Oxbridge Physics Mock Interview at Latymer

The idea of the mock interview is for us to have an Oxbridge-style interview with someone we’ve never met before. These took place at Latymer Upper School (on King’s Street), and my interviewer was from St Paul’s Girls’ School.

I went into the interview room and the first thing I was asked was why I wanted to apply to Oxford for Physics, at which point I explained that actually I was applying to Cambridge for Phys Nat Sci but due to an error I was down for Physics at Oxford. He said it was fine and didn’t actually let me explain why I wanted to apply for my course, and straight away asked me to differentiate a pretty standard quadratic. I did it and predicted the next question would be to do it from first principles (which it was). I got as far as the second line (writing Lim(Dx→0){the entire mess before it simplifies}) before he cut me off and asked me whether I knew about radioactive decay. I cautiously said yes, at which point he asked me to write down the equation, then derive it from first principles. I wrote down the ODE, separated variables and proved the formula. He then asked me what I knew about how calculus was conceived. I hadn’t gone to the Newton/Leibnitz Maths Soc lecture but I knew enough about the history (thank you Simon Singh!) to say that they had independently invented calculus at the same time. He asked me what Newton was researching at the time and I said gravity, and was about to go into detail at which point he asked me what I knew about Leibnitz. I confessed that I didn’t know much about him, and he said it’s fine – ‘he’s a mathematician – nobody really cares what they were researching’ (in case readers haven’t already worked it out, he was playing bad cop). He asked me why it’s impossible to say who was the first to invent calculus (which I at first misinterpreted and talked about the different notation which I was going to relate back to something but I now forget) to which I talked about research taking time and that they probably each took lots of time to formulate calculus, and it can’t just be proven who was first by who was the first to submit the paper. He implied it was really about fast communication and he asked whether I knew how research is now distributed. I talked about papers being published online (the arXiv logo jumped to mind though I didn’t mention it) at which point he asked me what scientific papers / magazines I read. I said New Scientist and Scientific American (I could have mentioned Physics/Chemistry Review etc. but I didn’t for some reason), and he asked me to talk about an interesting article I read recently. I started enthusing about this awesome article I’d read in Sci Am about semiclassical gravity – formulating QFT on the hyperbolic geometry of general relativity and possibly proving singularities cannot be formed. Before I could get to the crux of the issue (black stars, repulsive forces etc.) he asked me what I knew about black holes. I started talking about singularities and he asked what terminology I know concerning black holes. I said a list including accretion disks, Hawking radiation, event horizons. He asked me to define all of those. I defined the event horizon, then started talking about an effect which had nothing to do with Hawking radiation (axial plumes coming from the black hole, with an accompanying utterance about conservation of angular momentum and fast spinning) but saved myself just in time and said something about virtual particles being created and destroyed. I mentioned proving virtual particles with the Casimir Effect just before I got to the crux of Hawking Radiation, at which point he interrupted me again to explain the Casimir Effect. I said what I knew – something to do with an attraction between two metal sheets.

At approximately that point he said ‘that’s it’ and that I did fine. He explained he’d been playing [not his words] ‘bad cop’ (by then I’d worked out that either that was the case or he was just in a really bad mood because everything was behind schedule (!)) and that I reacted well under that. There’s a reason I’ve written all that in one paragraph – the interview felt exactly like one continuous rush of me going through almost every bit of classical (and some non-classical) physics I’ve ever come across in half an hour (it felt a lot shorter than that)! It felt a bit like some of the ‘Achilles and Tortoise’ recursion stories out of GEB by Hofstadter in that he kept cutting me off before I could finish one thing, but as it turned out that was the whole point.

At some point he also asked me about the difference between resistance and resistivity (object vs intrinsic material property) and I asked whether I should write the equation connecting them at which point he said ‘yes that might be nice’. He must really get a kick out of playing bad cop! He then asked what causes resistance and what happens to resistivity when you heat something – I drew the approximate structure of a metal and talked about electrons hitting metal cations, and that when temperature rises the cations vibrate more. He asked me to be clearer about ‘more’ – I said greater amplitude and hesitated on saying greater frequency trying to remember the SHM equation for energy (I thought I might have been being ‘browbeaten’ into assuming frequency would increase and in my panicked state I couldn’t remember properly!). I must have said something about SHM and he asked me what that was – I wrote the ODE and said what it meant in words (forgot to write it in x=(x0)sin(wt+phi) form), to which he said nothing and moved on. I can’t remember how that episode fitted in, so I left it out of the mega-paragraph.

Anyways overall, I almost hope my Cambridge interview ends up going like that. I feel I’m now more resistant to intimidating interviewers and have read relatively widely so an interview basically inviting me to talk about what I know about physics until I run out of breath and pass out on the floor (Calvin & Hobbes reference) would be pretty much perfect. He didn’t actually ask me to solve any physics problems, which was not what I was expecting, but hey.

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.

Young Rewired State

I’ve spent the last two days at the Google HQ in London attending Young Rewired State [hit link for more info about event] (#youngrewiredstate), and it’s been nothing short of epic.

And of course, I’ve taken some photos.

The schedule (shamelessly copied from the site) was as follows:

Saturday 22nd August:
10:00 Start
10:30 Planning session
12:30 Lunch
13:30 Hacking starts
17:30 Dinner
18:30 Home (Hacking overnight allowed!)

Sunday 23rd August:
10:00 Back to hacking
11:30 Brunch
12:30 Back to hacking
16:00 Presentations to Judges and Press
18:30 Prizes announced

On the first day we split into groups and started thinking up ideas. At about 4pm we finally settled on our idea: to make something very similar to RentACoder, but much simpler, targetted at talented coders who need experience in order to get a proper job. Here are a couple of screenshots of the final result (click to embiggen).

We decided on a PHP/MySQL project and as luck would have it, I was the only PHP/MySQL programmer in the group! So it was fairly frantic work (solid coding from 10 till about 3 on the last day) and we ran into all sorts of problems with versioning and people overwriting each others’ work in FTP, especially as the CSS people tended to be working on the same files as I was at the same time!

IRC

As with all hack days, IRC was one of the most important methods of communication. Literally everyone had their laptops out during talks, especially during the presentations at the end and there was a fairly constant stream of chatter on the channel. @samhale123 also put up a bot on the channel to tweet things over IRC – we had several hours of fun attempting to overload the script / twitter / the server!

Immaturity with Twitterfall

Google

Google is an amazing place with by far the best decor I’ve seen in a company building. The floor is laid out like the London underground and the meeting rooms are more or less in the right place for stations (with consistent naming). There are ducks on the ceiling and random awesome other bits of furniture / decor adorning the walls / ceiling / floor.

We were also given a load of Google freebies, including Google yo-yo’s, Google cakes, Google water, Google pens, Google notebooks…

This actually was a telephone box!

Google and Youtube Cakes

People

Of course it was a floor full of geeks, which essentially means a brilliant selection of geek T-shirts (I spotted several from ThinkGeek, at least one from the xkcd store…). The mentors (helping out with coding / guiding the groups) were also working in all sorts of fantastic companies; one of our mentors is working at last.fm, one at moo, one with the BBC etc. And needless to say there was a wide array of OS’ – the large majority seemed to be using Macs, those with PCs were probably split 50/50 between linux (mostly ubuntu, one debian that I know of) and windows.

There was also a brilliant selection of judges, including people from Wired (for some reason looks very familiar; came to school to give a talk maybe?), C4, etc.

Some of the judges

The presentations were good fun – there were something like 40 people from the press / outside making the buzz all the more exciting. And we (@workforpeanuts) won the “Wish I’d thought of that” award!

Anyways, this is the first hack event that I’ve ever been to, and if this is anything to go by, I’m definitely game for another at some point. Heck, maybe DEFCON next year… *MANY* thanks to @hubmum for organising such an amazing event.

And I took other cool photos so go for it and browse!

SPS Q Festival

The blogosphere and indeed local media are probably all over this thing, with sentiments ranging from high praise and celebration to bitter complaints about noise pollution and propaganda. But hey, I might as well make my own (very) little contribution.

I have to admit I was originally highly sceptical about the whole thing. The previous day I was dragged straight from Core 2 into a rehearsal, spent half an hour laying out deckchairs, and was immediately plunged into a three-hour rehearsal (about which I had known nothing until I was ‘reminded’ about it that morning) which ended at six. And I somehow managed to survive all that on breakfast: two pains au chocolat (or however you choose to pluralise the French expression) and a cup of tea (lunch was out of the question. Apparently). The information I had, as a performer, received beforehand, also gave me the impression the entire event’s organisation left much to be desired; I was until the eve of the Q Festival unsure as to the colour of the suit I was to wear (conflicting data manifested itself in several different letters I had received). Rehearsals denied me the latter half of Apposition (= prizegiving) lunch which cost me an excellent dessert and also barred me from the chance of helping out with the open day, something I had dearly wanted to do since I had first been told about it. I also hate having to turn down offers to help blow up things (Chemistry); in fact I had to turn down every subject teacher who asked me to help, which was not particularly pleasant. And to cap it all it transpired at about 6pm of the actual day that they had somehow either forgotten or ignored the fact that musicians, like most other people, require dinner. And apparently all the musicians grabbed from the outside world were being paid, including old Paulines, while pupils like me who had been non-optionally drafted in were being treated essentially as unpaid trained monkeys. In other words I was not immensely impressed with the entire proceedings.

But when the actual concert started after a major emergency involving a lost bag, absent music scores and instruments locked in inaccessible (and inconspicuous) locations, I actually started to feel good about it. The crowd was relaxed and the Prokofiev sextet of which I was a member actually went quite well. Interestingly, although I quite literally had a microphone pressed against my head and an enormous high-resolution camera that resembled the Hubble Telescope pointing directly at my fingerboard, I felt much more at ease than playing for a small concert in the Wathen Hall. Perhaps it was the physical distance from the audience, but it just seemed really relaxed and unstressful. Or maybe it was just the champagne. And after that were the orchestra pieces. The incredibly boring passages that we had rehearsed to death in a hot cluttered hall with an insufficient caffeine supply for eternity and a day (i.e. 4 hours) suddenly came alive with the choir and, needless to say, Katherine Jenkins. The entire jubilant feeling of the celebration did start to affect me and wearing a ridiculous, sweaty, unnecessarily insulating outfit with a bow tie and white dinner jacket started actually to feel rather good and for a moment made me feel proud to be a Pauline. There’s for some reason a certain amount of self-confidence that a bow tie and excessively formal suit gives one. And right at the end when the drunk and high members of the crowd thronged around the stage to touch the one and only Katherine Jenkins and scream demands for an encore it felt good sitting on the stage pretending to have played everything correctly.

I have never been involved in anything of this magnitude before, and it was really quite a wonderful experience to take part. One thing that really struck me was the quality of the orchestra. The school orchestra is relatively good, depending on your interpretation of ‘relatively’ and ‘good’, and we tend to work for quite a long time on each piece before it even begins to make sense. The orchestra I was playing in was composed mostly of professionals and extremely good musicians and it truly made a huge difference – each of the five or so pieces was conquered in half an hour of rehearsal, and everyone *actually* played in time (which for the Carmen and Gershwin was quite a feat)!

I was also somewhat surprised by the police presence – while our rehearsal was in mid-swing, three police vans pulled up and a hoard of crowd control officers began patrolling the empty deckchairs.

Anyways in summary:

Apposition: Very interesting declamations, awesome lunch

Open Day: CompSoc was mostly us pissing around with SSH and MacOS’s text to speech functionality. And of course playing games. Chemistry smelt like some combination of pyridine, ammonia and chlorine. I also saw some old friends at Physics (building a trebuchet).

Concert: Brilliant.

Nutrition: High-quality Sodexo stuff for lunch, champagne and white wine to see me through the concert, Tesco pasta as a substitute for dinner, and a nice Stella Artois to conclude the evening.

Oh. That wasn’t brief at all. Never mind.

And finally, a word of apology for lack of activity. It’s exam period right now and I’m stressing over Economics. So you probably won’t hear much from me until 16 June (the day after my last exam). Meanwhile, good luck to all those other unfortunate souls with exams, and to all relevant parties, have a good half term!

More photos can be found here

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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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Techie’s Take on Snow

White grass?

I don’t think there’s anyone out there who needs to be told that the UK ground to a halt today thanks to a freak downpour of snow. But I think some of the stuff that happened today was actually a great metaphor for the current status of technology in the UK as a predominant part of virtually everyone’s daily life, a phenomenon that I hope will flourish in the future.

Denial of Service

Slashdot and Lifehacker tend to inflict DoS attacks on websites and webapps whenever they feature them simply owing to the sheer traffic generated. This morning several sites began to have problems due to similar reasons: thousands of commuters simultaneously looked out of the window, smacked their heads and immediately tried to find a way to get to work … using TFL, subsequently causing the route planner to slow to a crawl for a few hours. The school intranet also managed to get DoS’ed from all the 900 Paulines attempting to discover whether the wonderful terrible rumours of school being snowed off were true. I suspect this reflects the current trend in general load balancing (including non-techie things: apparently electricity usage peaks just after some TV show ends in the UK owing to kettles being put on) and the clear necessity to move computing power to the so-called ‘cloud’ where it can take the strain of flash-flood traffic.

'The Lifehacker Effect' occurs when a site goes down owing to overload from traffic emanating from a Lifehacker post

Social Websites

The majority of Paulines used Facebook as their primary source of information regarding the school snow-off. Sitting there watching my Facebook feed reload every few seconds, I couldn’t help but notice that virtually every wall post, status update and note seemed to be asking and/or confirming rumours about school being snowed off. Twitter was also buzzing with activity which concluded with a jubilant remark from @the_unnameable:

No school. Yipppppeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Eventually intelligence was obtained from the few people who had managed to contact the apparently grumpy porters by phone (and of course sons of teachers) and information was seeded in the form of status updates on both Facebook and Twitter which spread virally and reached most people. Of course, this merely illustrates the increasing reliance on the web for up-to-date information and the power of viral marketing (well, spread of information). As a sidenote, David Smith, a teacher at the school with the foresight to see what is needed, has created a Twitter account for one-way updates from the school: @stpaulsboys.

And of course, since the school was closed for the sake of safety and preventing us from having to brave the weather, everyone was out and about, efficiently organising events through Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone.

Social Website Logos

Cameras

Of course, every such event is a photo op. There was a point when digital cameras were associated exclusively with Japanese tourists, but today during a photography outing with George, virtually every person we saw who wasn’t building a snowman was pointing a camera at something (often with flash still turned on *sigh*). In the age of twitpic and flickr, digital cameras have become day-to-day objects embedded into just about everything which are used as a means to record moments of one’s day. If this had happened just a few years ago, I don’t think anything like the number of cameras I saw today would have hit the streets, as the idea of having to record every precious last moment of one’s life on an SD card hadn’t quite caught on.

My Flickr Photostream

Personally, I ended up with a pretty cool collection of photos (including some of Doc Mayfield & co. having fun), a new way of getting school updates (@stpaulsboys), the beginnings of a raging cold, a free Sodexho school lunch and confirmation that school is off tomorrow as well.

John Colet Statue looking rather cold

London Underground

I’m furious. This is what happened today: I was intending originally to go bowling with some friends at Queensway. The only way to get there was, of course, tube. So I journeyed up there, taking about half an hour, including interchanges and slow walking on my part. No problem; in fact I was early. Next thing I know the location had changed – bowling was booked out and I was supposed to get to Hammersmith (where I had originally started). No problem, I should be able to do it in about 20 minutes. So I thought.

The best way was to take the central line onto the circle/district and go south. I quickly noticed the trains were running slow (I spent about 20 minutes waiting for one southbound at Notting Hill Gate). When it finally arrived I was ferried to Earl’s Court where nothing but fun awaited me. At first lit up signs on both sides of the Westbound platform indicated every single train seemed to be going to Wimbledon. About 15 minutes later I gratefully hopped on a train which was going in the right direction only to discover, about ten minutes later, that it was to be redirected south, to … Wimbledon. After waiting for about half an hour for the next westbound train, customer service decided to tell us all that there had been a ’signal failure’. Which meant there was zilch going from Earl’s Court to Hammersmith by District. Dashing down to the Piccadilly line (I was about an hour late at this point) I was confronted immediately with a motionless closed train and an announcement about the lack of westbound Piccadilly trains. I bailed out of the station and called a friend, asking how to get to Hammersmith by bus. Predictably, such a manoeuvre is apparently impossible without the aid of the tube. Returning to the station I waited a further 5 minutes for a northbound train in the hope of somehow tricking God into giving me an easy journey – hopefully he wouldn’t notice and continue throwing crap at the Hammersmith-Earl’s Court link. Notting Hill Gate forced me to walk a long way to finally get on the Central Line. A barrage of expletives later, I eventually made it to Shepherd’s Bush where I bailed out again and used Bus 72 to get back home. Tricking God had worked.

I had left the house at 6:45 and arrived back home at 8:30 – I had spent almost *two hours* shuttling back and forth between Notting Hill Gate and Hammersmith. I will count this as evidence for God’s lack of benevolence if he indeed exists.

The problem is that there really is no way of getting around London these days. My only real option was to use the tube and being at the mercy of such incompetence is really quite scary. They can’t even spell ‘St James’ Park’ right:

Surviving Black Ice on Bike

I present you with my new God Hypothesis: if and only if God exists, he is far from benevolent. It would appear the legendary Pure Mathematician Godfrey Harold Hardy agrees: “Another example of [Hardy] trying to fool God was when he went to cricket matches he would take what he called his “anti-God battery”. This consisted of thick sweaters, an umbrella, mathematical papers to referee, student examination scripts etc. His theory was that God would think that he expected rain to come so that he could then get on with his work. Since Hardy thought that God would then have the sun shine all day to spite him, he would be able to enjoy the cricket in perfect sunshine” (Toller made me aware of this; quotation taken from here). God, in order to spite me, over the last two weeks has strategically placed black ice in exactly the same spot of road causing me to fall spectacularly on both occasions causing grievous (= light) damage to my elbow followed by my face, as some sort of obscene joke.

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In fairness I shouldn’t be blaming some being who was invented a long time ago and exists solely in books. The real reason is that my bike’s tyres were worn almost smooth by regular trips to Richmond Park over the Summer and Autumn. But as Winter is setting on, a relatively high tyre pressure (pumped up in the hope of improved speeds) and non-grippy road (rather than mountain-biking) tyres are hardly ideal for the conditions. So I decided to do some research on how not to die at the hands of Winter, squashed between a bus and a centimetre of ice. I’ve organised my incoherent thoughts into a list of tips for anyone who is, like me, foolish enough to attempt to overcome whatever God throws at him, including icy road conditions. Since my expertise with ice cycling is evidently somewhat lacking, I’ve nicked half of these from different sources.

Technique

Keep upright and turn slowly

Both times I fell it was because P was too great; too great to be resisted by friction (F). To minimise this you want to minimise the torque created by N and W, i.e. minimise the angle theta: keep as vertical as possible as increased torque increases the effect of P. You also need to slow down (as Dr Zetie has just taught us, centripetal acceleration v^2/r where r is the curve radius and in this case it is provided by friction – if friction isn’t enough to resist the centrifugal force created by high-speed turns, God wins and you fall). I’ll shut up about Physics now.

Brake gently

This might seem obvious but it’s actually even worse than you might think. Friction with the ice when braking melts some of it creating water, which on ice is amazingly ‘fail’ at friction. Bad.

Brake with rear wheel

When you brake, torque makes the bike lean on its front wheels, so if that front wheel locks you’re screwed. Don’t brake with it. Braking with the rear wheel is also great for skidding down icy hills (apparently).

Let the bike get it

If it does come to it and you’re about to crash, a friend of mine advises you just throw the bike at whatever you’re going to hit and either land on it or hit the ground at a much reduced velocity. Not sure how good this advice is, but it’s probably a good idea on the personal safety front. Maybe not for other road users or indeed the bike…

It’s also better to get scrapes than go head-first into a solid object – I’m no expert but I’m pretty sure grazes heal faster than fractures.

Ride the gravel

There tends to be a load of crap at the side of roads, especially gravel which is great for cyclists when the rest of the road resembles an ice-rink. Snow is also better than ice.

Kit out your bike

Use studded tyres

These are the best tyres for grip in icy conditions. Also consider chaining your tyres.

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Lifehacker also did a post on it.

Also, slightly underinflating car tyres helps for low-grip surfaces. Presumably the same applies for bikes, especially for wide tyres.

Dress for the Arctic

Wear an anti-God outfit complete with crash-helmet so you’ll just bounce if you hit the road.

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Hopefully when I try (most of) this next week I won’t die in the process. And don’t blame me if you do attempt it all and still get hit by a bendy-bus after skidding into the middle of a road.

Most of these ideas and images came from here.

Click for original image

The depressing state of transport in London

The transport situation in London has always been a disgrace. But the thing that has caught my attention recently is the sad situation for the few people hard-core (or stupid) enough to mount a bike and brave the streets of London alone and without protection just in order to save the environment (or a few pennies).

On many an occasion I have attemted to get from point A to point B in London within an acceptable amount of time. These numerous occasions have frequently left me disappointed to say the least, and more than a little stressed.

It is always said London is full of history. But nothing can convey the meaning of that better than living in the city itself. Everything about London is Victorian. The technology used for congestion charging (taking photos of cars and getting monkeys to write down number plates) is Victorian and that used for the tube is Medieval.

Let me try to explain what goes through my mind whenever I plan a journey. Walking is out of the question – it would take forever and be about as good for my lungs as smoking ten cigarettes at the same time, not to mention the broken bones from being run over. Driving in London is equally dangerous, this time owing to the risk of high blood pressure, lateness and the associated anger caused, and the occasional desperate idiot on the road and the associated dangers. The tube is out of the question; just listen to the surprised note in the announcers’ voices whenever they declare there is a ‘good service on the District Line’. The only alternative is cycling which I only began considering recently and almost immediately dropped as an alternative since London is built to combine quite neatly all its crap into a single vehicle. The second you venture onto the street you are honked at by some 18-wheeler accelerating towards you like in Duel while simultaneously verbally abused by a cigarette-smoking idiot gesturing at you while overtaking on the inside lane. While you swerve to avoid the greater of the two evils you are run over by a bendy bus and end up in hospital. After you recover you discover your bike to be stolen and receive a fine for swerving into a bus lane, and to add further insult to injury you discover pieces of your bike (or perhaps it in its entirety) to be stolen. Finally you die at the age of thirty of lung cancer. Such is the life of a cyclist in London.

Fortunately I note steps are already being taken to counter this. London is currently being made such a miserable place to drive in that no driver in his or her right mind would even dare to venture within its labyrinth. Such a mess of one-way systems has been created that one might run out of petrol before finding a way out, and the designing of the parking system has been delegated to a person sufficiently intelligent to understand how a phone can be used to run a pay service but not quite smart enough to grasp the idea of actually providing that service (to any acceptable standards). I applaud these changes and hope to see London clear of all traffic by 2012; I guarantee if things continue as they are, this vision will become a reality.