Dec 24 2011

Calendar 2012

The past few years I have been making calendars for Christmas presents, it’s an opportunity to hunt through the photos for the year. Some of these I took, and some were taken by The Inelegant Gardener (Mrs SomeBeans).

00 - Cover - Wood bent around rock

Cover – a slightly arty picture of a piece of wood and a pebble taken on the remnants of a lead mine in the Yorkshire Dales. I wrote about the lead mines here.

01 - January - View from below Schattberg West

January – Skiing in Austria, this is close to Hinterglemm. A short description of our holiday and some more pictures here.

02 - February - Sandstone

February – Sandstone, from the Sandstone Trail which runs from Frodsham to Whitchurch. More enthusiastic walkers cover this distance in a couple of days – we took months!

03 - March - Pussy Willow Catkin

March – Pussy willow catkin, this was taken on the flat muddy slog across the Cheshire Gap.

04 - April - Ploughed field

April – a ploughed field and a tree, I like the texture of the ploughed field.

05May

May – Blue poppy (mecanopsis)  symbol of Mrs SomeBeans’ latest venture: Blue Poppy Garden Design.

06 - June - Astrantia

June – Astrantia, another photo by Mrs SomeBeans nice use of depth of field and my macro lens!

07July

July – Kisdon Force in the Yorkshire Dales, scene of this years summer holiday – we stayed in Reeth.

08 - August - Town Hall Detail

August – a very small detail on Chester City Hall, this wasn’t the most newsworthy event of the month of August. This was.

09 - September - Meddlars and squashes

September – Medlars and squashes, medlars are known as “cul du chien” in French.

10 - October - Stair Hole

October – Stair Hole near Lulworth Cove with Portland in the distance. Down to the South Coast to visit my family over half-term. This is 5 miles from where I grew up.

11 - November - Highcliffe Castle

November – Highcliffe Castle on the cliffs by Mudeford, also taken on our trip to the South Coast.

12 - December

December – trees in the fog and frost, this one is a ringer – I took it a couple of years ago from along the Shropshire Union Canal.

Dec 16 2011

Like distant thunder…

I first felt Beetle around the 20 week mark, he was the very faintest flickering on my wrist, draped across my wife’s belly in the night.

Later he felt like distant thunder, a couple of pulses followed by a slide.

Now he feels like a cat in a leather bag, pushing to get out.

Dec 13 2011

The Peevish Physicist

This post is about the strong possibility of the discovery of the Higgs particle, if you want a more adulatory report on the (nearly) discovery of the Higgs boson you can try here in The Guardian or here, at Nature or just about anywhere else for that matter.

I suspect what has me riled is that it’s frequently said that “physicists” will be very excited about this and it will open up new research – actually it isn’t true: particle physicists will be very excited – many other physicists, not so much. I even heard someone saying on the news that it was ok, there was still more for physicists to do, forgetting the rest of the field entirely. You can see what the rest of physics gets up to in the American Institute of Physics Classification Scheme, PACS. You can see what sort of physicist I am, aside from peevish, here.

It’s also driven by the suspicion that the particle crowd don’t really consider the rest of us to be proper physicists, Rutherford said a long time ago:

All science is either physics or stamp collecting

This attitude maintains, you’ll hear plenty of physicists expressing it, including A Famous One and I can never help thinking that what they really mean by physics is “particle physics”. There are hints of this around the physics departments I know, that feeling of being looked down upon for bringing in industrial funding and working on things which fit in a modest size lab.

The rest of physics will go on entirely as before, we know what the masses of the fundamental particles are and we can make use of them in our calculations, regardless of how we know that mass. The discovery of the Higgs boson would confirm a proposed mechanism as to how particles got their mass.

Impact is a big deal for scientists these days, and CERN pays some lip service to satisfying this demand. The wordwide web is often used as an example, I’ve always been somewhat sceptical of this claim. The web we see has many foundations, some such as the proto-hypertext systems stretching back to the end of the Second World War, network protocols from the seventies and Standard General Markup Language from the eighties. What CERN had was a load of computers on a network with a computer savvy audience who wanted to share quite a lot of information at just the right time. This evening there were slightly wild claims for improved medical imaging and mobile phones…

In truth I suspect CERN is worth the money for the boost it gives to the high tech industries that service its exotic needs, and the PhD students and postdocs it spits out.

Bonus Peeve

“God particle”?!

Dec 10 2011

The Eurozone

There has been much excitement over David Cameron’s use of the veto at the recent European negotiations over rescuing the Eurozone. For people that don’t like Cameron for political reasons these are obviously the worst of times, for a large fraction of his Tory backbenchers these are the best of times.

The problem the Eurozone has is that when the system was set up some members lied through their teeth to meet the convergence criteria which allowed them entry and none of them where prepared to comply with the constraints on their fiscal policy (tax and spending) after the Eurozone had formed. Now, when times are difficult, these shortcomings have become very obvious. The solution towards which the rest of Europe are heading is to treat the Eurozone as a proper national economy with a European Central Bank which takes on the mantle of a national central bank and a degree of fiscal discipline not yet common across the member states. This would weaken the powers of the constituent nation states.

Sarkozy’s comments are quite clearly self-serving, he wishes to portray the UK veto as a result of of Cameron trying to protect the City because that is the French see the cause of the problem as the Anglo-Saxon economic model, not the Greek economic model. Angela Merkel’s position is a little more subtle: she would probably really welcome a UK that stood alongside Germany at the heart of Europe but she has her own problems with the German constitution which limit her flexibility in fully throwing her weight behind the Euro.

I have long been a pro-European and given the choice I would have taken the UK into the Euro at the very beginning, but that didn’t happen because John Major negotiated an opt-out and then Tony Blair and Gordon Brown (more the later than the former) kept us out of the Euro. These days I have my doubts, I can see a Euro zone with a core membership of nations I would trust to run a whelk store running quite nicely to the benefit of all concerned but that’s not the situation we are in now.

This attitude is reflected in the following passage in the Liberal Democrat 2010 manifesto:

The European Union has evolved significantly since the last public vote on membership over thirty years ago. Liberal Democrats therefore remain committed to an in/out referendum the next time a British government signs up for fundamental change in the relationship between the UK and the EU.

We believe that it is in Britain’s long-term interest to be part of the euro. But Britain should only join when the economic conditions are right, and in the present economic situation, they are not. Britain should join the euro only if that decision were supported by the people of Britain in a referendum.

The Guardian has leapt to it’s tired, old Nazi collaborator meme (here) in its description of Nick Clegg. To be fair there have been a lot of tired, old Nazi memes (appeasement being the favoured route of the right and some Lib Dems). It’s somewhat ironic that effectively the demand is that Nick Clegg must exercise a veto over David Cameron to not exercise a veto. For the enemies of the Liberal Democrats they will never be able to do any right in coalition: these enemies will laud the original policies of the Liberal Democrats (which often they did not vote for) and demand every one is implemented, and that the Coalition must fall if these demands are not met.

David Cameron has put himself into a tricky position in part through his own actions – withdrawing from political groupings in the EU, and reforming with only the most fringe characters, and in part through the party he inherits: John Major said he could here the sound of “flapping white coats” as one of them approached. Cameron did make the only decision he could: any treaty agreed would face parliament where it would lose because the Labour Party would side with a large Eurosceptic wing of the Tory party and even if it passed that hurdle it would fall at a referendum.

The Labour Party find themselves in an interesting position though, they cannot say they would support the current treaty proposal. Resorting only to the famous route directions: “If I was going there I wouldn’t start from here” but actually the relationship with Europe has changed little in the 18 months since the general election.

For other nations in Europe, to use the old breakfast analogy: the chicken has an interest, the pig is committed. All the other non-Eurozone countries are on some sort of track to join the Euro – we, uniquely, are not. This has been the case since before the election and it remains the core of our issue. Cameron’s posturing to satisfy his eurosceptic wing is not helpful, and a better statesman would perhaps have achieved some consensus outside the core Eurozone countries but fundamentally this is window dressing and the other members of the EU are already on a different track, they have been for years.

Dec 09 2011

Strike!

Today I am on strike.

The details of why I’m on strike are not particularly important but since I am sure you will be curious: I am on strike because the company I work for is closing the final salary pensions scheme to which I belong and moving me to a career average scheme – I anticipate losing 13% of my pension. You can see us in the news (here on the BBC, here in Motley Fool which I think gives the best detail and here in Professional Pensions – plenty of other reporting elsewhere).

I prefer to think of myself as a research scientist but my company describes me as a “manager”, and in fact one of my roles is “line manager” so I am a little unusual for a union member: I have dealt with the union from the “other side” – I appreciate the local union representatives and the contribution they make to the smooth running of the business.

For me union membership is a question of equality: equality of representation. Should I ever be in dispute with my employer I will be faced by the pointy end of an organisation containing roughly 150,000 employees. Under these circumstances I will need some support and in the UK this support comes from membership of a trade union.

I am a member of Unite, to be honest, I remain a member largely by ignoring their national pronouncements; as a Liberal Democrat I’m fairly sure they will have organised marches outside my party’s conference where they used the word “scum” to describe my colleagues.

Which raises for me the question of whether unions must be political and politically left-wing. Historically the unions founded the Labour party, and the stance of the major unions is now firmly to the left of the majority of the Labour party and therefore most likely to the left of most of the UK workforce. Companies  make a fair crack at good relations with governments of any stripe. Unions, on the other hand, seem determined that the only governments they will deal with are Labour governments and that a Tory government (or a coalition containing Tories) is its sworn enemy. Surely this is not a good thing for a unionised workforce.

I grew up in rural Dorset near to the unlikely birthplace of the union movement in Tolpuddle. Somewhat entertainingly it seems Adam Smith (18th century economist and freemarket idol) was not unsympathetic to the union movement:

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

The Wealth of Nations, 1776

There is a bit more on the history of the trade union movement in the UK here.

I have form in striking, I was a lecturer at UMIST during the merging with the University of Manchester. Although we were never in dispute over the merger, during the process there was a pay dispute. At one point an e-mail came from management asking me to tell them whether or not I was on strike, rapidly followed by an e-mail from the union rep saying “Don’t tell ‘em, Pike”!

The worrying thing is the number of my colleagues who have said how “brave” I am for striking this time round.