New season at the RI

Very crowded in the concourse area of Vauxhall tube station at around 1800 on this Monday evening. Many more seemed to be going down than were coming up which seemed odd, but the tube man said normal for the time of day.

Interested to see that the high value art gallery in Albemarle Street noticed at reference 1 had moved from very low content art to low content art, that is to say art involving triangles and more than one colour. See reference 6.

Goat all present and correct. Not too busy.

Unusual choice of event in that it was in chat-show format, not something I usually go for, and called 'Visions of the future'. One master of ceremonies and four ten-minute speakers. All bar one (Julia Slingo) professional communicators and all bar one (Philip Ball) professional scientists. Question time afterwards fairly much a waste of space as far as I was concerned.

I found the master of ceremonies, Jim Al-Khalili particularly irritating, the science writer Philip Ball slightly less so. The latter was the only one to speak sitting, made sensible remarks about such things as the quest for consciousness (about which I do actually know something), but this last was not enough to blot out the irritation. Fortunately, the three ladies were much better.

Julia Slingo, whom we had heard before she retired, and noticed at reference 7, did well on climate change. She recycled one of her 'nice visuals of clouds swirling around the globe' and gave us a clear statement on the what and why of climate change. I also took away the fact that ice ages happened on a different time scale to global warming and were all to do with small variations in the tilt of the earth's axis relative to the plane of the solar system. Entirely different. Then, as it happens, I was reading in the NYRB just yesterday about the little ice age, perhaps peaking in the 16th and 17th centuries, with one of the contributory factors said to be the eruption of Huaynaputina in Peru in 1600. Maybe Slingo did not have time, on this occasion, for this wrinkle on the tilting orbit story.

Aarathi Prasad gave a quick tour of the state of DNA testing. From which I took away that fact that in fairly short order this testing has become orders of magnitude cheaper and quicker. To the point where there are tools not much bigger than mobile phones, about the size of the tool they use to test my INR level (a warfarin thing) at my GP surgery.

And Anna Ploszajski wound up with a quick tour of materials science. I was very taken with her as a person and she shared some interesting factlets from her field. Some of which we had heard about before, at the talk noticed at reference 8. Some talk of plastic films which could change shape fast enough to behave like the birds' wings needed to make Leonardo's sketches of aeroplanes fly. But no mention of perovskites.

A worthwhile outing, despite the irritations. And when the irritation reached a critical level, I distracted myself by counting the heads in the opposite segment of the (round) lecture theatre. A counting which I found quite difficult, but I was able to be fairly confident about the number being in the high 70's. Perhaps 79. I imagine that with practise one could develop tricks and techniques for doing this sort of thing. Similar in difficulty to counting the floors in a very tall building from (say) twenty five yards away, something else which I try from time to time.

Picked up some sixty year old National Geographic's at Raynes Park, very quaint, to which I shall return in due course.

Passed a couple of unpleasant looking adolescents in the Epsom McDonald's on our way to the Rifleman. White males and unpleasant enough to have left their bicycles sprawled all over the pavement. I did not attempt to do anything about them. Later, from the Riflemen, we saw them leaving the convenience store opposite in a great hurry, pursued by an angry owner with a baton. It did not look as if they had got away with very much. A little later a young lady in party attire stepped out of her partner's car to buy a bottle of something to help the rest of her evening along. No police attendance.

The last such incident was noticed at reference 9. Turned up from the archive after a few false starts by the search key 'railings'.

PS: not much trace left now of the Glazer talk noticed at reference 8. But I did buy his very short book on crystallography and tried to get to grips with symmetry. Time for another go.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/talking-about-physics.html.

Reference 2: https://annaploszajski.com/.

Reference 3: http://www.aarathiprasad.com/.

Reference 4: https://www.philipball.co.uk/.

Reference 5: http://www.jimal-khalili.com/.

Reference 6: http://mazzoleniart.com/.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/albemarle-2.html.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/bragg-and-son.html.

Reference 9: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/cats-roof.html.

Albemarle 1

Last week to the Royal Institute to hear about climate modelling from Dame Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office. I shall report on the talk itself in a second post, here on the wrapping.

Two visits to the Goat, which seemed more crowded than usual, leading to a discussion about whether the Institute's discourses were usually held on Thursdays or Fridays, this one being on a Friday. Or was the presence of sport on television more relevant?

Further diversion on the first visit from an engaging pot-girl from eastern europe, not particularly young or pretty, but engaging. She was supplemented by a couple of large black limousines containing embassy Thais, followed by what seemed like a regular procession of goon vans. Why were they so windy in this obscure corner of Mayfair. And they were supplemented by a confusion about bells. On my last visit I noticed the bells, alleging that they came from Old Bond Street. See reference 2. But on this occasion the bells sounded as if they were coming from the top of Brown's hotel in Albemarle Street. For once, google unhelpful, so I shall have to pay a visit to Brown's when next in the area.

Dame Julia gave a good talk, only slightly marred by some of her visuals being a bit crowded. But she packed a lot of accessible stuff into her hour and a bit. My neighbour was a Japanese lady scientist from the NPL, chat with whom revealed little beyond the fact that I had more or less no idea what the NPL did. The little being the fact that NPL did do some weather & climate related modelling.

The occasion was graced by the presence of HRH the Duke of Kent, looking a lot older than his business-suited lady, presumably a lady equerry, although wikipedia suggests that such are few and far between.

No free glossy magazines turned up on this occasion, but one litter bin did offer an entire but rather tired & cheap looking violin case. Empty. Unable to think of any use for the thing, I passed.

Opposite we noticed that a very expensive looking gallery called Mazzolini had taken a leaf out of the Hiram Butler book (see reference 1), and was offering what appeared to be sheets of slightly textured white paper; expensive white paper which had been nicely framed and displayed. Illustrated above, and although I say it myself, the telephone did a very good job on this interior of a shop snapped through the window, in the dark. The interior was subject to both interior and flash light. The exterior was dark.

Back at Vauxhall we had a chance to take a look at the new tower, the one which was the subject of a helicopter crash just over two years ago. As had been suggested to us, less than 10% of these very expensive flats appeared to be occupied. First thought was the waste, second thought was that if this is what it takes to balance our payments, so be it. If all the foreigners to whom we owe money are content to sink that money into very tall but empty apartment blocks, so be it. Totem poles to mark the fact that we Brits continue to live well beyond our means.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/a-new-sort-of-rubbish-2.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/bells-of-bond-street.html.

Albemarle 2

This post being an attempt to capture some of the talk given by Dame Julia Slingo, introduced on the previous post.

We started off with some very old maps of ocean currents, perhaps from the seventeenth century.

From there we moved to the invention of the Meteorological Office of India in the nineteenth century, the thought being that if we got a better grip on the weather, we might do a better job of mitigating the regular famines. Dame Julia explained that the timing of the monsoons was all important, and was still something that we had not got taped down yet, despite it having been one of her own specialities.

Onto to the Coriolis force, all about the preservation of angular momentum as winds blow around the earth. The explanation on the day was a bit fast for me, but wikipedia plugged the gap.

Then a nice diagram showing the jet stream over the North Pole, which seemed to exhibit a sequence of near stabilities. We we had pictures which throbbed & wobbled a bit, but which held their gross structure for a bit, before moving onto the next structure, the next cycle.

Next up a diagram explaining how the green house effect worked: too much solar radiation in and not enough thermal radiation out. It seems that the basic arithmetic of all this has been known for a long time, with the basic linear relationship between total carbon burn to date and increase in temperature holding very steady. Asking google for images for 'greenhouse effect' gives one plenty of the same sort of thing.

Then some nice visuals of clouds swirling around the globe, one particularly effective one showing clouds projected onto a mercator map of the globe and speeded up to a day every few seconds. The snip above taken from reference 2 is not the same, but it does give some idea.

She explained that most climate models worked by dividing the domain into lots of chunks, small bricks if you will, defining a starting position, writing the rules which say how to move the thing forward, that is to say how, given the state of the brick and its neighbours, to move the first brick from time 1 to time 2 - and then just cranking the handle. In this it was important to integrate the air, sea and land systems; they were inter-related and modelling one in isolation was not the way forward, not for climate research anyway. Note the way the sea and land systems bring in all kinds of boundary conditions, conditions of a sort not experienced by an isolated air system.

She went on to explain that while we had become quite good at simulating weather and climate, forecasting if you prefer, we were not yet good enough. Our models, such as they were, were computer bound rather than data bound, and so the way to progress was to buy them an even bigger and better computer so that they can drop down from 100km squares to 10km squares - or even smaller. Sadly while I am clear about the desire for a bigger and better computer, I am vague about the squares business - with wikipedia adding more detail than I can easily digest. And I have no idea how the size of the computer they want compares to that of those which, for example, support our own nuclear weapons program or the LHC over in Europe.

But I am clear that big bricks or big squares, however cleverly you write the equations describing their behaviour, are apt to smooth things out. Smooth things out to the point where small beginnings which might lead to bigger things are apt to get lost. I associate to the butterfly flapping in the China Sea giving rise, some time later, to a hurricane in the Caribbean. Or some squiggle in the roaring forties tweaking the timing of the sub-continental monsoon.

It was also very clear that global warming is happening, with the temperature rise set to be somewhere in the 2-4 degrees celsius range. Which, from what I recall of the Stern report, would be enough to trigger migrations from the regions worst affected on a scale which would dwarf those which are troubling us just presently.

There was something of a postcript on sunspots, with the sunspot cycle perhaps being about to enter the phase when solar radiation was low, in fact the lowest for some time. The story on this occasion was that while sunspots might indeed help with global warming, they were not going to help enough. With one feature of sunspots being that small changes in radiation from the sun could make bigger changes in climate than one might have expected from the older, coarser models. I wonder how much of all this Piers Corbyn, the brother of our favourite crow and something of an expert on both weather and sunspots, would agree with.

Coming away, it struck me that some of this probably copies across to modelling the activity of neurons in the human brain. Modelling in big bricks might give one the general idea, but maybe all kinds of important detail is going to get lost. And maybe the brain also exhibits the sort of near stabilities mentioned at the beginning; maybe each half second frame of consciousness is one such.

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_force.

Reference 2: https://www.vets.ucar.edu/vg/T341/index.shtml.