can’t check by adding up since audience size was changing throughout debate}

Stephen Fry was a ridiculously strong speaker in this – even stronger than Hitchens, and despite my weak preconception that the Catholic church wasn’t doing much good, after this debate I am now quite convinced that it’s, if anything, a force for evil. Fry shouted twice (or even thrice) in that – he really is passionate about this topic.

Other highlights include us spotting Derren Brown in the audience and a priest in the audience standing up and totally siding with Stephen Fry.

EDIT: whenever I mention the ‘church’ I mean the Catholic church, just to avoid any confusion. As Fry pointed out, he has nothing against Quakers, for example.

UCL Lecture: Cosmic Rays, Neutrinos & Micro-Black Holes

Yesterday (16th October) I attended another of the weekly UCL science lectures. This week it was given by Dr Ryan Nichol from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCL. It was basically about practical particle physics, discussing experiments such as the LHC and the ANITA experiment (the one with hot air balloons flying over Antarctica). So here are my relatively brief impressions…

The first thing I noticed before the lecture started was the enormous turnout. In fact the lecture was moved from the usual Massey Lecture Theatre to the vastly larger Chemistry auditorium, and even so I ended up sitting on the steps. The audience was largely populated with schools, perhaps explaining the turnout. I also noticed the MIT-style blackboards adorning the front of the lecture theatre.

The talk started with a primer on high-energy physics. This was a pretty standard intro, putting familiar things on a log scale of size, quickly delving into some elementary particle and the ball-exchange explanation of repulsion and attraction in Quantum Field Theory (two people on boats throwing balls to each other), an explanation Feynman would not approve of considering his famous answer to the question ‘what makes two magnets attract’! QFT was elaborated upon slightly in terms of a brief description of the four gauge bosons.

He then moved onto cosmic rays. Apparently it was discovered there were more high-energy particles being detected than there ’should’ have been. In ~1910 Theodor Wulf attempted to detect a difference in muon detection between the top and bottom of the Eiffel Tower, but his instruments weren’t sensitive enough to record any difference. In 1912 Victor Hess did the same experiment, but using hot air balloons instead. As it turned out, as the balloon’s height increased, the radiation detected decreased owing to a decrease in detection of earth-produced radiation due to an increased amount of atmosphere between the balloon and the surface. But after a certain point, the detection rate actually increased, leading the scientists to conclude this excess radiation actually came from space. He also talked about the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina. This is a set-up spanning an enormous area consisting of a grid of particle detectors. If a shower occurs, several of these detectors will be hit at the same time. There are also four telescope stations which can, on a clear moonless night, actually ’see’ the fluorescence caused by the shower particles hitting air molecules (Cherenkov radiation?) and produce a pretty picture and model 3-D of the event. Dr Nichol was also at one point involved in ‘CREAM TEA’ which stands for ‘Cosmic Ray Extensive Area Mapping for Terrorism Evasion Application’. Supposedly this uses naturally occurring muons to map an area – detectors can build up a good picture of dense objects (like bombs) within an area by measuring scattered muons.

He then moved on to talking about neutrinos, invented in 1930 by Pauli to conserve energy. I knew they didn’t interact with much, but apparently the average neutrino travels through 53 light years of water before interacting! Luckily the sun produces 100 Bn neutrinos per cm² per second, and the few milligrams of ⁴⁰K in humans emits about 300 M neutrinos per second. I was pretty surprised by the sheer number of neutrinos being constantly produced – beta decay must be a big thing… He then talked about some neutrino experiments. He mentioned the MINOS experiment in which Fermilab fires a massive stream of neutrinos at Soudan (MN) in an attempt to detect a few. He also talked about the Super-Nemo experiment (interesting name…) which was created to discover whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles through the inspection of radioactive decays. Apparently theory has it that neutrinos can turn matter into antimatter (I’m guessing something to do with beta+ decay), so the discovery that neutrinos are their own antiparticles might help explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter.

The talk moved onto the less well-known field of micro-black holes. He didn’t actually say much about this except that most black holes are several hundred/thousand/million solar masses, but that it’s possible to create tiny ones of only several milligrams. Concerning the media scare about the LHC creating a black hole and eating the earth, he explained that only some exotic models allow collisions in the LHC to produce micro-black holes (which can be subsequently studied by measuring the Hawking radiation produced as they [very rapidly] evaporate), and only the most exotic models allow one such black hole to grow large enough to engulf the Earth. Thinking about it, 14 TeV (now reduced to something like 7 or 8 TeV) collisions are unlikely to do much harm considering the Earth is constantly being slammed into by 300 TeV particles from über-novae and other such awesome events. This actually reminded me of an interesting article I read in Scientific American (my preferred science magazine) which discussed formulating QFT on the hyperbolic geometry of general relativity (semiclassical gravity). Apparently as a star begins to collapse into a black hole, a force gets created which opposes this collapse which grows to infinity when the star tends from above to a certain radius. So according to this article, while singularities are theoretically possible, there is no way of going from a non-singularity to a singularity (a bit like travelling faster than light). So Black Holes are actually Black Stars. All very interesting stuff, though I just don’t know enough about the maths to really appreciate it myself. My only experiences of hyperbolic geometry are from a C4 programme about 10 years ago, and from reading GEB by Hofstadter. Not to mention QFT…

Finally, he talked about ANITA, a project he had recently worked on. I think someone came to Halley Soc recently to talk about ANITA, so this sounded pretty familiar. The idea was to fly around Antarctica in hot air balloons in the hope of detecting a Cherenkov cone of RF radiation produced when a neutrino decays in the ice. Apparently the battery box of ANITA had to be painted half black and half white to prevent overheating / freezing (since fans wouldn’t be very effective at low pressures at high altitudes), so they did an art contest for the best 1/2 black and 1/2 white design! Later they analysed their results and discovered no neutrinos, but did find they had detected 6 ultra-high energy cosmic ray air showers – the radiation was so intense that it actually bounced off the ice and was picked up by their detectors.

The Q&A session afterwards didn’t seem as lively as normal, possibly due to the sheer size of the audience, but overall it was an interesting talk and I learnt about several cool experiments I’d never heard of before. I’m always quite interested in how there’s always lots of good theory in practical experiments (cf. my Imperial work experience – week 1, week 2), so it’s all good.

Afterwards we (the three of us from SPS who went) managed to spend 3 solid hours discussing physics and maths in the regular post-UCL-lecture pub ranging from things from the lecture, CERN and QM to Feynman, Galois, Turing and Boltzmann to Primer (my new favourite film), a suitable conclusion to the evening!

EDIT: Urgh that wasn’t brief at all. I should really stop doing this whole mega-post thing…

Dual Booting Laptop: Win7, Slackware

Bam! School’s in. The inevitable has happened and the most hideously busy few months of my educational life have begun: the university applications term. And to support this packed timetable I reckoned I’d need some pretty decent technological backing. In other words Windows Vista had to go.

I’d been wanting to rid my laptop of this slick but extremely ungainly and messy monster for some time (ever since I bought the laptop actually) – it crashed at a very embarrassing moment at Young Rewired State (plugged into a projector in front of a big audience with lots of media cameras pointed at me…) which was probably the last straw for me, and it’s had reliably frequent networking issues (wifi and ethernet took it in turns to fail). After testing out Win7 on old machines and liking it, I decided to go for a dual boot with Win7 and Slackware – my opinion is that Linux shouldn’t be all about Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian and I reckoned this would be a good opportunity to give a less mainstream distro a try. There was of course a snag: the main reason I held off uninstalling Vista was that I had a setup of Firefly installed (for my freelance work) which had taken literally half a day to set up so I wasn’t too keen on losing that; clearly virtualisation is the key to the problem here. So I created a new VM in Virtualbox and installed Firefly and supporting software (SQL server, IIS etc.) onto that.

So I backed up my data and installed Win7 and Slackware side-by-side. The last thing Vista did for me was crash while trying to resize a partition so I took a chainsaw (= cfdisk) to my HDD and annihilated Vista. OK I’ll admit the reason I deleted Vista was because I screwed up and hit ctrl+c while cfdisk was running … oops. And I somehow managed to forget to install LILO (boot manager) at first so started off with no boot OS which was just a tad concerning … but in the end everything worked out! I’m using a ~100GB NTFS partition for Win7 + Windows programs. Slackware has ~20GB of ext3 and there’s a 100GB NTFS data drive.

Partition Table for my HDD. In hindsight I should really have used a separate partition for Windows programs and a swap partition. Oh well... Click to embiggen

VirtualBox running in Slackware. It's so much more convenient using virtual machines - they can be transferred from Win7 to Slackware or my desktop or even to someone in China; the portability factor is seriously useful

Linux on laptops, especially Slackware, is all about hackery and cool stuff so I’m hoping to implement sometime soon multitouch gestures (which Mac users have) and customise the OS beyond recognition.

Goods

I was also apprehensive that Windows 7 would fail to realise my laptop has a wifi card thus negating the entire point of the operation, but in the end everything works and wifi was set up as part of the installation process; even standby and hibernate which always crashed the computer in Vista work in Win7! Every time I use the OS I find some small but hugely awesome new little feature that makes me love it just that little bit more. MS have got it right this time in my opinion and I hope it sells well. And I couldn’t help but feel just a little smug when one of my friends came in with a new laptop with Vista on it complaining to me about a wifi failure…

Slackware’s also pretty great – it installed literally in about 15 minutes. I was slightly annoyed at first that it doesn’t have a package manager like apt-get or yum (or at least I can’t seem to find one) but actually now I find svn and make/make install more than adequate substitutes; although installing software is now a lengthier process I get up-to-date packages and have more control over installation. Even better (for me), Slackware starts with a command line and the GUI has to be started manually. So next time someone asks to borrow my laptop to check email be warned: you’ll be using lynx!!

Problems

There are still two things I can’t work out:

1. I’ve got all my Virtualbox information in the shared drive and I’ve managed to boot VMs in both OSes. However if I save the machine state in Win7 and then boot into Slackware it doesn’t seem possible to restore that saved state. If I run that state-saved VM in Slackware and save a new state then return to Win7, Win7 restores the state saved in Win7, not the one in Slackware. A perplexing problem – google time methinks.

2. Linux in general is allergic to Intel Wifi cards. Enough said; though I managed to connect through wifi in Backtrack 3 (not 4 beta though!) so maybe if I do a little driver shuffling it might work eventually.

Overall I’m pretty pleased with this. I didn’t intend to do much advertising in this post but I would certainly recommend Win7. At least give the RCs a try – it is *so* worth it. And having two very good OS’s should give me a huge amount of freedom: Win7 does what I *need* and Slackware does what I *want*. Perfect.

Microsoft – Week 2

This week has gone pretty quickly and I’ve mostly been working on the text analyser / summary program. I even managed to take some photos! The week started with @dumbledad (= Tim) showing me some of the visualisation stuff he and an intern had been working on to visualise a book, some of which will appear shortly on a site somewhere… It’s all in the spirit of new and interesting data presentation in the spirit of Information Aesthetics and he sent me a link to some stuff he did on ManyEyes – word clouds (or ‘wordles’) comparing frequencies of words in narrative and speech. Some of the other ones are more difficult to describe but I’ll be sure to tweet link to them when they get published.

The idea of the summary program was that it split the book into sections then compared a histogram of word frequency densities in each section with another histogram for the entire book, then picked out the words which were most likely to be important to the section by choosing the most unusually frequently used ones. The problem with that was the program wasn’t picking out main characters because they were being mentioned all throughout the book. So I was to implement a system to split words into three categories: local to the section, local to the book (main characters) and common to the English language. The existing framework for a two-way local to section vs local to book had already been written so I was to implement the three-way split.

Factor graph showing the model

By Wednesday I’d finished the actual implementation so I started trying to invent a visualisation. My original idea was to have a ’story line’ (no pun was actually intended) along which various threads would undulate, and the further out from the story line they are, the more important they are; think of it as a radial graph – I think I was probably inspired by the RealPlayer (yuk, I know) ‘cosmic string’ visualisation. I built a really flickery version as a mockup which was approved, and since I was by then starting to shy away from WPF I ended up learning DirectX overnight to implement a final 3D non-flickery version of it. After spending a whole day stressing over the edges of the scene getting cut off and finally realising I’d set the camera’s maximum viewing distance ridiculously low, I finally got it to work, and after writing some homebrew bezier curve code it looked pretty good (if I may say so myself); Tim tells me he’ll probably add a screen video of it to the online display of visualisations so … watch this space.

Another excitement of the week was a talk from TrueKnowledge (= TK), an internet answer engine. It’s similar to the famous Wolfram Alpha (= Walfa); however in my opinion it actually has more potential. Walfa throws manpower at writing new code to scrape information from various different sources on the fly which essentially means the more information you want, the more you’re going to need to work. TK on the other hand stores information in an enormous database which has a structure suitable for storing any type of information, and although work is done to ‘crawl’ Wikipedia and other sources for knowledge, it also sources the community for information which means it can gather lots of important knowledge very quickly with minimal effort. It also has awesome features of natural language parsing (ask it ‘what colour are red cars’ for example) and it can also give you a step-by-step explanation of the logical process that leads to its final answer.

The bottom half of the screenshot shows TK's stages of logical inference

It of course differs from Walfa in that it hasn’t got a tonne of Mathematica code behind it – its strengths are in factual and inferred knowledge as opposed to evaluating integrals. It’s currently in Beta and has an API (yay!) so I strongly encourage anyone who has used Walfa to give TK a go.

On Tuesday the weekly Mexican food van appeared – until then I’d never realised quite how amazingly good burritos can be! While we were eating we started discussing presentation of text. The problem is that a conventional layout presents the reader with a formidable block of text interspersed with some images which is difficult to follow and annoying to read since one always has to alternate between studying the image and reading the text. However attempts at producing non-linear presentations of information such as embedding text into the image as tooltips or expandable areas of the image etc. have always resulted in people simply not reading very much of the text and consequently missing out important stuff. The best solution we came up with is using an old method of collapsible clauses, just like collapsible code. For example, if a relative clause which in this case is italicised and relatively long yet somehow doesn’t contribute much to the sentence thus merely adds length and unnecessary information to the text making the ultimate meaning more difficult to discern is considered superfluous to the meaning of the sentence, it could be replaced by a small button that only shows the clause if clicked – such ideas are particularly relevant to German sentences which tend to have huge diversions into clauses before the verb is revealed right at the end. This way readers can quickly get the gist of what’s going on so they may study the image in an enlightened way, then go back and expand the text to get the full meaning.

There are also a few things I noticed about MSR in general. There is a strong sense of company loyalty – all employees seem to use Bing, and everyone I’ve seen even goes as far as using IE instead of Firefox! Using only Microsoft products to perform tasks however did make me aware of the wide range of programs they do produce – they even have Virtual Machine software and an internal proprietary alternative to SVN. I guess it does help the developers of these applications a lot if they have an enormous internal test group: all the employees and interns. There’s also pretty close integration with Redmond (Outlook + Office Communicator + global WAN shares) so feedback could be quite efficiently delivered. The entire place also operates in the spirit of trust – all users have admin rights (necessary for developers anyway) – which is so much better than what is implemented at school: a highly restrictive policy which, despite recent changes for the better, still filters out most protocols (FTP included) and in fact, instead of preventing people from doing things simply makes everything so much more difficult to do. Now I have to connect through encrypted VPN to use FTP…

Anyways overall it was a great two weeks. I enjoyed it hugely, I didn’t need to touch Excel, I didn’t make anyone coffee and I didn’t do any filing (who needs paper anyway? It’s a software company!) – instead I worked on real (and rather cool) projects, learnt some useful things, and made new acquaintances.

In other news, I’m off tomorrow to Cranfield for the Aerospace Challenge Finals – I’ll get to fly (actual!) planes, take lots of photos and it should be another great experience. They’d just better have wifi, though I’m bringing my Alfa Awus (ridiculously powerful) along in case of weak signal!

Dual Monitors

When I noticed a recent burst of activity from a number of the productivity junkies at Lifehacker showing off their awesome desk/cubicle layouts involving about eight screens, and a friend of mine proudly announced that he’d spent his Arkwright Scholarship money on a second monitor, I couldn’t resist the temptation of giving this whole dual monitor thing a go. My desk was crowded to the extreme: two external hard drives were selfishly sitting exactly where I wanted the second monitor, and paper, stationery, food, cables, multimeters, a keyboard, a mouse, playing cards, a tape measure and some old editions of the New Scientist occupied most of the rest of this space; clearly there was a problem. Using some of the ideas from Lifehacker about elevating the monitor and caching stuff beneath it, I proceeded to construct vaguely convex structures from bent acrylic, old books and power adaptors in the hope of squashing cables and other such paraphernalia into the cavities thus fabricated and sitting the 19″ primary monitor on top. This left the secondary (15″) monitor enough space to perch precariously atop a German dictionary.

There was however a hardware problem: the primary monitor was plugged into the only VGA socket available on my desktop, the other being a DVID, and I wasn’t sure whether the RADEON graphics card and XP would manage to work together to split my desktop into two screens. I eventually managed with the unfortunate consequence of a bit of imbalanced latency between the two screens. No biggie…

I’ve assigned two windows permanently to the secondary monitor: Mozilla Thunderbird and a Pidgin conversation window which I’m using for Twitter, and after using it for a few weeks I’m definitely starting to see all sorts of advantages. I don’t need to expend effort to check my email (all I have to do is glance to the left). I can use more than one maximised window at once. I can monitor what’s happening on my XP computer while I’m working on my Debian machine. There are a few untoward side-effects: print screen seems to have partially stopped working; memory usage is generally higher, perhaps just a consequence of having more programs open at once from having more screen space; I get glare from screen 2 while working on screen 1 (which I have subsequently attempted to minimise by skinning thunderbird and pidgin with dark themes); programs are constantly opening in the wrong screen, it’s harder to find the mouse pointer, and there’s this oddity that lasts a few seconds when I boot up:

I have to say though, overall, despite the annoyances, I came out of it with more screen real estate, theoretically higher productivity, and, for me most importantly, a clearer and less cluttered and wire-filled desk. So if you happen to have a second monitor sitting around, I’d definitely recommend going for it and setting it up as an auxiliary screen.

๏̯͡๏﴿

Particle Physics Lectures at UCL

I’ve just got back from a particle Physics Masterclass at UCL. Here’s a brief outline of what we did and what I thought.

After a number of technical difficulties involving the projector, the morning programme began. Interestingly, two of the lecturers were using Macs and the lecturer on distributed computing was running Linux with what looked like a GNOME desktop. Sadly for Linux supporters like me, it subsequently crashed apparently owing to the wifi (so cafe wireless at school isn’t that bad after all), after which he either did a really fast XP install or dual booted to XP.

1100 The LHC, ATLAS @ CERN

Dr Mario Campanelli, a researcher at CERN as I understand from his intro, gave us a brief talk on the LHC and the detectors. We got a brief description of the various different particles and a run-down on how precisely aligned the LHC’s parts had to be (0.1mm), leading to its being underground; why singularities produced in it weren’t going to swallow the earth and KILL US ALL (black holes would quickly evaporate in a puff of radiation), and besides cosmic rays hitting the Earth’s atmosphere create such singularities all the time – we’d be long gone by now if those were the Earth-swallowing type of black hole; the setup of the tubes; and a bit on how the detectors work. There was a lot specifically about CERN that I didn’t know before and that hadn’t been mentioned so I think we all found this particularly interesting.

He also said as a sidenote that apparently CERN would have closed over winter anyway owing to electricity costs, so the schedule wasn’t as badly set back by the ‘minor’ ‘meltdown’ (i.e. like 27 Kelvin) as the media make it out to be. Or maybe that’s his CERN researcher pride speaking

1200 Search for neutrinos in Antarctica

We were then told about the tremendous difficulties faced by scientists attempting to find neutrinos. When neutrinos interact with matter they form a cone of Čerenkov radiation consisting of blue light and radio waves projected in the shape of a cone caused (as I understand) by charged particles moving faster than the speed of light in the given medium. The research brought the scientists to the icy region of Antarctica, attempting to detect radio transmissions caused by neutrinos interacting with ice which carries radio waves well. The search went from water to ice to salt as media for neutrinos to interact with, and as yet neutrinos have never been detected except from two occasions: our sun and a supernova in 1987 (or thereabouts).

1230 Distributed Computing

This was more or less about how to process the 5 PB of data emerging from the LHC while in operation. The talk touched on supercomputers, showing us pics of CRAY supercomputers from ye olden dayes and more modern cloud computing centres. The capacity of distributed computing is enormous, as demonstrated by projects such as SETI@HOME and Folding@HOME.

After lunch:

1430 Hands-on

This consisted firstly of looking at simulated data from realistic particle collider experiments. We used Atlantis (software) and data from ATLAS (i.e. looking at particle traces and detector readings and unintelligible graphs of logs of angles against logs of other angles in some crazy units against GeV) and learnt to recognise different types of W and Z particle decays. I personally thought it was quite exciting and certainly eye-opening to be using the same software as researchers at CERN are using to analyse their data. However, realistic as the graphs and charts seemed and authentic-looking as they were, we successfully identified a Higgs Boson trace which the lecturers did not seem at all surprised about. Realistic indeed…

The day concluded with a video conference with some research labs in the US. As with all video conferences, the quality left something to be desired, but it was interesting if a little disheartening to watch the other side rip apart our conclusions from data and ridicule us as inefficient British people! In the end we ended up discussing in some depth differences in education systems between the US and the UK (apparently they start at 7:30 and finish at 2pm but were envious of our almost 2hr lunch breaks) before the sound quality totally disintegrated and nothing was left but an IRC channel!

Overall, I certainly got something out of the day. Although we didn’t really discover all that much new in terms of the theory behind particle Physics thanks to fairly thorough AS teaching, there was a lot I learnt about the practical side of particle colliders and detectors. More importantly, lunch was quite sublime (surprisingly so for pub food).

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Memory Sticks and Theft

On Thursday I was quite definitively an idiot: the inevitable happened and I managed to leave my memory stick stuck into a computer. Fortunately my school work and I were not parted for long; a brief trip back to the Physics computer room at 4:15 was sufficient to recover it from the floor (of all places). I gratefully grabbed it and made for home. Inserting it into my computer I was greeted with a shock which immediately made me lose almost all confidence I ever had in human (well, Pauline) nature. Opening my school work folder, I discovered someone had deleted all my school work presumably having decided it would be utterly hilarious: the main folder within ‘0-School’ – the one containing the entirety of this year’s work, conveniently named ‘0-Work’.

Here’s the folder structure of my USB stick:

The reason for the ‘0-’ prefix to folder names is to keep them at the top of the list when arranged alphabetically. The main folder in ‘0-School’ is ‘0-Work’ which actually contains a copy of all my school work, the main and most current version residing on my 500GB external hard drive permanently attached to my desktop at home which gets backed up weekly onto a Serpent encrypted 1TB external. In other words, fortunately for me, I lost no data whatsoever. Even when taking new notes in class I copy files from ‘0-Work’ to ‘0-Unc’ (it was supposed to stand for ‘unsynchronised’ but somehow got shortened to that). Rather than depending on synchronising software and risking losing everything from a bug in a program, I drop updated files into that folder and sync them manually when I get home. It is therefore hugely fortunate the folder ‘0-Unc’ must have had a sufficiently innocuous and unimportant sounding name to consider deleting.

What I really don’t get is why people do this. Some students rely entirely on their memory sticks to store all their electronic documents, including homeworks, courseworks and even sensitive information. Loss of a memory stick or any data within may therefore seriously jeopardise their chances of attaining those all-important A*s or As at GCSE and/or A levels. I think people do realise this, and also that it isn’t really all that funny, in which case they are very deliberately (though perhaps without properly considering the consequences) sabotaging others’ chances of success. I’m all for competition and fun (and even some pranks) etc. Just not at this level.

Other than ranting into general cyberspace I guess all I can do is offer some advice to those who wish to protect themselves from being on the receiving end of USB stick crime (a occurrence which I have been led to believe to be ridiculously ubiquitous). These are all obvious solutions but laziness tends to result in a completely unprotected USB stick.

Put your name on the memory stick

This may seem obvious but I have far too often seen memory sticks left in computers which have no markings to identify their owner, and the contents of which contain unhelpful information as to the authors of the documents (another reason to stick a name on your work). Mine for example has a text file within called “This USB stick belongs to Bryant Tan.txt” with the following within:

If found please return to:

Bryant Tan, L8
Tutor: AG
St Paul's School, Barnes, London

Please don't be a bastard and steal it. Stealing is a bad thing; don't do it.

(Cash reward on return - $$$)

For heaven’s sake BACKUP

Backing up is like paying insurance. The differences however are multifarious: you’re entirely in control of what measures are taken against losing data, it’s free (if you have enough storage at home), you don’t end up in court if it doesn’t work, premiums don’t increase with increasing importance of the data etc.

Fasten it to something

There was a time (before the clip broke) when my memory stick was permanently affixed to an elastic keychain stringy thing which is always attached to my belt. That way, if I were to run off and forget about the stick, I wouldn’t get very far.

Encrypt

Depending on the importance / sensitivity of the data, it may be worth thinking of encrypting it. A fantastic program that does the job is Truecrypt. It is capable of 256 bit block encryption using all three of the Advanced Encryption finalist algorithms: Twofish, Rijndael and Serpent, and even supports a quite effective (and, in my opinion, quite a genius) form of steganography. Unfortunately it requires admin rights to run since it mounts decrypted volumes to drive letters so it’s useless for school computers.

Use a cheap USB stick

… because it’s so not worth bringing in a gold-encrusted 64GB memory stick only to lose it.

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My PC Collection: in pictures

I begin to wonder whether I have too many computers at home. At the last count, my family uses four computers on a regular basis, which of course begs the question of exactly what the other 6.5 are doing… I’ve decided to make an attempt to justify to myself my possession of the 10.5 computers living (in some cases not) alongside me, a technophilic teenager.

First of all, the family computer – 5-6 years old, Windows XP. It’s used on a daily basis by my parents, and occasionally by myself. It seems to have become the central computer since all our DAS is connected to it, and it’s the one physically closest to the router (interestingly it’s also the only computer which is linked to the main router via a single cable – just about everything else is connected through an ethernet switch).

My own desktop is probably about 4 years old now and still serving me pretty well – when we bought it, a config with 1.5GB RAM and an Intel Pentium D 2.8GHz processor was pretty impressive. I use it for just about all my Windows software and it’s rigorously maintained, using the likes of TuneUp Utilities and CCleaner. It’s also running XP, arguably the most compatible and programmed-for OS around. I’ve optimised it quite heavily for performance – relatively minimal yet pleasing visual effects and faster, more efficient free software alternatives to default crapware such as foobar, Pidgin, the Mozilla suite and AVG Free.

The antithesis of my desktop, so to speak, is my Laptop: if my desktop is D, my laptop is D’. Optimisation goes straight out the window immediately as it was shipped with Vista and I was too lazy to install something decent, and besides it’s a Toshiba Satellite A300 with 3GB RAM and a speedy Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 processor so it can theoretically cope with pretty much anything I might care to throw at it – including Vista, excluding games. I use it, obviously, for all mobile computing needs, and also as a ‘programming computer’ – it’s the only machine at home with C#.NET installed.

The last of the regularly used computers is my Debian server – the white Compaq. An ancient machine, it boasts about 500MB RAM and a processor whose clock speed is probably best measured in tens of MHz, but it does the job of hosting a WordPress blog with the help of the wonderful stress-reliever XAMPP.

Next to it is the Dell Optiplex workstation (WinXP), which is used for road testing software and port scanning other computers on my network using Nessus in search of security holes.

Compaq: This one runs Windows 2K and is the same model as the Debian server. I tend to use it occasionally to test software in a Win2K environment and experiment with LiveCDs.

Huge server: A wonderful piece of history, definitely worth the ~0.25 square metre of floorspace it occupies. It unfortunately has no HDD and seems to use nothing but SCSI and tape drives (oh the days of tape drives…), neither of which I possess, so only boots off liveCDs – Sabayon Mini and Knoppix are therefore its OSs of choice.

Our old computer was a Time, and was built for Windows 95. That pretty much says it all – the wires protruding from its rear end are testimony to its current function: its PSU provides DC for my electronics projects.

Toshiba Tecras used to look like this…

…and HPs used to look like this. The HP is the only computer downstairs so is used as an excuse for a home entertainment system – it just about managed to install XP so can’t be all *that* bad.

And finally, the half computer: the picture really says it all. I think it was made by Time.

You may now be wondering how rich I must be to own so many computers. Allow me to surprise you – we only spent money on four of the above: my desktop, the family computer, my laptop and the old Time computer (the PSU one). Both Compaqs (including my server) and the old Dell were given to me by the school as old machines when they replaced the computers, my dad’s company also threw out some machines: the huge server and the HP, and my friend also contributed 1.5 computers to my collection – the Tecra and the, erm, box of components.

The Beauty of CPUs

I recently salvaged a couple of old CPUs from some Dell computers which CompSoc was taking apart – they would otherwise have either been left around or, even worse, been thrown away and ended up in a landfill, contributing to the UK’s waste problems. Unfortunately I doubt either of them still work owing to the brutal way in which we at CompSoc treated them during extraction (We didn’t have screwdrivers so brute force was the next best thing) so intend to use them as decoration. However, being me, I couldn’t resist taking some photos of the things before drilling holes for keyring creation.

CPUs are actually very interesting subjects for photos, especially the pins on the underside. The first time I took (ripped) out a CPU, I was amazed by the sheer neatness and beauty of the hyper-regular arrangement of the pins: not a single one is out of line, giving the entire spectacle a certain geometric magnificence; I can see myself spending many happy [seconds] in the future pointing cameras at upturned CPUs playing with focal depth. What an action-packed life I live.