Cults, laws, and free speech

Cardiff Skeptics in the Pub turned a year old on 20th September. The day before - it also being a Monday - we held its birthday party, with crisps, cakes, balloons and two very special guests: David Allen Green and John Dixon to revisit #Stupidscientology.

Thank you @wmjohn for this photo. Are there any more?

It was a good time to be all insane and swoony over the astonishing fact that our baby group had launched a whole year ago - that had been a pretty good day too. Thanks to all the speakers who've been so far: Simon Perry, Ash Pryce, Andrew Holding, Simon Singh, Hayley Stevens, Deborah Hyde, Jon Ronson, Trystan Swale, James Onen, obviously David and John, Rhys Morgan who's every so often had another news snippet for us, and the great comedy cast of July, whose names for which my memory is embarrassingly incomplete. And the people who've helped with lifts and chair stacking and spreading the word, generally being enthusiastic and supportive, and the audience for keeping us going, and the lady who brought along some profiteroles!

Appreciation expressed, to I hope the smiles of those receiving it and not too much boredom from everyone else (Skeptics leaders love it when you visited one of their events!) - we visited the subject that had got John famous. It may look like an idiotic piece of red tape, political correctness gone mad etc on the surface, but the implications were surprisingly sinister.

David has written a brilliantly detailed blog post about it here; I recommend a read. In short, John, in between tweets about what he was up to in London, had tweeted that he was hurrying past a Church of Scientology so the stupid didn't rub off. A while later, a scientology Twitter account began following him. Well over six months after this, someone complained to the council about the tweet, mentioning, I might add, that they thought there might have been two other tweets they objected to but they could now no longer find them on Google. It was a great many months more before his fellow councillors could make the decision what to do. In the end, they did not take it to court, though John gave us the impression that he might rather have enjoyed himself if they had.

John defended himself with great humour and sense: someone having attempted to make him look a bigot, he was able to raise awareness of quite a lot of unsavoury information (links provided by me, not him) about the Church of Scientology that made "stupid" look like the kindest possible description. You might enjoy this video of him standing up to Kirsty Wark, and being much politer than she was in her attempt to make him appear rude. David's knowledge of law gave him expertise in tackling this issue of free speech defense versus "bigotry" accusation, with weapons I would never have thought of - for example, in his criticism of the document by the Ombudsman, he did not mention the author, because "you can't defame a document". John actually skyrocketed to fame whilst in a tedious two-hour meeting. His mobile was switched off, and he had no knowledge that David had brought the case to the country's awareness. When he switched it on, he had 700-odd new followers and umpteen tweets and voicemails waiting for him.

This is of course far from the first time David has got involved with an issue like this. Not scientology, but a case where the law is being treated as a weapon, rather than a means to get justice.

"The Church of Scientology has as much right as anyone else to assert and protect their ultimate legal rights," he writes. "But it is misconceived and illiberal for litigation (or the threat of litigation) to be used by itself as a weapon."

L. Ron Hubbard, who founded Scientology, is quoted as saying:

"The purpose of the [law] suit is to harass and discourage rather than win. The law can be used very easily to harass, and enough harassment on somebody who is simply on the thin edge anyway, well knowing that he is not authorized, will generally be sufficient to cause professional decease. If possible, of course, ruin him utterly."

In other words, the point is not winning or losing. As Simon Singh found out, even if you win, you have lost thousands, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands, and years of your life. Very few people in their right mind would take that on if there was any way out. The way out is to back down, to apologise, to retract all your statements, to make out that the individual or organisation suing you has nothing to be ashamed of - and your peers will self-censor their own work, too.

I had something like this happen to me 11 years ago, albeit on a much smaller scale. A boss in whose employment I had been extremely unhappy (the guy I describe at the end of this post, if you're interested) took it upon himself to tell the company treasurer I had said I didn't want to be paid for my last two weeks of employment at his firm - at least, that is what she told me when I telephoned to enquire. When I wrote to the firm to challenge this, I was fobbed off for 3 months (the 3 months in which an employee must begin an industrial tribunal), then suddenly accused of theft on the grounds that I had sent an e-mail to a friend with verbal permission. I was informed that there were 4 logged occasions on which I had been forbidden to use the Internet, and that two other employees had wasted four man-hours searching for any viruses I might have allowed into the company's computers, time I was being charged for.

The charges were blatantly ridiculous, since other employees had routinely used e-mails and often sent them to me, one of my duties was using the Internet, the boss was famous for never logging anything or even being able to use a computer, and he had even claimed that each man-hour cost the company £65 after I had spent the best part of a year daily logging man-hours which were £45. And, as Acas told him, it is illegal to deduct pay from an employee under such circumstances; you have to bring a case against them first. If anyone tried this nonsense on me now, I would laugh in their face. But I was only eighteen, I was extremely poorly, I was inexperienced, and I had spent months being bullied and humiliated by him and had had about as much as I could stand. Now obliged to fight for myself when I was least able to do so, I went to the Citizens Advice Bureau (now being cut all over the place), and although I did not win any compensation I was given back most - not all - of the money I was owed. But it took five months, by which time my sickness had become long-term. He never did drop his threat of suing me. My sickness and the worry that he might do it went on to ruin university for me and whenever I start any new employment I still have an undercurrent of alarm that something like this might happen again. Frankly, if I could have foregone my lost wages and allowed the wrong thing to happen, in exchange for having my health and confidence back, I know which I'd have chosen.

(I would love to name the individual and company that did this - and I bet I'm not their only victim - but sadly, I do not dare do so . . .)

The mere threat of litigation is a massive weapon. For me it was merely "civil action", minor but bad enough. For someone like Simon Singh, or Hardeep Singh, or anyone who someone with as much money as Hubbard had to use the law as a weapon as much as he pleased, the consequences could be much, much worse.

The law, there in principle to do a good and essential thing, can also ruin the innocent. That's why I admire David. He dedicates huge amounts of time and energy, often free, to fighting against that, and defending those to whom it happens.

But that's not the only way the law can be used for personal benefit rather than as it is intended.

A few days ago, Steve Jobs lost his battle with cancer. I've never been able to afford any kind of Apple product, but the effect they've had has really changed things - there's an app for Galaxy Zoo, for instance. The Curious Astronomer and the mother of a special needs child whose life was transformed by Apple have written about that. Sadly, certain people affiliated with Westboro Baptist Church were not so graceful.

This piece of utterly hateful loser-ness circulated the Internet quite a lot shortly after Steve Jobs's death. (She then claimed that God created the iPhone purely so she could insult its founder . . .)

Even though I didn't know much about Steve Jobs, and I'm certainly not an uncritical fan of Apple, I exploded with indignation when I read this. Death hurts. How can anyone use the occasion of someone's death to pick on their relatives? As I've just described, to be kicked when down makes you feel desperate. Why do Jobs's relatives deserve to be made to feel desperate when they're saying goodbye, already knowing the world is watching them?

How, I tweeted, was this kind of harrassment even legal?

I was then immediately challenged by someone I hadn't come across before: Donalbaion, a mature student in Physics. He pointed out that I was arguing against free speech. Simple as that. To deny Westboro Baptist Church the right to harrass the grieving was anti-free speech.

Initially, of course, I was even angrier. Honestly, who would be suffering from a deprivation of their rights more: the bullies, who would be told "No you can't upset these people", or, say, someone who might have to hold a funeral in secret (and therefore deny many others the chance to mourn) if they didn't want to be psychologically attacked? What kind of freedom is it when you can't even have a funeral in peace?

But of course, anger alone isn't much of an argument. What would be the consequence if Westboro Baptist Church was not allowed to exercise its freedom of speech by picking on grieving people?

Donalbaion tweeted me this review of the book "When the Nazis Came to Skokie". In summary: in 1977, Skokie was an area in which a sixth of the residents were Holocaust survivors and their near families. In this very area, a neo-Nazi group wished to demonstrate. The residents fought against this, citing not only the worry that violence might erupt from the demonstration, but their right to live without intimidation from a group who presumably supported the horrors they'd gone through. But on the other hand, to refuse the neo-Nazis a right to protest would violate freedom of speech. The review concludes: "Strum's book shows that freedom of speech must be defended even when the beneficiaries of that defense are far from admirable individuals."

In other words, once someone (say) took out an injunction against Westboro Baptist Church, who else might lose free speech as a consequence? It could be anyone, for any reason. It's just too dangerous.

But that's not the end of the story. All that agonising over human rights, knowing that people are going to be bullied and degraded - that is, according to this piece of writing, precisely what they want us to do. Go and read it now.

Apparently, this is not about beliefs at all. Whether or not they honestly think God agrees with all their statements about who is going to Hell, their aim is that someone else will get angry enough to try and violate their rights somehow. And then they can sue them.

As "El_Camino_SS" has written:

I saw that he was way too calm and collected for what he looked like in the media. I noticed that he never made personal statements against a person, which is verbal assault, and an out against a lawsuit. Also, for a religious fanatic, a group of people who pride themselves on personal attacks, he was running a protest so terribly by the books that I was impressed by it. He will not bait a person, ever. He will not make personal attacks. He will make blanket statements. He will look at a person in the crowd that he thinks is gay, walk over to his stack of signs, pull out the appropriate, well designed, easily read, laminated bright board, and hold it up and loudly proclaim that "gays are going to hell" or some such nonsense, and make eye contact, but he will never cross the line of telling that person that they're going to hell. That would be the part that would screw up the lawsuit. He just wants to get them after him, but wants to appear utterly blameless for damages.

. . . They run too tight of a ship to slip up, and at that point, I realized that the objective of the group was not anything religious at all.

Assuming the above is true - and here I do not claim to know for sure - this seems to me another misuse of law, and it's even more cynical than the type of misuse about which Skeptics here in the UK have heard so much. It's not even, strictly speaking, misusing the law. It's not using archaic silly laws that are set up to benefit the already rich and powerful. It's using a hallmark of civilisation simply to try and get money out of people.

And frankly, I'm not sure if there's anything we can do. With the first type, we can sign the petition to change the UK's outdated and embarrassing libel laws. With this type? We can't change that law, because that way almost everybody would lose their rights, rather than in the above case, where so many would gain them. After all, a civilised society does not remove its welfare state because a handful of people abuse it. And Donalbaion was right to point out that we cannot put free speech to a majority at risk because a handful of people abuse that.

I suppose, in this case, that if anything can be done, it could be a grassroots, done-by-the-people effect. For example, stronger people are less bothered by banners which display the words "God" and "Hate" in the same breath - so a campaign to give people strength in some way. Perhaps similar banners could be waved, saying something like "Civilised people don't target the grieving" - using the Phelps' tactics of blanket statements and never coming across as personal. Just showing solidarity. Bringing a society to a point where it no longer cares. Of course, you good folks in the States may already be doing that; I honestly don't know. My post is about law and free speech, not about any particular church.

And there are things that to some extent make up for the worst. For instance, according to that journalist's post, at least the grieving cannot be verbally attacked, and that these folks only stay for a maximum of 30 minutes. And, more importantly, they are a tiny minority. Take a peep at this Apple store in Chicago (photo taken by Arfon from the Zooniverse). We may not all be Steve Jobs, but if your rights have been violated, in most cases in civilised countries it will only be a few people who've done it, rather than an entire society. Often, most people are on your side.

Astrophysics, here I come

Whew! I'm here!

"Here" is London, the city I was born in and still think of as home. Through a friend of a friend I've found some lovely lodgings just outside the North Circular and am getting used to cooking for one again. All of a sudden there are things going on all around me. There are kids playing with remote controlled cars in the streets, there are buses and trains for which I seldom have to wait more than one or two minutes, there are endless food shops, there is shouting and laughter, there are beautiful parks, there are such a huge variety of people, there are all these friends I can meet without travelling for hours. And there is Queen Mary University and a course which, so far, looks as if it's going to be the course of my dreams.

Over the years of running the Galaxy Zoo forum and getting more and more interested in astronomy, I became increasingly aware of the gaps in my knowledge - the more I knew, the more I found there was to know for which knew I needed some training. Absorbing facts is one thing, but mathematics and computer code and the language I call "journalese" (in other words, the very dry style in which scientific papers are written) is quite another. My knowledge contained some of the gorgeous constructions of science, but without the nuts and bolts to hold them together or build on them. The trouble was that neither my undergraduate degree in Environmental Sciences nor my attempt at teaching had been any encouragement to study any more. I had long stopped thinking of myself as academically minded. So I had thrust the idea into the back of my mind and it stayed there for years, until one tedious morning driving to a pretty useless course I was on for work when the idea of doing a masters in astrophysics suddenly popped into my head like a massive bright gold light being switched on.

At work later that day I snuck onto Google and by that evening I knew which course I wanted to do: this one. There weren't very many others, to be honest (at least not without also doing an undergraduate degree), but this seemed both the friendliest and the best tailoured to what I wanted. I began filling out the form, but procrastinated, worried about money and unable to get hold of one of the referees I had in mind. Then it was off to Boston for the 218th AAS Conference and that was it.

That conference was one of the happiest times of my life. I was invited into what turned out to be a waterfall of astrophysics, flooding me from all sides. Everywhere I went there was more. And miraculously, I found I actually understood a lot of it. Not a large percentage. But I did begin to notice that what I wasn't understanding was the jargon, the mathematics, the acronyms. The concepts themselves were fine. And many astronomers didn't understand the acronyms either: astronomers were specialists, so a cosmologist for example might be bemused by the many Kepler reports on extrasolar planets - and they were quite happy to tell me so. Even more encouragingly, several astronomers wanted to talk to me at their work, and were quite happy to explain things to me in detail. Since I was writing an article for the Astronomy Now magazine, and because the older I get the less self-conscious I become, I never worried about putting my hand up in seminars or press conferences to ask questions. And the upshot of that was that I heard the same thing from umpteen genuine scientists: "Where do you study?" and upon hearing that I was not a student, "Oh, you must do a PhD! Your questions are really good - you've obviously got a great aptitude for this subject!"

(It's really hard work, not aptitude, but we are often reminded that the former is what really makes the difference. For instance, I also used to be one of the worst public speakers I know. I just curled up and mumbled. Seriously. Now, due to repeatedly bludgeoning myself with the task, public speaking is one of the things I'm best at. In fact this was one way I reasoned myself into going ahead and applying: if you can run the Galaxy Zoo Forum, co-found Cardiff Skeptics and learn public speaking, I told myself, you can conquer mathematics. We'll see in the next few weeks if I was right . . .)

This autumn, I'm studying Cosmology and Research Methods. The latter is quite a new course and there is some worry that it seems "soft" and is somewhat hard to teach. It's actually incredibly valuable - everything anyone studying science needs, everything I wish I'd been told as an undergraduate, everything you need to know if you want to back up some claim you've made (or debunk someone else's). The material we are reading for it is also anything but "soft"! Next term will be Astrophysical Plasmas, and Extrasolar Planets and Astrophysical Disks, both of which sound pretty mysterious! Next year will be the Galaxy, the Solar System, Stellar Structure and Evolution, and Electromagnetic Radiation in Astrophysics - these are all more familiar to me and I can't wait to take them, but since it will also be my dissertation that year, I'm glad to be getting the difficult things out of the way now.

It's a part-time course because for one thing I want to go slowly and for another and MSc course is expensive, as is living in London. So I'm also looking for a job. If you happen to know of any science or science communication related jobs, please let me know. Science communication would of course be my ideal, but I realise I can't be choosy! As well as astronomy I have some background in Environmental Science and Chemistry, plus teaching English and Science, plus other supervisory roles, plus an awful lot of admin. Oh, and some experience of working with vulnerable people - which has been the subject of a lot of my outraged-at-injustice posts the last year or so. Oh, and I'm a very good proofreader and editor. (This is not a post in which I'm going to bother to be modest.)

I'm hoping to get myself together and get blogging more; it's been a topsy-turvy year and I haven't done much for some time. Meanwhile, because I owe so much to Galaxy Zoo for getting me into astrophysics, and because it's so much more fun to feel as if I'm doing the course for hundreds of other people as well as me, and because it'll make sure I myself keep up to date, I'm writing about what I'm learning here on the Galaxy Zoo Forum. Please come along to ask questions and join the lively discussions it's prompting!

Apologies, also, for not writing an Ada Lovelace Day post. Today is Ada Lovelace Day, in which we celebrate women in science, and women who have influenced us. Can I make the excuse that I've been busy starting off on what might one day make me, myself, a female scientist? (I don't know if I will aim to do that or not yet. Let's just say that it looks a lot more possible than it used to.) Carolyn Porco recently tweeted a list of inventions you probably didn't know were made by women, and I also want to make a tribute to Wangari Maathai, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who died a few days ago. Her loss to the world is great: she has done amazing things for women, for politics and for the environment; you can read more about her at the Green Belt Movement.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, and may neither men nor women ever be put off from learning!

Why do stars live in galaxies?

Coma Cluster from SDSS

This post is dedicated to David Allen Green, who asked me after seeing my PubSci talk why the Universe is full of galaxies - stars living in "cities" - rather than stars being evenly spread around, so the Universe is one big galaxy.

People often remark that the Big Bang sounds like an explosion, or is described as an explosion - and that is a violent, chaotic, destructive event, so why did it produce so much order? I have written about the Big Bang itself in more detail here. David knew this was not the case. His question is, in more scientific terms, this: if it produced so much order, and everything expanded - why did it expand with some areas being denser than others?

I'm not going to answer in the traditional way a scientist would expect. I have a tendency to answer things by telling the story in the opposite order from the traditional way. Rather than starting with the Big Bang, I'm going to start with stars.

The Big Bang did not emit stars. It did not even emit atoms. All this stuff came later - when things had cooled and been able to clump. Paradoxically, a star cannot form from hot gas, only cold, because the atoms (or molecules, or ionised atoms and electrons) of a hot gas or plasma are whizzing around too fast to be able to stick together and condense.

So, how can gas cool down? There not being fridges readily available in outer space, it basically needs to be shielded from radiation. This happens in dust clouds. We can't see the centre of our own Milky Way Galaxy because of all the dust in the way. Longer wavelength radiation can get through a lot of it, but not optical (visible light). Where the dust or gas is thick enough, it can cool. And that's when it gets affected by gravity. It contracts.

Star formation typically occurs in clumps, turning the whole area apparently blue. Take a look at these two galaxies and you'll see where the star formation is occurring:

Galaxy Zoo 1 tutorial

In the spiral galaxy (left), the stars are moving in the same direction. In fact, they move into and out of dense areas, rather like cars moving into and out of traffic jams. This allows regular shock waves to pass through gas clouds, triggering their gravitational collapse and setting off star formation. In the elliptical, on the other hand, each star is going on its own route (see here - click the arrow on the right - for some rather silly star orbits which still remain stable, like a ball falling back to the Earth after being thrown upwards). This leads to the gas being in pretty much a mess, too. There's nowhere it can comfortably clump and cool without being disturbed for a while. Indeed there are no gas clouds left - an elliptical is known for having used up all its gas and having no fuel left. (There is some, but it is too hot and thinly spread to form stars.)

When stars do form, they often start in clusters like the Pleiades:

Digitised Sky Survey; Wiki

The nearest area to us where star formation like this is occurring now is in Orion's Belt. Next time you see the familiar hunter and those three stars lined up, you can relish the knowledge that although it looks dark around them, there's a churning gas cloud there and a great deal going on inside it - APOD has a gorgeous picture collection here.

Star formation stops in the cluster once the stellar wind from the young stars blows off the rest of the gas; we know the Pleiades are young because there is still a lot of gas surrounding them. Due to the gravity of stars in their local neighbourhoods, these young clusters then tend to drift apart. While in Boston I heard one theory that we may have captured some of our comets and even planets from our sister stars in the Sun's infancy. It was an odd talk . . .

Anyway - this was not the question, but I hope it demonstrates that star formation is not straightforward, and that things need to happen to get it going. I suppose one could say space needs to settle down and get ready.

It does demonstrate why stars don't live outside galaxies: basically, they need to form from gas clouds, and any self-respecting gas cloud that happens to collapse in space won't just generate one star at a time - it'll generate lots! The closest we can get to these is an irregular galaxy. These are clumps of star formation without a local supermassive black hole, and without a defined structure such as spiral or elliptical. They are also far smaller than the big monster we live in and the sort the Zoo has been studying. (This is why Richard's project is so exciting from a purely scientific as well as a citizen science point of view - well, duh, if it wasn't good science, it wouldn't be good citizen science either. But you know what I mean. He has already found that irregular galaxies are much more starforming even than beautiful blue spirals.)

Irregular galaxy from SDSS

So, stars form when gas clouds collapse. And a good thing too, or we wouldn't be here - not only does the Sun give us light and heat and keep the Earth in a stable orbit, but it's nuclear fusion in stars that creates heavy enough atoms and molecules to form rocks and iron and organic molecules and water and so on that are needed to create life. (As Carl Sagan put it in Pale Blue Dot, it's funny that we consider this the anthropic principle when it might just as well be called "the lithic principle", that the Universe was primed to create rocks, too.)

But why should there be clouds of gas in the first place? If the Big Bang sent everything out in its own direction, and the force of the explosion was equal, sending everything in a sphere (assuming there are three dimensions - in any case, sending equal quantities of everything in equal directions) - then everything should be the same space apart.

Picture a given area of atoms, say of hydrogen. Each is the same weight and has the same gravity. Each is equally spaced from all the others. Each is pulling on the ones around it - so each feels a force from all of its neighbours in every direction. Like a tug of war whose sides are entirely evenly matched, nothing goes anywhere.

But the Universe did not expand quite evenly. Its evenness - its homogeneity - is very, very nearly complete. Especially after inflation. When we look back at the time before any atom was cool enough to get near another, the differences were less than one part in ten thousand.

That time is called "the dark ages" and it's the limit of how far back we can see. There's something in the way. And that's another sort of cloud - or to be exact, a plasma. A plasma is a seething mass of ionised atoms and their electrons - atoms whose electrons have been torn off. (There's probably no net electric charge, since for every negative electron zooming around, there's a positively charged atom somewhere.) The Sun is a plasma. And the one at the edge of the visible Universe is called the Cosmic Microwave Background.

We can't see through it because its edge marks the end of a time in the Universe when it was so hot that light couldn't get through it. (Recall that as you look deep into space, you look back in time. When we look at the Cosmic Microwave Background, we look at a time over 13 billion years ago. When you look at the Sun, you look at a moment 8 minutes ago - and hurt your eyes, incidentally, so I don't recommend that.)

Space was so hot and dense then that whenever a photon of light went anywhere, it promptly collided with an atom or an electron and was sent off elsewhere. It would have been like looking through a thick cloud - or, indeed, the Sun itself, where the same thing happens. (This is why the light that shines down on us is millions of years old. It took that long to escape.) But once the Universe had cooled enough, electrons were able to bind with protons and neutrons, to form neutral atoms. At that point light could get through. We cannot look back any further than that boundary; we have to look at the rest of the Universe and work out what happened before that point.

The COBE satellite, which launched in 1989, made a discovery about the Cosmic Microwave Background that explained our existence: some parts of it were hotter than others. Just a bit. And you've read earlier what hot particles do. They whizz around, they bounce off each other - they don't clump together as easily as cold ones. So everywhere in the Cosmic Microwave Background that was a tiny bit cooler got that tiny bit denser.

And that's where gravity set in. That's where the clouds of hydrogen and helium started to fall together. I have yet to read an astronomy book that doesn't jokingly relate this to capitalism - that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer - in other words, any area with just a bit of density will, over time, attract more and more material. And, conversely, the empty areas get empty. Marcus Chown has written a whole book about how the Cosmic Microwave Background was discovered, and the tiny, tiny fluctuations in it - Afterglow of Creation.

(I once asked Chris if heat alone could account for the fluctuations. Things were very hot then, and as in Brownian motion - the random motion of water molecules that kicked a pollen grain around and therefore allowed Einstein to demonstrate that atoms did exist, and measure their size - there would be a certain amount of randomness: particles moving now one way, now another, like waves on a lake. Would that alone be enough to account for the fluctuations? Chris said no. They were caused by something more, some other irregularity in the Big Bang. I don't know what.)

Stars and galaxies soon formed; the furthest - that is, the earliest we can find - you can read about here. Look at the Hubble Deep Field, a region of space containing vast numbers of very early galaxies, and you'd think that all that uniformity you'd expect from the Big Bang hadn't happened at all.

NASA; Wiki

And yet . . . David was also not wrong. Not at all.

Before writing this blog post, I dug out Horizons of Cosmology by Joseph Silk, which Astronomy Now had kindly sent me in exchange for a review, and which prompted this blog post. I thought it would probably remind me of a few useful things, and it did.

Galaxies live in clusters. Our own Milky Way does - and it is steadily zooming towards a larger cluster, even while the Milky Way and Andromeda circle each other, ready to merge. And clusters live in superclusters. Superclusters are the largest objects in the Universe. They are like bright filaments through the blackness of space. An accident and emergency doctor and dedicated galaxy classifier once remarked to me that they look remarkably like neurones in the brain.

NASA and Universe Today

Silk describes some of the deep sky surveys, the search to understand inflation and the minute differences in temperature that seeded the unevenness, and goes on:

"The larger the region, the more the universe approaches homogeneity. On average, the universe is completely homogenous. There is no dense centre, no rarified boundary region. Yet everywhere there are galaxies. In some regions, there are slightly more than the average, and in others, slightly fewer. We describe these variations as fluctuations in the average density of the Universe. Some are positive, some are negative.

When we measure the strength of the density fluctuations, in other words, we find that the overdensity or underdensity is smaller with increasing scale . . ."

Float away from our world, and look down at it: it will seem huge. Further, and it will shrink, and so too will the Sun, melding into our local group of stars. Later will come our Galaxy's spiral arm, then the galaxy itself. Then the cluster. Then strings of superclusters . . . the further you go, the more you see, the more similarity you will see. It's like when you break the world down to see atoms, and then electrons and quarks. Nature is simple. The Universe is vast. And I love it.

(You may notice I have created a silly new hashtag called Fizzicks Questions. I hope to answer more - and tell you about some good answers I have been given to my own astronomy questions - in the future.)

Shut up and be grateful - that's an order

I confess I'm a regular reader of the Virginia Ironside column at the Independent. The dilemmas are often interesting and indeed have given me ideas for stories, as well as prodding thoughts about real people I meet. However, I don't always agree with what Virginia says, and today's dilemma was no exception. A lady with osteoporosis in many joints is understandably infuriated with people being made anxious by her slowness and asks how to get them to calm down without being rude. Virginia responded with a blast of accusations of rudeness and being "impossible to please" - "people like you irritate me". Other letters published were all to the effect that the person writing in was basically an ungrateful cow.

Since nobody had any practical advice to offer, I gave mine. I also thought of blogging about how all these accusations completely missed the point of the dilemma. About how fussing, while better than the horrific prejudice thousands of disabled people face, is not the solution. And about regardless of how well a fusser means, the questioner had to live with this situation, and was asking about how to live it better - and being made to feel dreadful is not going to help her or anyone else. However, I don't have to, because BrennyBaby at NewsJiffy has already done it for me - many thanks!

(Related post: Blaming the vulnerable, from back in January.)

Update:

It got a lot more interesting than that. I did not really expect the writer of the dilemma to see my comment - but not only did she see it, she's posted her original letter and got a really good discussion going right here, so please check out the comments. And please join in!

On a time and place for pain

Many years ago I awoke very early, surrounded by sleeping people. I was on a week-long retreat with the creative writing society at university; I had just finished my degree. Curled up silently, feet away, was the guy I was mildly interested in at the time, in the arms of a girl whose arms were always covered with angry red slashes. I'd found out too late that she didn't like talking about it, which put me in a terrible bind: I ached to listen, to try and help her, and it seemed unforgiveable to ignore them, yet that boundary was one she had asked me to respect.

It was a wonderful week, but one in an unhappy time, for various reasons such as my then poor health and generally being young, with romances that weren't meant to work out, not working out. That sort of thing.

I couldn't bear to stay in that room. I crept downstairs. It was summer, so already light. There were more people downstairs; there were 13 of us in a house for about 5. The kitchen was empty, though. On the windowsill there were huge boxes of books. One was called "Cutting". I picked it up. I've never forgotten it.

I don't know how good, really, the book is. I know nothing about psychology and I have the feeling the author, a psychiatrist named Steven Levenkron, was writing about his own theories and I don't know whether or not they were tested. I could go and do a bunch of research now, but this is the wrong place to go into that or the issue of self-harm, which other poeple have written about far better than I could. Because that's not the point right now. I wanted to write about an atypical case in the book.

A 12-year-old girl was very good at gym, and seemed to be constantly training, always pushing herself harder. Sometimes she had an accident on the equipment, which hurt, but she would recover and go on. Her gym teacher grew concerned and called her parents, however, when injuries began to appear on her body that could not be accounted for by any accident he'd seen.

It turned out that the girl was used to the fact that after hard exercise, her body ached, and she had heard that that was a sign she was really pushing herself and on the way to success. Feeling desperate for more success - due to ambition or due to feeling undervalued out of the gym or feeling honour bound to please, whatever it was - she had started inflicting pain on herself, confusing that kind of pain with the by-product of hard training.

Now before we start shaking our heads and sighing pitifully and thinking how dreadfully obvious it is that two forms of pain should not be confused, let's remind ourselves how similar they often seem - and how much we need to reassure ourselves that the productive kind is worth going through. Isn't "no pain, no gain" a common saying? I once had an immensely illuminating discussion with a particle physicist at Sussex University. For some reason he and I and a few other students were talking about mathematics and how far removed it is from society. (I could not more recommend this wonderful essay by Paul Lockhart on that.) This physicist's remark was: "With so much television these days, and things like that, people think they should understand something instantly, and they must be stupid if they don't, so they should do something else. But mathematics is like a language, or a musical instrument. You need to practice."

Although the first bit sounds a bit Susan Greenfield ish, his words resonated with both my own education, and the curriculum I was supposed to feed to the children I later taught. In short: here is the learning objective for today, all of you must get it by the end of the lesson, and we will move on. No allowance for children who might whizz through five or six of such "objectives". Nor any allowance for topics, for skills, for complexities that needed a long story, that required several lessons - and often bits from apparently unrelated subjects - until it all hung together.

He had a point. If you don't get maths immediately, you're encouraged to stick to arts subjects. That's the attitude that, if many of us want to get anywhere, we must fight. The fighting can be painful. So can the practicing and practicing. Those of us who come to university to do a science degree, having done the kind of maths lessons that address something for one lesson, prepare you for the exam, and then leave you to forget. You have to make up for all that. It can hurt.

It leads to a schism of two cultures. The people who feel let down by the get-things-instantly approach foster their own reactive culture of work-yourself-like-mad-to-make-up-for-it. And a reactive, they-did-this-to-me-and-it-was-really-damaging approach to things can go a bit into overdrive.

Similarly, something being "hard to understand" can often be labelled as "and therefore, correct", along with "if you don't understand it, you just need your brain to work harder". Alternative medicine proponents use very warped logic to seem deep. Indeed, they use what they think is the language of scientists, and borrow the catchphrases of brave fighters, to look like lone, persecuted proponents of truth.

The fact that their logic is "hard to understand" does not make it correct. Something being hard to understand may mean that it is hard to understand, but important and worthwhile - quantum mechanics, for example. It may also mean there isn't anything there to understand.

Similarly, someone I used to know got very angry when I responded to his constant nagging that I became a devout Christian with a few choice quotes from the Bible, inspired by a few handy hints like this. When he told me that God was all about peace, and anyone who engaged in war was directly disobeying God, I reminded him of Numbers 31 7-18. "Where are you getting all this from?" he demanded. "You're obviously not looking this up as you go along." (For the record, I do not usually go around upsetting people by pointing all this stuff out until I've been severely provoked.)

The crux of the matter - excuse the pun - was that he would end up by acknowledging, "Yes, some of these things are hard to understand. But God is Love." Apparently, I was supposed to twist my brain around to equate war crimes and genocide with love. It was difficult, but a mature, thoughtful person could manage it.

Sorry, I don't think I'm being immature or thoughtless to refuse to equate war crimes and genocide with love. I don't label that as "hard to understand". I label it as "barbarity that is an integral part of an important and sometimes beautiful historic document, whose barbarity should not be overlooked or embraced".

But many people do feel that the "hard to understand" actually is maturity and depth. They have worked hard to find peace with it, and they feel that I should, too.

Maybe it's not the same thing as the pain. But maybe it is. Maybe feeling that you've made a difficult, complex leap, in whatever form, feels like an achievement - when it might simply be that you've made a difficult, complex leap into a much worse place than you were before you made it.

The reason I'm writing all this is to make a request to many teachers, employers, and other leaders out there. Not anyone I'm currently working for or with, all of whom (and I am very lucky to be able to say this) are wonderful.

Take a man whose company I worked in when I was 18. He believed himself to be naturally of infallible honesty, but irrevocably corrupted by a cruel world. He had had to adapt. He had had to learn to exploit and deceive. He had faced the pain of watching his real self die. He had to, he felt, charge a client £600 for his trainee (me) to update a few words and dates in a document to send them, a process which took 2 hours and for which I would be paid £7, minus tax. It was not respectable to tell your clients the truth about anything. "At the end of the day", as was a favourite phrase of his other two employees, that was how business operated.

Well, if that was what he wanted to think, that was his problem, I thought, and got on with my work. But no, he had to make it my problem as well. He couldn't stand the idea of me thinking, even privately, that one might be able to run a business without deceiving everybody, one might buy locally produced food, one might have a romance that worked, one might smile and do someone a favour without feeling afterwards as if you had personally handed them a spoon to dig into your flesh. I knew not to contradict him. I knew to look polite and listen. But my opinion must have been written on my face. I had to have daily lectures about how unacceptable my attitude was, how he had faced the pain of betraying his principles, and my not facing similar pain was equivalent to my being a bad worker (no matter how good my work was), and I had wasted company time by having him lecture me, too. I owed it to him to get as badly hurt as he had, to feel as if I too was filled with poison.

Why this was so important to him I have no idea. I'm glad I've never met anyone quite like that since. What was so strange was that I was, as he constantly reminded me, the bottom of the heap - why was it so important to him how my brain worked? He seemed to think he was doing me a favour by making me miserable. I'm sure I need hardly say he wasn't. It wasn't as if I learnt anything, other than that he wanted me to be miserable. Maybe he thought I was learning, maturing somehow.

It was the teachers on the science teaching course I nearly completed four years ago who were even more blatant. (I've written elsewhere about some of their methods.) Let me put it this way. Two of them, a man and a woman, complained to my mentor in my hearing that I had failed to cry when they expected me to.

Yes, you read that correctly. Apparently, my commitment, effort, and indications of success were measured by my ability to weep when they criticised my teaching.

Indeed, I recall now, all the girls in that school who I worked with had broken down in tears in public at some point or another - except me. I don't cry often or easily. It's not my thing - that's just the way I am. When someone humiliates me in public, I crawl into a shell. Surely to cry would be to let them win? I guess that was what they wanted. I guess they also didn't apply that standard to the male trainee teachers.

If they had some point to make about my teaching, then I presumed this was to instruct rather than upset and therefore I listened as hard as I could. It wasn't as if there was any point taking it personally. Of course my teaching wasn't perfect. I was a trainee for goodness sake. I was full of human faults like everyone else. I didn't know the kids or the curriculum as well as them. I didn't have their authority. I hadn't gained the children's respect. (Well, of course I wasn't going to gain that if they shouted at me or made sneering remarks in front of the children, as some of them did!)

And it's the same in a lot of jobs, if not to quite such a degree. Apparently "I'm stressed" and "I'm broke" is an acceptable form of boasting. To be willing to be stressed out, to be willing to be utterly humiliated, to give up your principles, to give up your dignity and important things in your life, means you are committed to the job.

It doesn't. It means you are committed to the ego management of your boss. It means they have power. It doesn't mean you're good at your work, but I guess the former is a lot more satisfactory to them (and indeed to be too good would be an insubordination).

Bosses? Teachers? Leaders? People with a public influence? Please think twice before being dissatisfied if those below you seem happy. It doesn't mean they're not learning, concentrating or respectful. Most of them will learn far better without extra pain. If you really need to see someone getting hurt, please bear in mind that in their lives they will all have plenty of that to deal with all on their own.

Thanks.

What the hell I'm actually doing these days

No, I haven't forgotten to do a blog series about the conference in America. It was utterly wonderful - here's my Galaxy Zoo blogpost about it - but I seem instead of blogging to be finishing up work neatly, researching astronomy history, trying to get my head around maths, whizzing around doing various talks, daydreaming, procrastinating, puffin watching, trying to stay in touch with friends, and hiding from my duties in ridiculous and ancient computer games. Sorry!

I said finishing up things at work? Yes - I'll be leaving my charity in about five weeks or so. I've got a place at Queen Mary University to do MSc Astrophysics! After my undergraduate degree, and not passing the teaching course, I spent many years vowing never to do postgraduate anything. Deep down I didn't think I was clever enough. However, I've changed my mind. The initial trigger was realising that the research I'm doing really needs me to have a deeper understanding of scientific research and how to read a journal. The main reason, now, is that the conference opened my curiosity and confidence like a bursting dam. There's nothing more encouraging than finding you actually understand professional talks and posters, that people are happy to answer your questions - and then to be told by several strangers, "You ought to do a PhD, you ask very good questions." Pardon the pun, but I'm over the moon. It was odd to get the offer by e-mail on a Sunday morning. I have a picture in my mind of a zombified admissions team slouched red-eyed over their desks on a Saturday night, fuelled with fourteen cups of that milkless sugarless corrosive caffeine that professional astronomers call coffee.

In other words, if you don't feel confident about something, maybe you can do it after all. I hope other people who've been disappointed in other aspects of their education will get another chance, as I have.

As for the talks, I recently went to Aberystwyth - a delightful experience because Mark and Sam were such lovely hosts, and a strange, nostalgic one because I lived in Aberystwyth for a few weeks when I was nine. I recognised nothing - not even the street I'd lived on - except the seafront and Constitution Hill. Skeptic speakers, Aberystwyth may be a long way away but I seriously recommend you go there.

My next Skeptics in the Pub talks will be in Winchester (August 25th) and Skeptics on the Fringe in Edinburgh (11th August)! Look what an amazing picture Ash Pryce made - even though Michael keeping that close an eye on me and the fact that my chin has decided to take up half my face are both amusingly disturbing.


Hope to see you at one of these. Cardiff Skeptics is also on Monday, and we've got a fantastic team lined up for a chaotic evening of science comedy.

A revolution snatched away

I avoided the tabloids anyway. A glance at a headline, or the first few sentences of an article, and I felt quite sick enough with no need to go further, like seeing a plate of mouldy food. Or hearing respectable-looking people spouting about how all jobseekers and immigrants are scroungers out to destroy their families and our culture because they read about it in such and such a rag. Or how climate change is all a lie, and how all scientists are dishonest "boffins" who mindlessly propogate each other's unfounded ideas. It kind of told me all I felt I needed to know. You know? And I know so little about media, law, and corporations - they're just not my sort of subjects - so I fear this will be a most spectacularly uninformed sort of blogpost. And yet I've certainly discovered that it is important to listen to the voices of the uninformed - sometimes they ask the best questions, or reveal weak spots that I can help strengthen.

It all happened so fast. I've spent the last few days glued to Twitter and the news - when I'm not busy at the office, obviously, and I've been doing extra time there this week as we've got a fundraising event tomorrow. There's too much stuff to read. I can't seem to keep up even if I spend all evening reading all the stories I can lay my mouse arrow on.

First it was the horror at them not only hacking Milly Dowler's phone, not only torturing the bereaved with false hope, but tampering with evidence; and Rebekah Brooks having the cheek to claim she had nothing to do with it and it was all for the public good. It got worse, with 7/7 family victims and dead soldiers's families having the same done to them. How could thinking, feeling people do this to each other? How could we give them the power to be the ones to tell us what's going on in the world every day?

David set up the #RebekahBrooksExcuses hashtag, which promptly went viral. I heard that the police knew what News of the World had been doing, and were either too pathetic to react or were actually bribed. Angry Mob pointed out very sensibly that this shouldn't really be news. It was the state of things. Should we be angrier about a 13-year-old girl than someone else? Part of me couldn't help but think yes - in the sense that as a former teacher I can't help but see children as people to especially nurture and treasure, and to feel that this callousness went beyond the mainstream - but it was a very good point (and I recommend you read that article). "We appear to be in a situation in which the majority of newspaper consumers accept without protest that what they read each day is not or cannot to be trusted . . . As consumers we can’t afford to be selectively outraged by an illegal technique depending on who it targets," wrote Kia Abdullah. Indeed.

Outrage grew into a determination to do something. We on Twitter smugly noticed we had power, and that was why many right-wingers especially hate Twitter. A Facebook group was created to "Boycott News of the World". (There are now several - including one which urges a boycott of all Murdoch's empire.) Of course, since most of its members wouldn't have been News of the World readers anyway, a boycott wouldn't be so effective - so they asked for ideas on what to do. For example, urging friends and relatives to boycott it; putting pressure on shops not to stock it; putting pressure on large corporations not to advertise in it. Ford was I think the first to publicly pull out (not of News International though!) - the Co-op put out a press release to say it was suspending it for now. Quite a few followed suit.

I wrote in with another suggestion: that a new "newspaper" was created offering cheap advertising space to all those who pulled out of News of the World advertising, along with exposes about phone hacking. I also signed Avaaz and 38 Degrees's petitions (I worry about signing two; but I did write a personal note with both of them - here is the one for Avaaz if you'd like to read it) - briefly, I asked the government to take this opportunity to consider the UK's own media laws. Clearly we have nothing to stop one individual taking over most of our media - which is wrong. No voice should have quite so much domination, as it affects not only our culture and policies but effectively decides who comes to power. Shouldn't we have a law to say that no individual or corporation can own more than such-and-such a percentage of our media? I'm sure it would be more complicated than that, but shouldn't it also be basic civilisation?

Then I saw Hugh Grant. Did you see Hugh Grant? I've never been a fan of him as an actor, but it took me about five seconds to become a fan of his bugging of and then confrontation with Paul McMullen - who seems to think that a) his own bugging of people is "a game", b) an actor's doing the same thing is "stooping" and "hilarious", and c) someone else's income somehow affects the issue. Even with terrorists I ask myself "What is driving them to this?" but with McMullen all I could think about was how pleasant it would be to pelt him with rotten tomatoes.

It was furore. And out of furore came hope. Steve Richards and Matthew Norman wrote thrilling pieces in the Independent about what this means for Murdoch in the long run. "When Margaret Thatcher made her Faustian pact with Mr Murdoch in the 1980s, granting him his every heart's desire in return for his unwavering slavish support, she hastened the creation of the monster we see revealed in all its gruesome hideosity today," wrote Matthew Norman. "In general terms, she gifted him the preposterous media market share he expertly parlayed into a stranglehold over the political elite. In a country without a written constitution, bereft of checks and balances and devoid of oversight, the levers of power are there to be seized by the most ruthless buccaneer in town . . ."

Politicians don't dare oppose what Murdoch's newspapers say, he argues, because it is they that make or break their careers. There was, is, opposition - but until now it's only been in whispers. They have now turned to outright shouting. "Today there is that tantalising sense that we no longer need to tolerate such Murdoch-Government axis powers' outrages . . ." Norman continued. "Today there is the hope, faint but seductive, of change. Public repugnance on this scale is a rare and precious force in a country beset by apathy. It fades very quickly, and must be harnessed and deployed before it does. It would take cross-party unity on a scale seldom witnessed outside time of war, with all three leaders agreeing that this, finally, is the moment to take up Vince Cable's rallying cry and go to war with Murdoch to break his dominion."

I watched. I retweeted. I wished I was nearer where things were going on. I fully wished that News of the World could be steadily bankrupted, as advertisers pulled out and sales plummeted. I hoped that Murdoch and Brooks and Coulson and their type would be the ones to pay. But they were several steps ahead.

I watched, as ever, in the office after I'd finished all the day's tasks. Then I got a very annoying phone call from a chap from Oxfam who demanded that I set up a standing order for what amounted to 12% of my income, fobbed off my "I'm at work and yes I am having a busy day" with "I won't keep you long" followed by an in-depth lecture, and who I eventually had to rudely hang up on. (I gave up donating to Oxfam because they pelted me virtually weekly with junk mail demanding that I give more when I had just graduated and was jobless for months. It must have cost more to send me so much stuff than what I was actually giving them. I told him this, and he informed me that only 11% of donations went to administration costs.) Then I was in such a bad mood that I went and spent more than 12% of my weekly wage getting myself some more work trousers and a birthday shirt for my mum, and a carrot cake. Then I went and picked my mum up from work, and we went home and ate. This took a couple of hours. Then I switched on my laptop and found out that News of the World was closing down.

For a minute or two I was almost dancing with glee. Finally, they had realised that they were not above the law and basic decency. They had responded much more dramatically than I had thought. Closing down! Actually shutting up shop!

Until this amazement faded and I realised what had actually happened. Brooks and the managers were staying. The journalists working for them were being sacked. Two hundred and fifty people about to be made unemployed - probably the majority of whom had never done anything wrong except to work for a dodgy paper, which some of them might well have been doing simply because they loved journalism and hoped to move onto something better once they'd risen a bit higher. The National Union of Journalists called an emergency meeting, and I hope it can help as many of these poor people as possible.

Opinion was split over that. Many people commented, not without reason, "Now these people are going to be the jobless they themselves have been smearing." Or, "Why the outrage at the News of the World closing when yesterday you were shouting for it to be made bankrupt?" I had made a joke about how Cameron was going to use our taxes to bail out the bankrupt News of the World, just like the banks - sadly, something very much like that had happened. As ever, the more vulnerable are the ones that paid to save the rich.

Two days ago it seemed that things were in the people's hands. Now they're not. Coulson is being very publicly arrested again, and I have the depressing feeling that he will easily talk his way out of it all again. The News of the World will simply be rebranded - even more depressingly, its new domain name was set up five days ago, I think before even the campaigns started. It seems they knew this was going to happen eventually, and merely picked their moment.

"Murdoch has never been as vulnerable as today and, if allowed to wriggle free, never will be again. This is an historic opportunity for parliament to excise the most aggressive malignancy in the body politic these past three decades, or at the very least stop it growing," wrote Matthew Norman.

I fear he's being very well protected from his vulnerability. There is one weak link left in his chain, though, and that is whether anyone actually buys his stuff or not. He and the government cannot yet force us to buy certain newspapers. We can also continue to pressure companies not to advertise in them (I wonder if those who pulled out knew all along that it was safe to do so?). We can, I suppose, keep the pressure on the government to reform media law to prevent such ridiculous domination happening again - although I don't know if domination and revolting tactics are necessarily related. (The only point McMullen made that did give me a nasty twinge was that hacking can also expose corruption that should be exposed . . .) And I couldn't resist putting up the logo of this Facebook group. Although it's mean to the journalists who write for the other papers, it sort of amounts to something we can still do.

Ice Blobology in the Kuiper Belt

Back in 2006, just before my interest in astronomy was rekindled by Galaxy Zoo, a spacecraft launched. It was called New Horizons. On 14th July 2015, it will reach a dwarf planet foursome: Pluto, Charon, Nix and Hydra. One of the things it will do there is use a spectroscope to examine Pluto's atmosphere - and see if Charon has one too, though that is another story. Its spectroscope, incidentally, is called Alice, which unlike CERN's is a whim not an acronym. The Rosetta spacecraft has an Alice on board too.

Diagram of New Horizons, from the BBC

So at the moment, New Horizons is about halfway to Pluto. But once it's done that job, it's got a whole Kuiper Belt to explore - and NASA is employing a wonderfully democratic way of choosing where to send it next: zooites.

The Kuiper Belt is the part of our Solar System that lies beyond Neptune. In 1943, a man named Kenneth Edgeworth speculated that beyond Neptune, any matter would have been too widely distributed to condense into more planets. Gerard Kuiper wrote in 1951 that a belt of small bodies would have been around in early times, but - because he believed, as many people did at the time, that Pluto is the size of the Earth, when we now know it is less than a fifth the size of the Moon - he did not think it would be there today. He is far from the first scientist to be remembered for something he did believe in! If Pluto had been as massive as Earth it would have done what actual planets do, that is, gravitationally scoop up or scatter all the other matter in its orbit.

The Kuiper Belt extends out to roughly twice as far as Neptune. It's thought to be the origin of a some comets, as even materials such as ammonia that we think of as gas are solid so far from the Sun. It is not the same as the Oort Cloud, which pretty much extends halfway to the next star - a sort of Sun-bubble, if you like. It's believed to be of a complex structure - Neptune's gravity, and resonances, and the fact that it maintains roughly the same disk shape as the rest of the Solar System, bunch up areas of the matter together. But, being of bodies so small, and so far from any source of light or heat, it's not been very easy to study. In fact, it was only really discovered for certain in 1992! This discovery involved painstaking poring over what were doubtless faint fuzzy images by two astronomers named David Jewett and Jane Luu, working in Hawaii in the late 1980s.

Technology has moved on since then, and now there are thousands of ground-based images of the Kuiper Belt. The Zooniverse has set its - what is it now, 400,000? I keep losing count - volunteers to going through these images to find possible Kuiper Belt Objects. If all goes well, New Horizons will be able to explore one or more of them.

This project is called Ice Hunters. Here's a sampling for you:

You can read about the mission and do the tutorial and so on - but here's a quick overview of what to do with that image. How to tell what is a Kuiper Belt Object out of that lot? (Click to enlarge, by the way.)

Well, what happens with image like these is that the area is looked at twice, and two images produced - one positive, one negative. When the two are overlaid, if nothing has changed, the image should be consistent. But if something has changed, it will be obvious. This, incidentally, is how Henrietta Leavitt found her Cepheid variable stars - very plodding, detailed work indeed, when plates meant sheets of glass, spotted with black or white, and spectra about 2mm long.

In practice, you can probably see that it's not working quite that smoothly: all the white blobs that contain some black are background stars. But there are two (or more, if I've failed to spot them) pure white blobs. Here they are, marked out:

(PS if you're wondering why my Facebook tab has "aaaaaaargh" as its heading, it was because I was commenting on a dreadful joke made by Richard Wiseman. I'm so intellectual sometimes.)

You can go back and look at images you classified. Here's one of mine, which has another interesting object in it. It's on the lower right.

It probably looks like a wormy thing at this size. In any case, it's actually apparently three blobs stuck together. Just like in the Galaxy Zoo Asteroid Thread, asteroids move relative to the Earth, so their position changes. So we're keeping an eye out for asteroids too.

Very thin, hairy streaks tend to be cosmic rays, not asteroids. I got caught out a couple of times marking them before re-reading the tutorial and realising I shouldn't. Oh well - as with all the Zooniverse projects, the beauty of it is they get several people to classify each image, so just such mistakes get ironed out. And, added up, human eyes are much better at this than computers.

Another way I got caught out is by images like this one:

On the right there is a dark streak, which is full of pure white blobs. Whenever there are that many pure white blobs, they tend to be in just such a dark streak, and I've come to the conclusion that these must be where the subtracting has slipped and we're being shown just one plate. They're doubtless stars - otherwise, Kuiper Belt Objects would be all over the place. Which just goes to show how important it is to clean up all those pesky stars! That must take an awful lot of programming, which is still continuing judging by the fact that they've got a checklist where we can mark out what's wrong with the image on the right.

And, being very fond of paraedolia, I couldn't help but laugh at some of the silliness in many of Ice Hunters's images . . . look at this little man jumping around on the bottom left!

We also have doughnut eyes . . .

. . . and a lot of spaghettified bottles and heads in bubbles!

So who wouldn't want spaghettified bottles, heads in bubbles and a chance to help NASA decide where its spacecraft is going to go? There's already what might turn into a row about which is the best Zooniverse project on my Facebook page. Personally, I have a fierce, mindless, animal loyalty to Galaxy Zoo, for being my first, and the one I have looked after for four years (Chris and I joked in Chicago about how the baby is growing up and has to go to preschool!). But I think I might hang onto Ice Hunters better than I did the other ones I tried. We'll see. Sadly, there just isn't time to pay attention to them all.

I'll be on a plane during the Rapture

Sorry for the lack of updates on this blog. Two months ago today I dug a grave and buried one of my best friends. She never said anything very intellectual to me, and she had four legs and was tortoiseshell, but it's astonishing how huge her personality was, how complex and important such a friendship can become. Here she is, my beloved Cassie, who had a horrific paralysing spinal injury - we know not how. She was only two years old.


She died only just before I was due to give my first Skeptics in the Pub talk. Thank goodness, Hayley stepped in. I've thought of writing about Cassie here, but I still don't think I can bear it - besides that not being the most interesting of blog posts. Anyway, since then, I've been busy with work and so on but more to the point just haven't felt like writing.

Now, things are getting more interesting - and it's a good moment to get back into writing again. Tomorrow night I get on a train and damn well hope it doesn't get delayed, because if it does, I'll miss my overnight coach to the airport and then will be in trouble! I'm going to Boston, Massachusetts - for the 218th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. I've kept very quiet about this because I barely dared believe it was happening, but I haven't received any last minute "oh by the way, sorry, you can't come" sort of messages - thank you so much to Chris and Galaxy Zoo for inviting me along! I'll be doing some Zoo/SDSS work in exchange, and if it's interesting - which I bet it will be - I will blog about it.

I'm going to be extending my stay in the States by a couple of weeks as I'm doing some research there - I'll blog about that too if it's successful, but not yet. It's in the preliminary stages at the moment, so I'm going to be annoyingly mysterious for the time being.

I believe you'll be able to follow tweets with the hashtag #aas218 if you want to keep an eye on what's happening. We'll be hearing quite a lot about Chandra and Kepler, and a great many other things astronomical, and the Henry Norris Russell Prize Lecture will be given by Margaret Geller - this is only the fourth time a female astronomer has won this and I do hope I'll be able to attend it.

As for the Rapture - the boredom with waiting for 2012 I guess - well, if it happens, at least I will get an excellent view of everything going on from the plane. If they let me pick a seat by the window, anyway.

(PS If you get the Society for Popular Astronomy magazine you'll find an article in the May/June Young Stargazers by me about the Big Bang. I hope you like it!)

My New Theory!

Dear all, I wish to announce an extremely important change to this blog, and to my life as a science communicator. First of all, I scrap this science communicator nonsense. They keep telling us that anyone can do science and I did experiments at school 'cause I was forced to in lessons so first and foremost I am a SCIENTIST and I have made DISCOVERIES and anyone who says otherwise is clearly either just gullible or in the pay of selfish academics who want to keep everything for themselves.

I have long had a problem with the lie that is relativity. Check it out for yourself! One minute these boffins are telling you that there is no force called gravity, that it is merely the curvature of spacetime. Next they say that it is a force but it is much smaller than the other forces, clearly ignoring black holes. By "they", well actually I've only heard it from Brian Cox, who was so mean about that most ancient and best proven science, astrology. And then they bring in this idea of tiny particles called "gravitons". How do you need gravitons if gravity is just curving space? As if you can curve nothing. Don't be stupid.

And don't get me started on Dark Matter. They can't even agree on what it is. One minute they say there's all this stuff around our galaxy that changes something to do with the rotation. Then they come up with all these other stupid ideas like MOND, which sounds more like a fashion item than science to me. If science is about making discoveries, why aren't all scientists in agreement with each other? They just want to keep up the pretence of still disagreeing so it doesn't look like they're all one obessive hive minded communist league. And to get funding for silly things like CERN, which recreate conditions from a time that never happened in the first place, when our money could be going to useful things!

It only requires a little thought. Gravitons are particles to do with gravity. When there's lots of matter around, they cluster round the matter or something, and they show gravity. But what if there isn't much stuff around? Like outside galaxies. Well maybe there's still lots of gravitons there. Just because galaxies are clumped together doesn't mean everything else has to be. (I mean, look at the way everyone's expected to be the same.)

So obviously that is what causes galaxies to rotate in a funny way. There's loads of gravitons about the place at the edge of galaxies, looking for a home. So scrap your stupid mathematical models - maths is only a way of intimidating people anyway, it doesn't mean anything - and get promoting my idea for what things are really all about. There's plenty of evidence, just look!

A representation of dark matter in the Bullet Cluster. Read more on Discovery Magazine and BangUniverse.

I would delete all the other stupid gullible posts from this blog that was really just me uncritically swallowing all the rubbish scientists had told me, but I thought I'd let them serve as a warning to you all.

P.S. In other news, skepticism has finally been acknowledged as just another cult, UK Uncut are going to become a political party, and you might see two dentist-requiring Suns in the sky any day now.