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Scientific surveys are distrusted by many people and organisations. Sadly, due to the fact that surveys are not always particularly well written, this is not entirely without reason.

Many years ago, when working for a health and safety consultancy, I was shown a newspaper article about the enforced closure of a care home after they had failed an inspection on safety grounds, such as their banisters being a couple of millimetres too wide apart. "These people aren't interested in whether or not you've got a loving home," one of the very upset care workers was quoted as saying, "they're only interested in ticking little boxes."

More recently, the IT firm Atos has been the recipient of the outsourcing of decisions on sick and disabled people's welfare, taking these decisions out of the hands of GPs and others who know the welfare recipients, and placing it in the hands of a survey for which you have to score points to be declared unfit for work. LatentExistence describes it in more detail here, and this is one of the results of this procedure. (By the way, if I say anything too critical of this company, my entire blog may be shut down - this happened to CarerWatch and it took a lot of fighting and correspondence to find out that the entire forum, which is a pillar of sanity and support for many exhausted, poor and desperate people, was closed due to a link someone had posted many months previously. But I recommend Margaret McCartney's writings on them, too - sadly the BMJ article I had in mind, and which I believe is linked to here, no longer seems to be available.)

In other words, a badly thought out survey can have horrific - and fatal - results. It can of course also be fairly hilarious to those who have the time and ability to pick it apart, as bloggers did to the BCA's "plethora of evidence" about chiropractic being effective back in 2009.

I'm currently earning my pennies by doing some scientific data entry, which involves a bit of database testing. I'm actually finding it both fun and fascinating, and also discovering just how much thought has to go into writing a survey and its results. A simple "N/A" in a box where an integer is required means that query after query gets generated, multiplying the poor data manager's work. When you create a survey, study, or report, you have to allow for various responses.

The problem a lot of people cite (in my experience, anyway) with surveys is that they "don't give a holistic picture", "ignore the real person", "don't treat anyone as an individual", "reduce important things to tick boxes" and so on. The trouble with this is that a really large survey can't treat everybody, or anybody, as an individual, except for case studies. You need to state exactly what you want to find out, and how much. No survey can find out everything about everybody! And if what people say isn't representative of what's really going on, or the results don't make any sense - that's when you've got a problem.

If your tick boxes make people feel like that, this doesn't mean that surveys involving tick boxes are the problem, it means that the wrong questions are being asked - or, if it's multiple choice, that the wrong range of answers are being offered.

It's a pretty good idea, I'd say, to do a trial run of a survey, and find out where these errors are coming from. No planning can possibly think of everything that will go wrong. So do a practice run, change what you need to, and then have another go. (This is much better than, say, adding a new question halfway through what you are doing - this makes the whole thing a mess.)

Still, I would have thought that even a mobile phone company would have had the imagination to forecast the problems they created themselves with the survey they just sent me. I won't name the mobile company, but they've just offered me a new contract. I've accepted it, because it's a lot better than my current one, and also there isn't a minimum time on it. Let me make clear that they telephoned me while I was at work and I asked if they could call me back another time, which they did, exactly when they said they would - and they did not much underestimate the time the call would take, which was a big bonus. Anyway, next day I got the following message as follows:

MOBILE: "From [X]: You recently spoke to us on [Day X] and we'd like to ask you 6 quick questions about your experience. All your feedback is free."

MOBILE: "Question 1: Was this the first time we've spoken about a specific problem or query? Reply with Y for yes and N for no."

So far so good . . .

ME: "Y".

MOBILE: "Question 2 of 6: Is your query or problem now resolved? Reply with Y for yes and N for no."

ME: "Y."

First problem. I thought I'd better add to that . . .

ME: "Except I didn't have a problem/query. [MOBILE COMPANY] did."

MOBILE: "Error: We were unable to recognise your response. Please enter a number between 0 and 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excellent'."

MOBILE: "Question 3 of 6: That's good to hear. Overall how would you rate our advisor on a scale of 0 to 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excellent'?"

I know a few people who work for these companies and know that if you answer anything other than the top number, they get a bollocking and lose their commission. (Mobile companies are not always kind to their staff - I recommend a read of this experience Dean had with a different one.) So although it was annoying being rung up and I had to listen to the standard waffle, the guy was a good listener and answered - even anticipated - all my questions. So I decided to be generous.

ME: "9."

MOBILE: "Question 4 of 6. How would you rate the time it took before you spoke to an advisor where 0 is poor and 9 is excellent?"

I think by now it's clear that they have started off this survey by making a very specific assumption which needed clearing up before questions and answers could helpfully continue.

ME: "N/A. I didn't call you."

MOBILE: "Error: We were unable to recognise your response. Please enter a number between 0 and 9 where 0 is 'poor' and 9 is 'excelent'."

ME: "'Excellent' is spelled with two 'L's. Please take a literacy course."

MOBILE: "Unfortunately we are unable to recognize the response in your message. Please try again at another time."

By not allowing for a few very simple different situations, or employing a proofreader, or even allowing a Ctrl-C Ctrl-V to be used in designing error messages, this company has messed up its own surveying ability and wasted its own time and money as well as mine.

And this is why it's important to learn how to design a survey before you do one.

36 Symptoms of Science Geekery

Science geekery is a deadly disease, not least because it makes you so happy you never want to give it up.

These are 36 of the symptoms I've encountered - and I don't think this is all. Most are mine; a few are other people's. What are yours?

1. You look for constellations in freckles and moles on your skin. And your boyfriend's/girlfriend's - and point them out when you find them. They may be a little disturbed, which is saddening because you mean it as a compliment.

2. One of the most upsetting and bewildering things you can hear is the sentiment that science takes the beauty or poetry out of something.

3. You start quoting Tom Lehrer at length when drunk. Or, indeed, sober and having a good time.

4. Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot makes you well up.

5. You have a mental list of all the science things you didn't understand in school. If you're organised you read up on them. If you're not, you just feel annoyed about them and keep planning to read up on them some day.

6. You have your own mental list of what you would put on the science curriculum, if given dictatorial powers!

7. Bookshops are incredibly dangerous places to enter. (For your bank account, not your physical self - unless you do your back in, of course, or indeed sit on the floor and get so absorbed reading something that somebody trips over you.)

8. Once shy and lonely, you suddenly become a very talkative and enthusiastic person!

9. Other people's responses to this vary. They might remark, "You get all animated!" or "You light up when you talk about . . .". However, more commonly they'll object to "these things you just blurt out" as if you've said something exceedingly offensive. Other remarks may include: "You're very passionate about . . ." in a telling-off sort of voice; "You're obviously really shy. Only shy people talk that much all in one go" and "You really remind me of my autistic relative/friend X" or gently take it upon themselves to diagnose autism or Aspergers. You tell them that is very interesting.

10. Fellow geeks are always to be cherished.

11. Your Facebook wall shows rather a lot of links to APOD pictures. You can't help but hope that some of the desperately boring people you can't acceptably unfriend will be even a little inspired. They aren't.

12. Stories such as the idea of "open science" (1st chapter here!) or the children's bumblebee paper put a silly grin on your face for hours.

13. You sneak onto a geeky website, or at least Twitter, when clothes, make-up, alcohol and X-factor become a topic of intense and opinionated discussion in the workplace. Or, if forced to participate, you come out with all the conversation-stoppers.

14. This makes perfect sense!

15. When your friends discuss the inevitabilities of nuclear war or the futility of trying to feed the starving or combat corruption, or treat as completely reasonable the idea of no country agreeing to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions until everyone else does (because it would be bad for their economy), science seems the obvious solution. For example, putting more money into science will drive our renewable energy, and then when everyone else runs out of fossil fuels we'll be in the lead. "Yes," they shrug, meaning "If only", or less.

16. Seeing the cruelty and stupidity of a lot of the world is, every so often, a horrific shock - because you've been concentrating on science, which is so beautiful and makes you so happy.

17. Indeed you feel that more science for everyone would make the world a much happier place.

18. Glow-in-the-dark stars are a very good idea.

19. Remarks such as "But we didn't know how electricity worked for ages, but we still used it" and "We used to think the world was flat" (usually said as excuses for thinking something unscientific and being too lazy to listen to reason) drive you up the wall.

20. When someone claims that some alternative remedy works just fine, you immediately prepare a firestorm of questions about studies, evidence, the placebo effect, and the mechanism (sadly, that usually has to remain inside your head - unless you're a lot braver and more patient than I am).

21. It deeply upsets you to see an inaccurate scientific article.

22. The best clothes and other accessories are those containing an excellent science slogan/joke/diagram.

23. After years, when young, of being personally desperately committed to all your arguments, you grow a virtue of detaching yourself from your scientific work, in order to look at it properly. That ties in with the dry, detached language of scientific journals - although you can't help agreeing they would be much more accessible if written in more ordinary language. (Now if only there was a job requiring that type of translation . . .)

24. You look back on the times you weren't doing science and ask yourself, "What was I doing all that time?"

25. The world becomes full of toys. Clouds change shape before your eyes, whiteboards invite you to write a science joke, broken machinery is there to be pulled apart, Lego is perfectly acceptable at all ages, and your glasses (if you wear them) turn the edges of everything red and blue. And when you arrive early for a meeting, and are conveniently there to help pour the coffee, you first arrange all the polystyrene cups (which you disapprove of, because they're not recyclable, although you wonder if you ought to check that is still true - but cool mugs are still better) into the shapes of a barred spiral, an unbarred spiral and an elliptical.

26. You then excuse yourself by explaining that, now you are into science, the world is suddenly full of toys, and everyone around you grins and nods, because they all feel the same way!

27. You see galaxies in your coffee. And everyday objects in galaxies. And point them out.

28. You can't help but check for flawed methodology in every claim and every study you see. And you see a lot.

29. Organisations or groups whose principles support sometimes see you as the enemy when you point out the flaws in their methods or reasoning. This is tragic, because you want them to produce the best data and arguments.

30. You are occasionally reminded that you have forgotten to do something important, such as turning off the oven, because you were so busy thinking about supernovae or similar.

31. When you suddenly understand a concept or equation you began struggling with a long time ago, it's difficult not to jump or dance. You have to settle for texting your geeky friends or blogging about it later.

32. Sooner or later, you will come across someone who feels that there is something childish about facts and being "right or wrong". This is a lot to do with their own maturity and having learnt to compromise and respect everyone's opinion. You think about this and go through a long thought process concluding that your own maturity about knowledge has passed various stages. As a child, for instance, you might have thought in black and white, and that is what this person usually thinks you are doing. As a teenager, you learnt to think like them (and some people never get beyond that stage). As a science geek, the maturity is error bars, acknowledged uncertainties, and a healthy respect for facts which you know can never be entirely proved, only disproved - who knows how or when?

33. When people ask you to recommend Christmas presents, you give them a list of science books. You genuinely found them funny and delightful.

34. You tell your beloved to paste this equation into Google: (sqrt(cos(x))*cos(200*x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(9-x^2), -sqrt(9-x^2)

35. A science lecture, a Skeptics in the Pub night or a stargazing/telescope session is a much better night out than getting pissed.

36. You use the word "geek" as a compliment. Other people think you're putting yourself down. This needs explaining.

Duck! The sun's throwing bits of itself around!

It's pelting down with rain outside and Cassie the tortoiseshell fluffball is squeaking disconsolately at the cat flap, not wanting to go out in that. I'm irked, too, but for different reasons. There might be an aurora, you see, but there's not a chance of seeing it in this weather. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

On Monday this week, the Sun let off a huge solar flare. That's a massive explosion on its surface. Surprising as it may sound, the Sun has a magnetic field, just as the Earth does - but it's not static. Sometimes, two magnetic fields which previously weren't lined up can suddenly realign themselves, releasing a huge amount of energy. Matter on the surface of the Sun can suddenly be accelerated to close to the speed of light. If the event is powerful enough, this gives rise to a coronal mass ejection - a great burst of matter heading out of the Sun.

Now, at 93 million miles away from the Sun and comparatively extremely small, it's not often the Earth gets in the way of coronal mass ejections. But occasionally we do - and this is just what's happened this week. The matter, of course, does not travel at light speed, so we get a few days' warning.

What happens when such a thing hits the Earth? Don't worry. Nothing lethal. Because all these particles are charged, they're affected by magnetic fields - and Earth has one of those too. This is what happens:

(From Chandra.)

Incidentally, Jupiter and Saturn too have spectacular magnetic fields and aurorae - indeed, Saturn's magnetic field might be responsible for all kinds of odd effects among its moons.

Although Earth's magnetic field directs the charged particles away from most of the Earth, it directs them towards the poles. But those don't suffer mass destruction. Rather, they shimmer with the Northern Lights, or the Aurora Boreolis.

The Aurora over North Norway, from APOD.

The Aurora from above, photographed by astronauts aboard the Interntional Space Station. APOD.

I went to Norway when I was 20 but have never seen the aurora, and that's one of the things I really long to do. It annoyed me that Philip Pullman turned it into something supernatural in "Northern Lights", but he certainly expressed a silent, throat-tightening beauty about it that made me want to go and see it even more. They move around - I don't know how fast. The green light is from excited oxygen atoms. "Excited", in this case, means that one or more electrons have jumped up to a higher energy state (you can think of that like jumping up to a higher electron shell). More rarely, it emits red light. Nitrogen, too, glows in different colours - blue and red. There's a nice little description of the chemistry here.

A coronal mass ejection is not needed to produce the aurora - it occurs anyway because of the solar wind. The Sun is in fact hurling ionised matter at us all the time. A coronal mass ejection is just a great glut in one go. This can result in the "northern lights" being seen much further south than usual - it seems they have already been seen in Northern Ireland.

The problem with coronal mass ejections is that they can disrupt communications. In November 2003 there was a particularly large one, which was not only hazardous for space observatories such as SOHO but also for aircraft. There's a good write-up in the introduction Dr Stuart Clark's "The Sun Kings" about the things that took place then: radios that aided expeditions, forest firefighters, marine emergency calls and the like became unreliable; aircraft had to fly below 25,000 feet and at a lower latitude than north Scotland; Sweden suffered blackouts; nuclear power plants in America reduced their power in case of damage. Compasses, too, no longer knew which way was north and swung about wildly. As luck would have it, Cassini, ten times further away, got a bashing too!

Infuriatingly, I missed this whole thing. I was in Granada, southern Spain, at the time, on a year abroad for my degree, and only using the Internet in cafes every few days (Galaxy Zoo did not then exist and I didn't even hear of Facebook for another few years). I think it must have been around Halloween - I recall walking round Granada with a friend terrified of masks that night, and listening to her worries about love and commitment. Then the 2006 solar eclipse happened when I went back to Spain for a TEFL course - we would only have seen a partial eclipse, but I missed it then, too.

The most spectacular coronal mass ejection to hit Earth on record is the one that occurred in 1859 - again, as detailed in Stuart Clark's book. In that one, auroras appeared, it seems, all over the planet. You could read a book at night - if you weren't busy being terrified of the end of the world, as it seems many people were. Hilariously, however, there were so many charged particles in the air that this happened:

Boston telegraph operator (to Portland operator): "Please cut off your battery [power source] entirely for fifteen minutes."
Portland operator: "Will do so. It is now disconnected."
Boston: "Mine is disconnected, and we are working with the auroral current. How do you receive my writing?"
Portland: "Better than with our batteries on. - Current comes and goes gradually."
Boston: "My current is very strong at times, and we can work better without the batteries, as the aurora seems to neutralize and augment our batteries alternately, making current too strong at times for our relay magnets. Suppose we work without batteries while we are affected by this trouble."
Portland: "Very well. Shall I go ahead with business?"
Boston: "Yes. Go ahead."

I first heard of this conversation in an Astrofest lecture - it was especially amusing because the lecturer showed us the code used first! In any case, it's rather like an msn conversation with the Internet switched off (so if anyone tells you that the Internet's a new and unnatural thing, remind them about telegrams).

Coronal mass ejections do not appear entirely randomly. The Sun has a cycle of its own: an eleven-year period that alternates between a "quiet" time of mostly steady shining, and a less-quiet time of more sunspots and flares. These changes correspond to changes in solar output - in other words, how much heat and light we get. There have been efforts to link this changing activity with climate change, but the trends are weak - if that. In the short term, it does work to some extent - there have been arguments for decades over whether you can correlate solar activity with the price of wheat. And it is possible that a few decades of warmth or chill (the Little Ice Age; the time Britons grew grapes, etc.) are due to changes in solar activity - but they were not global events but local ones, suggesting that conditions on the Earth itself, just like now, were the driving forces in those cases.

Going back to Stuart Clark again (as you can see, I must finish his book - I'm the dreadful kind of person who starts six books at once and falls asleep while reading them, awarding myself an ever-more-toppling booklist!), he has this to say about studying the Sun and its eleven-year cycle:

Like a heart, the Sun pulsates. This is not a visible movement but rather a gradual buildup in strength and subsequent weakening of the giant magnetic bubble that emanates from within the Sun and surrounds all the planets. As befits a celestial body of some 4.6 billion years in age, each one of these magnetic heartbeats takes a leisurely eleven years, or thereabouts, to complete.

So, in the average career of a scientist, he or she can expect to see this happen four times. This makes understanding the Sun as difficult as a biologist trying to deduce the life cycle of an unknown creature by observing it just long enough to witness four beats of its heart. As a result, solar astronomy is a multigenerational science. Each new cohort works to build a finger legacy of observations for those yet to come.

In any case, things are looking interesting. National Geographic says this is the largest flare for some time. Aviation Week has some mind-boggling pictures of what our local star is up to right now:



Pete Lawrence got an astonishing photograph of the flare. You can also watch a quick clip here on the BBC. And check out AuroraWatch to see if it might be worth nipping outdoors . . . please let me know if you see anything!

PS And if you are really into solar storms, you can now join Solar Stormwatch to map them properly. It's concentrating on past ones - but Zooites work through things very quickly, so you never know, soon enough you may be working on them as they happen!

Doctor Proctor and the Irregular Galaxies

Before I write this post, an apology. Formspring, the question and answer site - on which you're all welcome to contact me with an astronomy question (no guarantee I can answer it, but I'll do my best) - turned one of my entries into a blog post here without any form of notification. I always make sure I have the "blogger" tickbox un-ticked, so it shouldn't have been able to do that. Annoyed and caught off guard, I deleted the unwanted blog post - and forgot to save a comment someone had left! Sorry to that person. Please do leave it again.

Back in 2008, when the first of Galaxy Zoo's many projects on merging galaxies got underway, the zookeepers posted a list of galaxies they wanted us to identify as mergers or not. We had a zooite called Waveney, which, incidentally, is also the name of the hall of residence that I was in at university - and which he had been in many years earlier! Waveney, whose real name is Richard Proctor, wrote a program allowing us to go through the list much faster, Galaxy Zoo style - and made quite a difference, by allowing mini-projects to run quickly and enjoyably on the forum.

One area which hasn't been looked at much in astronomy, including in Galaxy Zoo, is irregular galaxies. We've been focussing - especially in the early days - on galaxies with a defined shape we can study, such as spiral or elliptical:

(From the Galaxy Zoo 1 tutorial. Click to expand.)

An irregular looks like neither of these. In fact, I can't really describe an irregular's shape. It might be a cloud, it might be a set of clouds or starforming clumps, it might be a crazy-shaped mass after a merger . . . There's a good sample here and the forum's whole collection here if you'd like to browse. Here's one for illustration, but it's hardly a representative of all of them.

(From SDSS.)

Now, on the one hand, irregular galaxies got more interesting since the launch of Hubble Zoo because it seems to me that nearly every galaxy we get on that is irregular! Hubble Zoo is mostly looking at galaxies much, much further away than those we looked at with the SDSS telescope. That means we see them as younger than our own - and younger than they would be now if light travelled instantaneously. Most of them are, frankly, a mess. It's fascinating to think that these wispy, often unclassifiable things are a prelude to the gorgeous creatures nearby. As an aside, to me, that's a hefty piece of evidence in favour of the Big Bang. I've classified well over 100,000 galaxies by now, and seen how different they look according to age. (Granted, this is not a scientific study.)

And on the other hand, irregular galaxies are interesting because Waveney is going to do a PhD on them.

His irregulars project has been running for a while, and as I write this, the "click count" is 88,488! The largest sample of galaxies looked at by a professional astronomer that he can find is 161; Waveney's project has many thousands. These were mostly collected by extracting all the ones from the Irregulars thread on the forum, and a brilliant, dedicated lady in Puerto Rico named Aida Berges going through the rest of the forum and the SDSS databases to find others. (Have a go at navigating around; it's terrific fun!)

To take part in the irregulars project, I recommend a quick look around Galaxy Zoo or the forum for a few tips, so you know what you're doing. But I don't mean masses of intense study. Galaxy Zoo itself does not require you to be an astronomer; it requires you to be better than computers at looking at shapes, and as (presumably) a human, you therefore qualify. There is an "irregular checking examples" thread where people can ask for advice.

You'll be asked: how clear the irregular is (i.e. how reliable anything is you say about it - some are very faint or fuzzy); whether it's a compact galaxy or whether it's all over the place; whether it has various features that larger galaxies have - a core, a bar, any spiral features; and whether it's alone or among a lot of others, for which there are zoom buttons you can use to help (even so this can be a bit thorny, as galaxies that appear to be nearby can often be millions of light years further away, just in the same line of sight). There are also buttons to indicate whether it happens to be the same as the previous irregular - for the SDSS camera often focussed on more than one point in a galaxy - and whether it's not an irregular at all.

Waveney's initial results show some definite differences between irregulars and other galaxies - their blueness, for example, which is an indicator of heat and star formation. You can also look at their metallicity to see how old they are. For example, are irregulars basically very young galaxies who might eventually evolve into the spirals and ellipticals we know? Or are they simply the cosmic plankton, unobserved amidst the sharks and whales yet a bedrock of the ecosystem - because, perhaps, not enough gas happened to be a round where they formed? (Spiral galaxies, for instance, need to be a certain mass to become the complex rotating disk we're familiar with.)

The method Galaxy Zoo uses to gain a really accurate database is for lots of people to classify each galaxy. For example, 90% of people might think that something's a smooth elliptical; but the other 10% may claim that they can see signs that it's rotating, or disturbed. It's easily possible that neither sample of people was wrong. Although I can seldom resist talking about irregulars as if they're the animals we don't notice because they're small and unglamorous, galaxies do not have particularly fine lines drawn between definite types. There's a lot of argument on the forum over whether or not one type of galaxy turns into another, or whether it's just that some sit on a blurred line!

Waveney uses the same method: get as many people as possible to look at each irregular. You could say that 25% of people think this has some spiral structure, and therefore, in a sense, this is 75% an ordinary irregular and 25% a sort of proto-spiral. That may sound unscientific, but it's less so than trying to force it into a human-defined category when it genuinely doesn't belong to one.

He got the idea of turning this into a PhD thesis from a remark Chris made along the lines of "you've done half a PhD here". " I recognise this means I have done 10%," he writes cheerfully, "but it got me thinking – why not do it properly. I don’t want to do this full time, I have a very full time job – but could I do it part time. Does the Open University do part time PhDs – a quick web search yes it does…" There's nothing like simply looking at what you could do and what options are available!

As I said, he's looking at colour and metallicity, also the irregulars' masses and starforming rates. He's comparing these with equivalent samples of spirals, ellipticals and also the peas, the intensely starforming compact galaxies we amateurs found and studied in 2007 and 2008. None of the irregulars contains an active galactic nucleus, which suggests that they are all of low mass. (An active galactic nucleus is the activity surrounding a supermassive black hole in the centre of a galaxy - where stars and other matter whose speeds around the disk are insufficient to keep them in orbit forever, and which therefore pile up in the middle. When a huge amount of matter arrives in a small place this way, before it enters the black holes, it becomes unbelievably hot, and can outshine the entire galaxy.)

What else? Doubtless he has other plans up his sleeve. I only feel sorry that, in the early stages of the project, when Jules and I were also helping, my part - examining the irregulars' environment, i.e. how close they were to their neighbours - came to a standstill before I even started, because nothing I did with SQL actually worked. Months later, Chris told me that in fact my task wasn't possible with current tools - I am sure there are other avenues, but I am no programmer and am an unlikely candidate to find it out. Waveney has tactfully described me as being "in a supporting role". That does seem to be my role in most citizen science projects, and it does seem to be helpful to at least the people and the communication, if not the data itself. Perhaps one day that'll change. If not . . . well, supporting people are very useful.

You can keep up with what Waveney (who has stoically ignored the nickname of "Doctor Proctor" I couldn't resist giving him) in the Galaxy Zoo Library, and do give him some irregular clicks. If you're interested in the wider issues of citizen science and education, please note that the Open University is among the umpteen bodies whose funding is being slashed. Some of us at Galaxy Zoo, me included, have studied astronomy and (in my case) mathematics, inspired simply by what we're doing and discovering - and it's the only chance for so many people to combine study with their jobs, families, and other real-life commitments. Waveney's PhD thesis will bring new knowledge to the field of astronomy, not to mention be a shining beacon for people who thought their chance to learn and contribute was over. Knowledge is not a drain; it's progress - so let's not let it go.

Where did the Big Bang actually take place?

I get this question every so often, and it suddenly occurs to me that I haven't used this blog to actually explain any science for quite some while.

In some cases, though certainly not all, the question is used almost rhetorically, by someone explaining why they do not choose to believe in the Big Bang. The most common theme is along the lines of: "But the Big Bang was supposed to be an explosion. Explosions destroy things and create disorder. That's the opposite of what you see around you in this ordered Universe." Or even to claim that scientists are lazy: "Nobody has ever even tried to find the centre of the Universe. Where is it?"

I've heard of an excellent article, I think in Scientific American, called something along the lines of "Seven misconceptions about the Big Bang" which I haven't managed to find (I bet somebody else finds it in 1 second after a Google search now I've said this, but there you go! *Update - check the comments.....). Because there are a lot of misconceptions about that subject.

It is true that not all scientists believe it happened. The brilliant Fred Hoyle, for instance - even though he discovered that elements are made by stars, rather than having been there forever, which does lead to the conclusion that the Universe must change over time. It was he who unwittingly coined the term, intended as a joke, on a radio show: he is supposed to have greeted George Gamow, another guest, with "Ah, it's the Big Bang man!" As occasionally happens with good jokes in science, the term stuck.

The word "bang" gives the impression that it must have been noisy, which in turn gives the impression of somebody outside, listening. This is where it gets very hard to imagine, unless you've had a little quiet time to get used to the idea: there wasn't any outside. Not only was it the moment when all matter and radiation were created. It was the moment when space itself was created.

Nor was it big. It was smaller than an atom. (Oh, when you've a moment, do play with this lovely representation of the size of all different things in the Universe!) At first, anyway. It expanded rapidly, of course. It's still doing so.

It was Gamow who realised how things must have been in the early moments of the Universe: that if it was expanding today, it must have been smaller in the past. His imagination allowed him to play the life of the Universe backwards, to when the Universe was tiny; and he also realised that it must have been unbelievably hot, for everything heats upon compression. Gamow and his students Alpher and Herman did groundbreaking work establishing the conditions there and what elements could have formed. They worked out what particles could have been there - mostly photons, but some protons, neutrons and electrons - and their results showed exactly the proportions of hydrogen and helium that make up the Universe today.

(It is of course a lot more complicated than that, since 96% of the substance of the Universe is not the baryonic matter - the matter we learn about and can touch - that I've described above, and there was that pesky business of inflation and other uncertainties. But if you're new to this subject, you can be forgiven for leaving these subjects for the time being.)

It's been possible to work out how long ago the Big Bang took place - not entirely straightforward as the expansion of the Universe has not been constant - and the best estimate, at the moment, is 13.7 billion years old. Galaxy Zoo's current project, Hubble Zoo, reflects that in its classifications. Take this galaxy:

As you see, they've given us a redshift. (Click the picture for a larger version.) Redshift is the stretching out of a light wave. Since space is expanding, the light waves are stretched out - if you have curly hair or a landline phone cord you can model this yourself! It's possible to work out how much waves have been stretched out because common elements found in stars and galaxies give very exact and recognisable spectra - patterns of light, like barcodes - and their peaks and troughs "move" to a measurable extent. You can tell how far the light's come, and how long it's been travelling for:

And therefore, how old the Universe was when that light left that galaxy:
It is fascinating to see, after thousands of classifications, how the galaxies change over time. Some of the most beautiful, ordered, intricate galaxies I've classified tend to be of low redshift - that is to say, near to us, or older. It does appear to be true that the Universe has got more ordered over time. Perhaps it will get more ordered still. Or perhaps there will be more and more galaxy mergers, and things will look less ordered. Or perhaps there are enough reserves of gas to keep the very disordered irregulars appearing for many billenia (yes, I just made up that word) yet. Or perhaps a great deal more will happen.

Hang on, I often hear, so all the galaxies are rushing away from us? Doesn't that mean we're at the centre of the Universe?

Yes, it does mean we're at the centre of the Universe. But it also means that everywhere else is also at the centre of the Universe. Because other galaxies are not only rushing away from us, but also from each other. From everywhere else. (Except of course their own local groups and clusters, which are gravitationally bound together.)

Take these smilies. You're the one in the middle:

The same five smilies, some time later:

The distance between each one has expanded. Now imagine you're at one of the other smilies. You'd still think everyone was rushing away from you. And at any of the others.

Because there isn't any centre to find, any location of an explosion. We're inside that. Everything is. The Big Bang took place right here, where I'm sitting. It took place right where you are, wherever you're reading this. It took place on the other side of the world. And on Saturn. And in the Sun. And in another arm of our galaxy. And in the next galaxy. And across the Universe.

So, various types of experiment and mathematical deduction give good evidence for the Big Bang having happened. And those who claim that we should be able to see it today are right. But not in quite the way they think.

So when you see a beautiful photo like this, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, you're looking at a Universe much smaller than it is today. (Click for larger version, on Hubblesite.)

It's at this point that it gets quite hard to wrap one's head around a logical conclusion of looking at a beautiful field like this: that such a field will be there wherever we look, in a great sphere, 13.4 billion light years away. (Beyond that, no galaxies had formed and matter was too hot and dense to let light through.) All around us? Hang on . . .

As the Galaxy Zoo Forum admin, and great skeptic and astronomer, Edd, says:

The problem is that the distant universe is the universe in the distant past, when the universe was small. In some sense, the universe is smaller on the outside than it is on the inside. But it still has to go round us all the way. This screws completely with how things get smaller as they get more distant, and above a certain distance, which is not actually tremendously far on the cosmological scale, things start getting bigger as they get further away. This happens for things where light has been travelling for about 10 billion years to get here.

Edd goes into the mysteries of this a lot further than I'm going to; suffice to say, nobody has yet claimed to me that the Big Bang could not be because of this impossible-to-visualise, head-messing conundrum. I wonder if they ever will?

I myself got very confused about something to do with this, relating to the Cosmic Microwave Background. Let me explain first what that is.

I mentioned earlier that we can't see the first 0.3 billion years of the time of the Universe because there was too much stuff in the way. That was a slight oversimplification. To be precise, atoms had not quite yet formed and the Universe was a plasma. This is a state of matter in which electrons have been torn off their protons and neutrons due to extreme heat. The Sun and stars are just such a plasma; and the Universe was, too. That, of course, means that there are a great many more particles rushing around and getting in the way of light. That's just what happened in the early years of the Universe - and we can still see it today. (The discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background itself is a great story which I'll leave for another post!) Galaxies were able to form because of temperature fluctuations in this darkening fog:

(Good old Wiki.)

When the temperature had dropped enough for electrons to combine with protons and neutrons and make normal atoms, that's when light was able to shine through. And that's the point when we can start seeing what was going on.

Back to the confused point. I said earlier that the Big Bang took place right here, where we were. If it took place anywhere else, we'd be outside our own Universe. And that's impossible.

So how on Earth - or indeed how in anywhere you like - is the Cosmic Microwave Background 13.4 billion light-years away?

Bill - a beloved addition to the Galaxy Zoo team - explained it wonderfully simply. Light travels around the Universe. It can't stop moving. But it can't go outside the Universe, and it can't just wink out of existence. We are shown a slice of Cosmic Microwave Background from what to us is 13.4 billion light years away - or 13.4 billion light years ago. Now, if you go somewhere else in the Universe (if only we could!) - if we arrive there "now", we would see a different piece of Cosmic Microwave Background. Or if we go to that galaxy I showed you earlier, 5.931 billion light years away - and let's say that we go back in time 5.931 billion years - we would see a slice of Cosmic Microwave Background 7.469 billion light years away. As Bill put it:

Of course it represents material that was relatively close to us when the light left, but it's taken a lot longer for the radiation to get to us across the expanding Universe. So every location is in the middle of its own CMB sphere. Cosmologists wold love to sample someone else's, because there is a certain statistical error in properie sof the CMB whch is associated with only being able to sample one location in the Universe at one time (so-called cosmic scatter).

The discussion on the thread went, sadly, out of my understanding. I expect this post has at least been partly beyond the understanding of some readers - and, to others, grossly oversimplistic and perhaps with some mistakes of my own. Apologies to both! But I hope that some of it at least was useful and thought-provoking. One of the Zooites has as their signature: "The Universe is not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine." It takes a huge amount of brain-bending to imagine some of it; but Nature was not created in order to be comprehensible to us. I just find it thrilling that any of it is!

Cascades of Cassini's wonders

Saturn at equinox, found on APOD, imaged by Cassini.

I first fell in love with Cassini back in early 2007 when Mark Leese, who works on the project, came to give us a talk at Sussex University. At the time, Huygens had comparatively recently dropped onto Titan's soil. I remember three things most clearly from the talk. One was the video of Huygens spinning down on its parachutes, one of its instruments going thud-thud-thud like my heartbeat. Another was when he asked if we wanted a break, and Tim Metham, our course tutor, replied: "No, this is riveting!" - he wanted to hear it all, right now! And finally, he took us on a tour through Saturn's rings . . . those little blocks of ice, once thought to be dust and rocks, but made of frozen water, so they gleam . . . many of which looked like little dots - but one was blue. Was it an anomalous blob? No - it's the Earth.

And it wasn't for another couple of years that I encountered the traditional Pale Blue Dot, which you can see and listen to here. But the lump in the throat was exactly the same.

Here it is again, an insignificant point of light, a tiny flicker against this backlit Saturn:
Do read its caption on APOD. Imaged by Cassini.

I'm a poor substitute for Carl, but nevertheless I tried to give a little of that sense of hugeness in my Tea with the Stars lecture the other night. I described to the audience how the rings had scattered the sunlight to brighten up Saturn from behind - and then I zoomed in on the Earth. I don't know if it came across. It's often too personal to say.

Back to more practical terms, I was thrilled to be asked to write a piece for Astronomy Now's yearbook on what Cassini will be up to next year, and Keith, the editor, is happy for me to blog about what I found out.

I e-mailed various Cassini scientists and was answered by two, Carl Murray and Joe Burns, both of whom agreed to my ringing them up and taking up lots of their time with asking occasionally silly questions. Although I really must invest in a dictaphone or something else to record what people are saying (at the time I just scribbled it down; they were very sympathetic about waiting!), it's definitely easier to get information out of people by talking to them than by e-mail. I could ask very general questions and let what they said lead up to specifics; often the specifics came by themselves, rolling on waves of enthusiasm. I love talking to people who are exhiliarated by what they're doing! I hope it goes without saying that neither they nor Keith are responsible for any errors I have made . . .

Meanwhile, Keith had kindly pointed me to Cassini's 2011 timetable. That took some dissecting - mostly drawing up tables of types of event. To summarise, it'll make 16 orbits, usually using Titan's gravity for the slingshot effect but making 30 course corrections. It'll look at the Sun and our pale blue dot 11 times. Cassini has an elliptical orbit, allowing it to view moons at different distances from Saturn, and also goes "through the ring plane", from north to south, 29 times! This isn't through one of the actual rings, obviously; it picks fairly empty areas. But even so, it'll need to "employ protective mesaures" half a dozen times or so. I asked Carl Murray what these were and he said mostly turning the instruments inward, except obviously the cosmic dust analyser which loves that sort of thing.

And what about Cassini's main job - the moons? Well, as you'll see, it heads past lots of those. Most passes are only distant ones, though these can be useful, Joe Burns explained to me, as they show you the whole moon rather than just a "patch" of it; this allows them to check general brightness, which in turn tells us about their atmospheres, temperatures and so on. But the important, nearby passes will be Rhea, Enceladus, and Titan. Those will be checking the moons in great detail.

Rhea and Janus from Cassini. NB I'm finding all these on APOD but (update, Feb 2011) have just been told off by the legendary Carolyn Porco for not making it clearer that Cassini took them. All the originals can be found at that link. I'm now updating the links wherever possible - it's not easy! I will however keep the APOD links alongside as they are friendly and informative.

Here's where Huygens landed:
Tethys behind Titan from Cassini.

(A friend remarked that whenever he talks about Cassini he feels he should just shut up and show the pictures. I know how he feels! You can easily waste half a day going to APOD Search and typing in "Cassini" . . .)

Titan is the only moon in the Solar System with a thick atmosphere. This atmosphere is actually denser than the Earth's, and is mostly methane. However, this methane is split apart by sunlight, and if Earth is anything to go by this generates free radicals, which would then react with other methane and anything else around such as nitrogen to generate quite large molecules. This makes the famous haze which we can't see through. Cassini can see through to some extent with radar and IR. Radar doesn't bounce off liquid, so these dark patches were lakes:

Found on APOD; taken by Cassini Radar Mapper.

Herewith some beauties that Huygens found when it detached itself from Cassini and dropped down into Titan's atmosphere . . .

The landing site (having trouble finding the original one here) . . .

From eight kilometres high (JPL/Cassini) . . .

About five kilometres high, a fisheye view . . .

Rivers and lakes, as predicted (Cassini) . . .

And rocks and sandiness, just like Earth, or Mars. (Cassini)

And an artist's impression of what it looked like there.

So there we are. Titan is a solid world - but its surface is shaped like the Earth's, because of weather. That implies a cycle. Not a water cycle, for all water is frozen hard as rock there: it is, according to our best guesses, a methane cycle. It seems that those lakes and rivers are liquid methane, and methane rain falls from those hazy clouds. What we don't know is what drives the cycle: when does it evaporate or liquify? Is it the Sun - far less powerful out here, nearly ten times as far from Saturn as from the Earth (and those studying basic physics will know that means nearly 100 times less radiation, if I remember correctly) - or is it something else; volcanic activity perhaps? Can Titan hold onto its envelope of gas, or is it slowly losing it, as Mars probably lost most of anything it had lighter than carbon dioxide? The team may have found evidence of a changing coastline, but it's hard to tell, since these things take a long time to occur. There are still a few corners here and there of Titan unmapped (good old Huygens only lasted there an hour and a half), which is one of the tasks set for Cassini to do in its remaining estimated 7 years of life.

There is also some argument about wind on Titan. Dunes appear to point against the wind; this may be because only storms which occur rarely and go the opposite way from normal are strong enough to shift the sand. All in all, there are lots of delicious mysteries to go.

Besides its moons and rings, Saturn has a very complicated magnetosphere. Any planet with a molten core (that is, Earth plus the gas giants) has one of those. Do play around with it in this animation. Magnetic fields give off radio waves, which allows Cassini to study it, and it's got quite a few objectives on its (so to speak) hands. What's especially interesting about Saturn's magnetosphere is its interaction with its moons. Some moons have actually been found by local drops in the charged particles, which the moons take up - come to think of it I'm not sure if that's by gravity or by something else, sorry folks and anyone who can enlighten me and my readers, please do. (Good job this is a blog and not a news article. Of course, it may be that nobody yet knows why moons take up the charged particles . . .)

The effect of Saturn's aurora at its poles, from the VIMS probe, found at guess where. Sometimes these charged particle storms "punch through" Saturn's atmosphere, or indeed, drag it upwards. There are still a lot of mysteries and surprises - it was due to studying this magnetosphere that the moon Rhea has been hypothesised to have some kind of rings!

When I asked Carl Murray about this, he laughed wryly and said, "Well, that depends on who you believe!" He sent me a paper which describes their repeated efforts to go back to Rhea and find these rings again - which failed. Something is causing a local drop in charged particles; as yet, we know not what . . .

Rhea, the second-largest moon, whose surface is patchy and worn.

And, for me, the biggest surprise of all? Guess what's contributing not only to the very diffuse e-ring (the faint, outer one you see in that gorgeous backlit picture), but to the magnetosphere? The moon Enceladus.

Here it is, right in the middle.

These
These fountains are water. To be exact, they are salty water, indicating a rocky presence below, and they are ejected from the south pole by geyser activity. But why? Joe Burns remarked to me that something as small as Enceladus shouldn't still be hot; that it still is "calls into question our understanding of how things work" (always an exciting sort of sentence in science). It may be because it's in resonance with Dione, as Ganymede, Europa and Io are around Jupiter. This may be causing tidal shifts and heating.

Ultraviolet light from nearby stars is dimmed by these fountains, indicating that there's plenty of material there. Out in space, of course, with little or zero pressure but plenty of radiation flying around, much of it won't stay as water, but will break up into the charged particles that make up the magnetosphere.

Incidentally, the moons within the E-ring reflect more light than Saturn's other moons, indicating that they get blasted by these charged particles. I suppose to say that Enceladus "washes" them is going a little too far, but the thought made me smile. Actually, it's because such particles move pretty fast, and that melts their icy surfaces and keeps them smooth.

Another view of Enceladus's vents - if you click the first link, you'll see it's upside down! It makes for a terrific video too.

Enceladus looks, at first, like a pretty placid sort of world in comparison to all this trouble it's making - until you notice those tiger stripes. They indicate regions where the ice has melted. The stripes have a different temperature and composition to the rest of the moon, but as far as I know that's all we can say at the moment.

So, besides a very strange magnetosphere, unique rings, and the only moon in the Solar System with a dense atmosphere (Triton would have a similar one if it was warmer - on Triton, the methane is frozen, much as water is on Titan), Saturn has two moons where liquids are present. Could life exist in Titan's methane lakes, or under Enceladus's ice? Organic compounds and a liquid medium are present in both. I doubt it would be life like ours. I won't be personally disappointed if there isn't any. When people ask me if I believe in life on other worlds, I tell them that I accept my own ignorance on the matter and am simply waiting to see - which many people do not consider an acceptable answer! But life or no life, there's plenty for Cassini to do in its probably six remaining years.

Yes, it's due to last until about 2017. In fact, all flybys are planned until then. It may change, of course. But that's about how long the remaining rocket fuel should last. Once that time comes near, Cassini will head out a long way, 10,000km beyond the F-ring, to survey Saturn and all its moons from afar; then it will head in again - right into Saturn's atmosphere. While it's still transmitting, we might get our first glimpses of what it's like under that giant planet's visible surface. Further and further in it will head . . . until that's the end of the mission. And what an extraordinary mission it will have been.

Thanks to Keith at Astronomy Now, and Joe Burns and Carl Murray of the Cassini team for all their information, guidance and encouragement.

This was my last slide at my recent Cassini talk.

Science is Vital!

I'm going to be missing a very special and important event tomorrow: a demonstration to tell our government that we need to keep up funding for science.

There are more reasons for this than "we want to go on with our jobs" and "we want to go on making cool discoveries". Science actually contributes to at least 30% of GDP, and if I recall correctly only takes up 1.8%. It was invention and innovation that sparked the Industrial Revolution, here in Britain. It was to scientists here in Britain that two out of three science-related Nobel Prizes were won this year. It's here that 8% of scientific papers are produced, from 1% of the population (I don't know if this means the world's population, or the percentage of working scientists worldwide, but it's a pretty nifty figure even so!). Science has given us nearly everything we've got in the modern world in health, technology, communications, transport, standards of living . . . not to mention serendipity, education, and joy. For me personally, it was science that gave me my life's work and almost all my friends and happiness.

It looks like it's going to be a huge event - they've been making hundreds of banners today, and are gathering distinguished speakers such as Simon Singh, and guess who else? Dean! Congratulations mate! I do wish I could be there. But next week is going to be ridiculous enough as it is. On Monday I'm off to Oxford to do something for the zoo which I'll blog about when I get the all-clear. On Tuesday, since I'll at least be in the right part of the country, I will be going to this, and have written to my MP to let him know:
On Wednesday I'm attending the launch of ESERO, which aims to use space research to boost teaching of science, technlogy, engineering and mathematics (now, please do not let this go to waste, government! . . .). As soon as that's finished I'm coming home, because I'm working again on Thursday, then heading off to do my second Tea with the Stars lecture on Cassini. Then on Friday I'm heading back to London again to go to TAM. And after that, it's the second Cardiff Skeptics talk with Ash Pryce (please coming along!), and staying in Cardiff that night, so I will arrive in work directly off the train. So you can imagine that I am in no mood whatsoever to spend this weekend travelling as well, even for science.

Indignation (expressed best in this article by Roger Highfield) and gloom and worry have, I'm glad to say, led to action. If you can attend either rally, please do so - it's up to us all. And please sign the petition!

Yes, it's accepted that cuts have to be made. Yes, others look extremely worrying too - take this hideous scenario of disabled people losing essential care. Should scientists stop whinging and accept that they're not above the rest of us?

Not if you realise how much science contributes. In earlier times of economic crisis, Finland and Korea actually increased their science budgets, and Germany and America are not cutting theirs now. The reason is that, as Sir Patrick puts it, "If we cut funds for science we'll be shooting ourselves in the foot." Science boosts the economy, alongside other things. Withdrawal of funds leads to people we've trained, and who we don't pay much, taking their talents abroad. Private companies and charities that invest their research here won't see the point in staying either. Recovery from that would take a long, long time.

I thoroughly recommend this open letter by Dr Evan Harris, this Guardian datablog which details some of the statistics, and the key messages page on Science is Vital. If you fancy something a little more heavy-going, try the Royal Society and its document "The Scientific Century". Or, if you understand government papers, try this one, co-authored by someone in the HM Treasury. (I confess - I'm struggling!)

And if by any chance an MP is reading this, please sign Julian Huppert's Early Day Motion to save science - and our future.

Thank you.

They Protest!

OK, this is going to be a bit of a lazy link round-up, but I've been following two amusing but worrying stories over the weeks - those concerning our guests of honour at Cardiff Skeptics. One of these stories has just ended, and I wanted to put together an update.

First the one that isn't: the MMS saga, known on Twitter as #bleachgate. Although the hero of this saga is of course Rhys, I think the best place to start is Noodlemaz's in-depth investigation. It's pretty frightening. For more on the early episodes, check out LizDitz's link round-up (now we need a link round-up of link round-ups . . .).

To summarise, MMS, "miracle mineral solution", is basically bleach. People are sold it as a "cure" for anything from AIDS to Crohn's Disease, and are told that when they feel nausated that is the "toxins being released". Actually, when they feel nauseated it's because it's doing exactly what it does to everything else: oxidising it, which basically means destroying living tissue. Supporters who understand this much chemistry claim that it somehow magically selects pathogens in our bodies and leaves our own tissues alone. They also repeatedly claim that "THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN CURED WHY DON'T YOU LISTEN TO THEM YOU BIG PHARMA SCOURGES" (etc), though have not provided any links to such stories - and obviously not to scientific studies.

That's because there aren't any. This is how they go about things - again, credit to Noodlemaz for finding this:

Do you understand the power that a church has that hasn’t given up its power? Look at the Catholics. Their priests have been molesting women and children for centuries and the governments have not been able to stop it. If handled properly a church can protect us from vaccinations that we don’t want, from forced insurance, and from many things that a government might want to use to oppress us.

I will let you form your own opinion of the above.

Martin Robbins wrote this brilliant article about MMS - both the forum incident and the worldwide state, both of which attracted a lot of comment. Several folks from the Crohn's Forum came along to offer their defences, and the replies to them made highly amusing reading. On a larger scale . . . look what's happened as a result, again by Martin Robbins.

I feel terrible about Africa when I think about it. I know it has a lot of problems of its own - the stories of mass rape in Darfur and children being killed as witches - and yet I can't help but feel that if it wasn't pushed into treaties that kept it as a recipient of aid rather than a participant in trade, among so much more, incidents like these would be fewer. Countries themselves, drawn up by Europeans, have very little to do with the people that populate them, who think of themselves as members of their tribe rather than citizens of their countries. (If anybody thinks I'm patronising anyone by saying this, it's not unique - I give you as a more local example certain folks in Cornwall who would boast for half an hour at a time about their Cornish ancestry and surnames as a means of putting me in my place when I lived there. I haven't got a direct link to source my Africa/countries comment, but a close relative lived in Africa for many years, and I recommend this in which it's mentioned - though it's hardly the focus.) That also makes Africa the perfect haven for those who wish to market their untested products and ideas which would be promptly stopped in their own countries, from anti-condom propaganda to MMS.

Onto more cheerful subjects, look what Rhys Morgan has done! Not a bad thing to start off such a huge campaign before even reaching 16. You can also hear him on the radio (if I remember rightly, about 17 minutes in) here. He's got a link round-up too (see what I mean about link round-ups . . .). The BBC report that there's now an official safety warning in this country, too. Those MMS adverts which keep appearing on Wordpress sites whenever the product is mentioned - I wonder how long they will stay?

All this has seriously rattled Jim Humble himself. Or at least, someone posing as him - you never know. Check out these comments early on in Rhys's blog . . . it's really quite surreal. Note that the first thing he does is advise Rhys not to speak publicly any more.

There's no point trying to convince him or his fanatical supporters, though. The best thing, in my opinion, is to try and educate the consumers and regulators. It's always the hardest, most costly solution, I hear a few people cry, isn't it? To round up as many people as possible, which will take the most time and the most resources. You could say the same of a scientific trial. Yet it seems worth it to me a thousand times over. Because putting in lots of time, money, resources and people is going to have thousands more good effects than just encouraging people not to drink bleach. Because this is very tied up with some of mankind's greatest problems, and there are no quick fixes to those.

(Humankind if you prefer, but I write it meaning the same thing.)

That story might only be just beginning. But here's one that's ended, at least this part of one. Councillor John Dixon's #stupidscientology tweet has been deemed to be in a private capacity. That is, he is entitled to tweet an obviously personal rather than Cardiff Council representing opinion.

WalesOnline and the Guardian have also reported on the case, and the latter has a brief follow-up on the disagreement of the Ombudsman. (You can read the Ombudsman's report a little way down Jack of Kent's blogpost here.) I recommend the comments of the Guardian website. I couldn't resist inserting a cheeky idea - the one about how, if he was representing his constituents, he was probably doing so quite accurately. A couple of comments above mine is the remark that whether John Dixon was cleared or not is beside the point for the scientologists - their aim was to make councils worry and waste their time, and therefore to discourage freedom of speech, rather than to punish John Dixon particularly.

The story coincided neatly with a Panorama documentary on scientology. I didn't watch it, and understand that while it was revealing about some of the strangeness of the cult, it didn't go into its practice of harrassing its critics. Why We Protest has revealed a most interesting e-mail sent around to scientologists on how to handle criticism on websites. I don't suggest this represents scientologists as a whole, and you know what? I also don't think it's likely to be terribly effective. (The tired part of me wonders if any comment on any news-related website is ever effective.)

On a lighter note, the Daily Mash and Crispian Jago have thrown their oars in for a good laugh. But best of all is John's guest post on Jack of Kent, which goes into the Paul Chambers case and Rhys's campaigning too.

It looks like the Internet is shaping things up for quite a lot of coordinated fighting from both sides of all controversy. Well, I suppose that's better than nothing . . .