Telepathy

David T Lykken was Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota. He became very famous, far beyond academia, for his studies of identical twins separated at birth. In 1991, in an article reflecting on the practice of psychological research, he wrote these words:

Just as there are few hypotheses that we can claim as proven, so there are relatively few that we can reasonably reject out of hand. Extrasensory perception is a good example. Having worked for years with hundreds of pairs of adult twins, hearing so many anecdotes of apparent telepathic communication between them, which usually occur in moments of stress or crisis, I am inclined to believe in telepathy - as an individual but not as a scientist.

Brazil (4) "From a land of monsters to monsters in the sky"

A year or two into my PhD I started to work with colleagues in France. I learned lots from them, scientific and otherwise. In particular I learned the defining features of Scotland, as viewed from the rest of Europe: the Loch Ness Monster, and haunted castles. Nessie didn't surprise me but I hadn't been aware we were particularly haunted. The existence of a dedicated Wikipedia article seems to offer definitive confirmation, however (***FOR THOSE WHO DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW ME: IRONY ALERT!!!***).

I thought again recently of these defining characteristics. In São Paulo I'm a pretty exotic specimen. I thought I should offer a little bit of my exotic self to the city so we discussed a talk for the public, on a Scottish science story I have told often at home: CTR Wilson, the Ben Nevis Observatory and the origins of the study of cosmic rays. Lots of people, apparently, have found my webpages on these topics, come across one of the many appearances of the Cosmic Way roadshow, or heard me give a popular talk on these topics. Thinking of a title that would scream, "Scotland!!!" I mulled over the monster and the castles. I remembered a book I liked by an Italian astronomer, Paolo Maffei, called Monsters in the Sky (a nice book but a bit out of date now). The "monsters" of his title are the exotic objects of modern astrophysics, the black holes and exploding stars that are studied via the X-rays they emit. Some of the pioneers of X-ray astronomy, like Bruno Rossi, started out as cosmic ray scientists and adapted their expertise to this new subject. We know now that these same objects play major roles in the origin of the cosmic rays. Scientifically, we can indeed trace a line from CTR Wilson and the very beginnings of cosmic rays to the study of these outrageous objects, "monstrous" both in scale and in the challenges they present to our everyday ideas of the world. So the theme of "monsters" seemed to tie together all the strands of my talk together: "From a land of monsters to 'monsters in the sky'" was the title of the talk.

If I'd thought just a day or so longer I might have kept "ghosts" too. Wilson's Nobel Prize (still the only Physics Nobel for someone born Scottish) was for the invention of the cloud chamber, the device that brought electrons and ions, "phantoms" of the subatomic world, into the realm of the visible. "Monsters and ghosts: a Scottish tale of fundamental physics" might have been an even better title. Maybe next time.

We all thought this public talk was a nice idea but the timing was not good, there was no big high-profile event to attach it to, and a lot of end-of-teaching-year activities complicated finding a room for it. Anyway there was a nice audience for the talk, many familiar faces but at least one member of the public because I brought her with me. I enjoyed augmenting this familiar tale for a southern hemisphere audience, using MacKinnon tartan, Victorian paintings of highland cows crossing cloudy mountain passes, etc.; generally wallowing in cheesy Scottishness as well as, for instance contrasting the roughly 5 million population of Scotland and the 22(?) million of the São Paulo urban area.

Perhaps this was also a wee subconscious device to start turning my thoughts to home. I have only a few more days here until I swap fejoiada for black pudding, cachaça for whisky, temperatures between 20 and 30°C (not always with clear skies, to be fair, or even dry) for wind, rain, snow and short days. Home to a land of ghosts and monsters.

Brazil (3): A solar physicist takes a taxi ride

On the day I arrived a colleague kindly met me at the airport. On a Tuesday he could not bring his car (traffic congestion control measure) so we took a taxi to my new lodgings. I guess the phrase "South American big city taxi ride" will conjure up a particular, hair-raising image. Stereotypes concocted from a great distance so often turn out to be wrong; not this time. I'm sure we travelled at 60 miles an hour through dense traffic in busy streets. Over and over again we cut in front of other cars at what felt like well after the last possible minute to take some sliproad or junction. Our driver's eye and reflexes were fantastic. We'd have been in ten crashes at home but nobody even tooted their horn. Evidently drivers expect such craziness of each other. I said out loud, "this is exciting".

Here's a São Paulo taxi crossing the Avenida Higienópolis not far from Mackenzie University. The camera has frozen it but I expect it was travelling at high speed and dodging from lane to lane. I actually took this photo because I like the name, "Higienópolis". It also applies to the whole area: "hygiene town" and reflects how nice and clean it was, compared to Downtown, when they started expanding the city in this direction. It's still appropriate.

Much later it struck me that the taxi is a nice metaphor for some of the science that triggered my visit. The gas of the Sun's atmosphere is sitting quietly, atoms moving around randomly in all directions, with a range of speeds but none of them going too much above the average speed. Then from somewhere above them comes an electron or an ion at enormous speed, like one of those São Paulo taxis heading from the airport into the city centre. Unlike the taxis it has no skilful driver, only speed, and it just crashes into all the rest of the traffic, sending them flying in all directions with much greater speeds than they had before; heating them up and making them glow in various ways. Exactly why they glow holds our detailed attention. But of course we'd really like to know, "who ordered the taxi?" And why was it moving so quickly?

If a taxi crashes into a car all that happens is car and taxi get mangled and some fragments go flying off in all directions. When we look more closely at the collisions in the Sun's atmosphere things get a bit stranger. Most of the time no actual damage is done. A very fast-moving proton crashes into a slow-moving proton. Afterwards the slow-moving one is going faster than before, because it's had a big dunt, but both protons are still protons. No lumps are knocked off them, both are still intact. But if the incoming proton is going fast enough, things get weirder, a bit like a surreal, Looney Tunes version of such a car-crash. The two protons crash into each other, there's a bit of a blur, but afterwards, different stuff comes out and moves off. It's as though the taxi crashed into the car and then, afterwards, the car shot off in a new direction and not just the original but two new taxis also get spat out the far end of the collision, only different sizes and maybe colours from the original (protons don't have a "colour". But in the "Big book of science" type books I read as a kid they were always drawn as little red billiard balls, red for positive electric charge. Electrons were blue (negative) and neutrons were green.)

Let's stick with the taxi metaphor. A fast red taxi crashes into an identical, slow-moving red car. Afterwards we'd expect a red taxi and a red car to come shooting out of this collision. Instead we get a red taxi, a green car and a funny wee yellow, sort of half-size taxi. Before our eyes, the funny new car travels a short distance then changes into something else different again.

The taxi metaphor's running out of steam. Here's what happens: accelerated to very high energy by an uncertain process, a proton collides with another proton. After the collision some of the energy of the proton has been transformed into a new particle, called a pion. After about one hundred millionth of a second the pion changes into a different, less massive particle called a muon, and finally the muon decays and spawns an electron or a positron (the antimatter counterpart of the electron). The electron or positron emits gamma-rays (like X-rays only even more penetrating) which we detect with instruments above the Earth's atmosphere on satellites. Once we detect those gamma-rays we can follow this sequence of events backwards to learn about the protons that were accelerated in the first place.

My colleagues here in Brazil lead the world at observing very short wavelength radio waves from the Sun. Recently they've begun to explore the wavelengths between radio and infra-red, what is called Terahertz radiation. This is a frontier and they have made some discoveries that we don't completely understand yet. The stories I've described above might be part of understanding Terahertz radiation in solar flares and that's a big part of why I'm in Brazil.

Since arriving I've had other taxi rides that were not nearly as exciting as that first one. Was the driver thinking of proton-proton collisions and pions? That question will probably go unanswered but we can be more optimistic about the reasons that solar flares glow in Terahertz radiation.

Brazil (2)

When everything is different you're much more likely to experience those moments when you wake up to something you've been taking for granted, that has become part of life, that you stopped thinking about a long time ago. I've used Sao Paulo's excellent Metro system a couple of times now but it will take me some time to switch off that "what the hell" moment of irritation, when you don't get your ticket back. It's such a trivial thing, knowing that the barriers for the trains and the underground at home give you back your ticket, and you should keep it until you leave the train system through another barrier. When did any of us last give it a thought? But it's obviously more deeply engrained than I'd realised because I don't like it when it doesn't happen here.

It's not just the being away that's good, it's coming home again more awake.

Brazil (1)

I've been thinking of renaming this blog. It hasn't worked out as I originally planned (and as other people assured me it would - I was always awake to the danger of creating one more of those little unvisited internet graveyards of good intentions). Instead of a multi-disciplinary conversation it's just me sounding off about whatever comes into my head; and not terribly regularly at that. All on my own I can be as multi-disciplinary as the next guy or gal, but with wildly varying degrees of expertise and effectiveness. Laying personal claim to the spirit of DACE would be hubris on an impressive scale, and unjustifiable in dozens of ways. I think maybe the name should change but I have no idea to what. Anyway it seems likely I'm going to touch on all sorts of topics over the next couple of months so maybe I'll give in to hubris for a wee while longer. Any new name suggestions will be more than welcome - even although I'll probably ignore them (already I like "The unvisited graveyard of good intentions" but I suspect Bob Drake already has a song with that title).

I'm spending most of the rest of this year in Brazil, on study leave, working with colleagues here. I have a visiting position at Mackenzie Presbyterian University in Sao Paulo. The name of this university has caused some amusement among friends from the Western Isles but: (1) Mackenzie himself was an American (2) it is a very serious institution of 40,000 students, with possibly the best Law School, for instance, in Brazil.

Mackenzie's compact Sao Paulo campus is guarded and policed in a way that would be alien at home. There's a big high wall around it. Each of the entrances is controlled via the sort of barriers we know from railway stations and you need a magnetic card to come and go. Uniformed guards keep a close eye on the barriers and are stationed round the campus. This might sound intimidating but it's not. They just keep an eye on things. I don't think I've actually seen them speak to anybody. Their uniforms are not remotely military, more like janitors, and they're unarmed. It's worth noting that there are parts of the city not that far away that you wouldn't walk around after dark. On Sunday the entrances to the campus are all shut up, as in the picture (I'll post another showing it busy, if I can do that unobtrusively).

Mackenzie is a private university. I was curious about this. I was told that 75% of Brazilian Higher Education is private. The state universities are the most competitive to get into. The kids who go to expensive schools have a head start and are more likely to meet the entrance requirements. So poorer people are more likely to have to spend more money, maybe work at the same time as study, if they aspire to higher education. If this is correct Brazil has some way to go down the Widening Participation road. Of course there is also the possibility that this is a glimpse of our future.

I was also fascinated to learn that Mackenzie incorporates secondary and primary school provision. If you can afford it, you can send your kids to schools that are part of a University. I have no idea how integrated primary and secondary provision is with the rest of the university, if some people teach both degree level students and younger people. I don't think anybody I know has anything to do with the school level provision, however (seems like a missed opportunity - how exciting for school age kids to meet people who are leading edge researchers in subjects like astronomy, that grab the imagination). But it's quite likely I don't know lots of what goes on here yet.

This ingredient of Mackenzie really caught my attention. It's quite unlike anything that happens in the UK. But this might not always have been the case. It reminded me of the young William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, attending Glasgow University at the age of 11. This wasn't, apparently, a consequence of unequalled brilliance but just something that wasn't unusual for bright children of affluent families, in a time of much less formally organised education. I don't know if Glasgow University offered classes specifically for such young people or if they just sat in lectures and took in whatever they could. There probably isn't much similarity between Kelvin's 1834 experience and that of young Mackenzistas, even allowing for the radically different worlds around them. Nonetheless I was intrigued by something Brazilian universities do that ours stopped contemplating a long time ago. Probably somebody reading this knows more - please comment!

That was the first Brazilian bulletin. Everything here is different so I'm bound to touch on all sorts of topics before I go home; a tiny wee, inexpert DACE.

500 years of Astronomy in Glasgow

In this year's Open Studies programme we have a day school, Saturday 5 October, 10.00 - 13.00, on the history of Astronomy in Glasgow. I know lots of people would find this day school fascinating, even if they think they're not interested in Astronomy. People who come to Astronomy courses sometimes say they want to hear about new discoveries, not history: black holes, supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, dark energy, etc., so some of them might need a little persuasion too. We can Tweet about this, or post on Facebook but I'd like to use a few more words to try to persuade lots of people that they should come. Here we are - please read on!

The tutor for the day, Dave Clarke, has just published Reflections on the Astronomy of Glasgow which tells the story of 500 years of Astronomy in the city. Dave is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Physics and Astronomy and was Director of the University Observatory when he retired just a few years ago. In the Preface he writes about his successful interview in 1966, the old astronomical clocks that caught his eye that very day, and how his attention returned to them much later in his career, leading almost inevitably to this detailed history. So he is THE authority on this subject at the moment, with a wealth of detailed information and stories at his fingertips. In the day school Dave will lead a wee walk around the university campus, looking at these same clocks - which are very old, and extremely interesting - as well as portraits of some of the key characters and other relics. But before this there will have been a fascinating look at the succession of - very varied - Professors of Astronomy in Glasgow, the development of the subject in the University and its relationship to the history of the city more widely.

Most people nowadays have a clock built into their mobile phones and all of us are locked into a single, global standard of time via wireless telecommunication. GPS tells us where we are on the surface of the planet. Things were of course not always so simple (they're not simple now! But most of us can just use them as though they were). Astronomy played an essential role in the regulation of time, and in navigation, all through the 19th century when Glasgow's wealth was being built on global trade. So the Professors of Astronomy had vital jobs to do and their stories at various points illuminate the development of the city. They're closely tied to the growth of the port, the development of the harbour and the city centre along the river, the story of shipping on the Clyde. You can still set your watch by Edinburgh's famous one o'clock gun; Glasgow's is mostly forgotten but provides one amusing incident in the middle of these tales.

Alexander Wilson was the first Professor of Astronomy in Glasgow, from 1760-1784. Here's a nice, modern perspective on the feature of sunspots that still bears his name. A fascinating array of characters succeeded him. I've always had a soft spot for J P Nichol, a hugely successful populariser of Astronomy, pal of poets and literary types (like Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas de Quincey), teacher of Lord Kelvin.

The Dowanhill Observatory is long gone but its memory lives on in the name of Observatory Road, just off the top of Byres Road. The now-bustling West End was still green fields when it was established in 1845. Like so many city observatories, Glasgow's have been pushed further and further out by burgeoning populations but the physical move of the university from the Old College in the city centre to Gilmorehill was also part of the story.

So: the growth and development of Glasgow and its place in the Empire, the evolution of scientific knowledge and ideas and their relationship to wider currents in society, the evolution of the fourth oldest University in Britain, both physically and organisationally; all of these strands and more are viewed through the particular, illuminating lens of Astronomy's history in the city. Dave is a a warm, enthusiastic speaker. This day school was in our programme last year and Dave also gave a wee talk on these lines as part of our contribution to the West End Festival. Each time people came out saying, "that was excellent. There should have been ten times that number of people." I know if you come along you'll agree with the first of these statements. And I hope the second won't be necessary.

I linked to details of Dave's excellent book above and you can get it from Amazon.

Raspberry Pi

Really just a few notes, mostly for my own benefit; like the MOOC post. I might not even click "post".

The Raspberry Pi is the hardware core of a small computer. It was conceived primarily as a sort of sophisticated, educational toy that kids would learn to program, gaining basic skills of programming and computer systems in the process. You buy a board with a processor and some memory. The board has interfaces so one can attach a keyboard, video display device (a TV - HDMI not VGA) and various other sorts of device. There's a USB socket. It's just credit card sized, so it's great for all sorts of physically small projects that need some computing power, flying a webcam on a balloon to take aerial photos for instance. The teddy bear that repeated Felix Baumgartner's amazing leap from the edge of space was Raspberry Pi-powered.

The Raspberry Pi and some other bits of hobbiest scale electronics form the heart of the AuroraWatchNet magnetometer design, for monitoring geomagnetic activity (manifested visibly as the aurora).

Various enthusiasts are thinking about radiation detectors based around raspberry Pi's. Here's a forum discussion. A simple radiation detector kit built around a photodiode rather than a Geiger tube might be a good starting point.

Don't know how many people read these; probably more than find them interesting! If you find this and know something about these topics, any comments will be read eagerly.

Added next day: you run Linux on these. The preferred flavour is Debian. Ubuntu and no doubt others cannot support the Raspberry Pi.

radio thunderstorms

In Scotland we've just had the second hottest summer on record. As the month wore on more and more cloud accompanied those high temperatures and July closed with some beautiful thunderstorms. I was tickled to see them showing up in the measurements from our little Callisto radio telescope, mentioned in an earlier post, e.g.:

This picture is called a spectrogram. What's it showing? Time increases from left to right, across the picture. The caption at the top tells us that the picture represents events on 25 July, 2013. At the bottom of the picture you can read that the picture starts at 14.45, quarter to three in the afternoon, and that it represents about a quarter of an hour's worth of data, i.e. of measurements of the radio signals arriving at the antenna out at Acre Road.

Each of those vertical streaks is the pulse of radio waves from a bolt of lightning. You've heard the radio when there is lightning, that loud "click". Draw a horizontal line across the picture and each time it crosses one of those vertical lines, that's a lightning strike; a "click" if you're feeding the radio waves to a loudspeaker. For example there was a bolt of lightning just before 14.52. I should emphasise that this is the pulse of radio waves from the lightning strike arriving at the antenna; the lightning itself might be some miles away.

The height at which that horizontal line is placed represents the frequency of the radio waves. For older readers (like myself), we can think of where we stop moving the dial that tunes the radio to a particular station, perhaps the Home Service or the Light Programme, or one of the many more distant and exotic possibilities: Radio Luxembourg, Hilversum , Athlone....

You can read the frequency of the radio waves from the scale at the right-hand side. They lie between 45 and 80 MHz ("megahertz" - Mega, millions, of Hertz, cycles per second). This is quite a nice range: Medium Wave radio stations mostly transmit between 0.1 and 2 MHz, while FM radio stations are mostly between about 85 and 110 MHz. So this range is away from strong, man-made signals and that's why we use it. Across the top of the picture there's a funny, repeating pattern and that's some sort of man-made radio signal, possibly from some sort of electrical machinery rather than a deliberate transmission.

The colours represent how intense the radio waves are (how loud the click would be if we played them through a loudspeaker), at each time and frequency. The blue colour that's mostly there in the background means nothing much is going on. The most intense radio waves are yellow. Looking at that lightning "click" just before 14:52, for instance, it would have been a much quieter click if we had tuned the dial to below 50 MHz or above about 75 MHz, than in between these frequencies.

When I saw this lightning signal it reminded me of the very beginnings of radio astronomy, in 1932 and 1933. Bell Labs wanted to start using radio frequencies of 10s of MHz for communication, but they needed to know what competition radio transmissions would face from natural sources. Karl Jansky, a young physics graduate, was tasked with answering this question. He discovered three natural sources of radio waves at these frequencies. The first is the one we've seen here: nearby thunderstorms, highly variable, intense but short-lived. The second was the weaker, steadier signal from more distant thunderstorms; there's usually thunder happening somewhere. The third, a steady "hiss", was a much more unexpected discovery. Jansky was able to work out that this came from the sky, from a direction that stayed fixed among the stars and seemed to coincide with the direction to the centre of the Milky Way. "Star static," he called it. This was the first indication that radio waves could tell us something about the universe beyond Earth, although there was only slow progress at first in following up this discovery. Now, of course, radio astronomy is a major branch of the subject. The information it has given us on, e.g. cool gas in interstellar space, neutron stars, or supermassive black holes in other galaxies, could not have been obtained in any other way. The radio wavelengths still have a major role to play in answering the big, fundamental questions of Astronomy, so bigger and more powerful telescopes are still being built, like LOFAR.

Our Callisto receiver's antenna is too wee to detect most cosmic sources but it does pick up what it's meant to: the bursts of intense radio waves that sometimes come from the Sun when there are sunspots, flares etc. These were discovered in February 1942 by J S Hey, an English physicist working on radar during World War II. He soon recognised that this new sort of signal was coming from the Sun, not a German radar jamming technology at all. Jansky would have discovered these solar radio bursts if he hadn't been working at the bottom of the sunspot cycle, when the Sun was not very active at all.

Now that we can understand spectrograms, here's a wee sample, from earlier in July on a day the Sun was particularly busy. Just one comment just now: the solar radio bursts might look a little bit like very intense versions of the signals we get from thunderstorms on Earth. They're not! They're something quite different that can only happen in the tenuous, high temperature gas of the Sun's outer atmosphere. More in a future blog post.

Lastly, here's a nice lightning photo also from July 2103:

Northbourne: lightning continues
  © Copyright Chris Downer and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.

Kafka bus company

On non-biking days my journey home from the St Andrews Building often involves a wee walk up to Great Western Road to catch the number 6 bus. Then the mysteries start.

First of all, I almost never get there at the perfect time to board a bus.

1. Mostly the buses just aren't anywhere near - more about this case below.
2. Sometimes they get to the bus stop just before I arrive and I get to watch them disappear along Great Western Road towards the town centre, just before I actually reach the bus stop. I hate those days! Watching that bus come to a halt, pick up passengers, and move off again while I'm trapped on the other side of the traffic racing along Great Western Road, feels like one of those punishments visited in perpetuity for sins I no longer remember.
3. Sometimes I get to the bus stop just at the perfect moment. The bus is just a few yards away (this is the British Empire after all) and it comes to a halt so I can board it effortlessly, no hanging around at all, looking like one of those people who surf reality, stepping weightlessly from one perfectly timed action to the next.

You would think that cases 2 and 3 would occur at pretty much the same rate. If the bus is somewhere near, either it's just ahead of me or just behind me and if I and the bus are arriving randomly at the bus stop it should be 50/50 which actually happens. But it doesn't feel like this is the case. The punishments seem to occur much more often than the rewards.

Now these words seem like a silly little boy with a persecution complex. It seems possible that the frustrating days strike the harder blow so that they loom more numerous in memory. But I wonder if there might be some mechanism that would in fact make them more frequent? For example, my presence at the bus stop in advance of its arrival will make it slow down. If I'm running towards the bus stop with the bus in front of me, however, the oblivious driver will keep it travelling at a constant rate so the same interval of time between me and the bus will result in a bad consequence more often. That might not be right but I'm trying to imagine how this might be a real effect. I'd love to hear thoughts, by email, or in the comments below; and especially to discover that somebody else has already asked this question.

Even the most frequent and apparently straightforward occurrence, a bus still minutes away, is not unattended by mysteries. Our super-high-tech Glasgow bus stops include a digital display that shows the timings, updated apparently in real time, for the next few buses (I don't have a picture. Let me warn avid readers that I will edit this text and add a picture when I remember to make one). Perhaps this notice board tells me that the next No. 6 bus is five minutes away.

When I came to Glasgow as a student it struck me that Great Western Road resembled what it was, for me: the road home. An attractive, broad, straight thoroughfare, it rolls for miles and seems to lead inevitably and unavoidably out of Glasgow all the way to the small communities of the West Highlands: Oban, Campbeltown, Lochgilphead, Fort William. Standing at that bus stop on Great Western Road I can see about a mile along it to the west. I can see easily that no bus is five minutes away. Nonetheless that digital sign at the bus stop gets automatically updated. It tells me that the next No. 6 bus is three minutes away. Then one minute. Then it is "due", an acknowledgement that no bus has arrived and in fact none is yet visible. The same bus shows on the display as "due" for a few more minutes, then simply disappears. Another bus, previously 5 or 7 or 10 minutes away, moves to the top of the display.

Do these buses exist? Although we never lay eyes on them the digital sign tells us they move around the city, pass our particular bus stop, and move on. Where are they actually doing this? Maybe it's we at the bus stop who don't really exist. We're just brains in vats being fed fake sensory information that says, "a bus arrives and leaves again". Except it's bogus, incomplete, allowing us to pierce the veil. Just like The Matrix.

Or perhaps there's a slightly less baroque explanation: a bus service that runs according to its own internal bureaucracy of timetables and electronic notice boards and does not allow itself to be distracted by the reality of whether the buses actually exist or not. Nowadays it's easy to operate such a service, for example in a FirstBus digital simulation of Glasgow. Sort of a Kafka Bus Service.

Mumford and Sons

Last week I was in Prague, attending the 2013 CESRA Workshop; a super meeting, providing lots of fodder for future blog posts. Since I was co-leading one of the Working Groups there was little time for tourism but I was able to relax, in one of my favourite cities, for a while on Sunday. Passing the old Jewish cemetery I recalled the dark tale of the Golem, creature of dirt animated by arcane knowledge.

Back home I saw my brother, on Facebook, ask, "what do people like about Mumford and Sons?" I could reply only, "beats me". But I thought a bit more about Mumford and Sons.

You look so edgy walking down Byres Road in your Che Guevara t-shirt; but which shop did you buy it in? Who gets the money when you buy a Rage Against the Machine poster? All the symbols of protest and even the ideas behind them are vulnerable to commodification. Capitalism clasps its enemies to its breast and adds them to its product range. This is certainly one ingredient of the current "there is no alternative" mentality.

Since the 1950s popular music has been a mixed blessing for capitalism: a focus for dissent and a fabulous commodity at the same time. We see those tensions from day one in the desperate tale of Elvis, Colonel Tom Parker and Hill and Range (I've really enjoyed Peter Guralnick's two-volume Elvis biography, by the way). Music's never got very far out of control but it's been a troublesome little commodity from time to time, all the same. How much better if we could have the commodity without the possibilities for dissent, for "consciousness-raising" (sorry!).

My little theory is that this is where Mumford and Sons come in. Real folk music is risky. It deals in eternal truths, death, passion, archetypes. It makes you think about who you are and how you fit into the world (as long as you don't treat it as wooly-jumpered nostalgia); subversive stuff. How will we deal with this? We'll produce a bland, neutered commodity music that does none of this but has the visual trappings of folk music, clothes, acoustic instruments, and deals in a non-threatening sort of fake, overwrought emotion. We'll market it intensively and people will forget about the scary stuff. They'll feel cool because they're into "folk music", and they'll be happily surprised how little it distracts them from their roles as producers and consumers. This is what "folk music" will become, just as "rhythm and blues" has gone from John Lee Hooker to Beyoncé - who needs no weblink from me (a fact underlined as I type by the automatic appearance of the acute over her last "e"; BlogSpot has Beyoncé in its spelling dictionary!).

So I think this is how to understand Mumford and Sons: a sort of golem, animated by capitalism, set going to defend the established order from folk music. A Capitalist Folk Golem (and yes, isn't that a great band name? It's mine. You can't have it).

Of course this is nonsense. Capitalism doesn't "do" things, perceive enemies, animate golems. What on earth are we talking about? And while we're at it, could we really animate a man of mud in some moment of magic? Funnily enough I think the answers to these odd-looking questions might be connected, via ideas closer to my usual territory. Maybe we'll tackle those another day, if there is sense to be made of them.

Another, final little aside: the experimental music record label RER Megacorp is having a summer sale. Many of its titles are going for a fiver a shot. Do yourself a favour: take a chance on some of these, try some sounds like you never heard before, music permanently immune to commodification. Play them when you're doing other things around the house and see how these new sounds seep into your brain and what they do to you, happy in the knowledge that any profits are going to the musicians and the handful of people who keep the record label afloat.

Archie Roy

Archie was a great man. We shall not see his like again. I was honoured to speak for a few minutes, describing his contribution to adult education in Glasgow University, as part of a public tribute. When planning for this event started, I expressed the hope that his stalwart 50+ years of Glasgow University Continuing Education would be remembered. Such a view, voiced, means you get fingered to say something yourself and I was happy to do so.

I started with a little bit of history, partly re-used from a previous talk. Archie started teaching for us in 1951, when university continuing education sat on the crest of a wave. It seemed important to provide some context, especially in describing a sort of provision which is certainly now in decline, irrespective of any absolute value it might have. Also, academic colleagues from other European countries might have been mystified; the "extra-mural" tradition is a particularly British phenomenon. I was struck, again, by how Scottish physicists played such significant roles in this history, even at its earliest origins.

Archie was a man of some eminence, globally, with genuine achievements to his name. Many colleagues, sympathetic in principle, now have no time for continuing education. There's always another paper to be finished, a grant proposal deadline to hit. That Archie always found time for those people outside the academic mainstream says something important about the man: a great scientist and a polymath but one for whom people and community never lost their importance.

MOOCs

What's a MOOC? "Massive open online course"; a course offered online that anybody can take, and delivered in a way that should make it possible for people to sign up in huge numbers at a time, even 10s of 1000s. Without having studied any of the detailed literature on MOOCs, I don't believe they involve any radical new development in online pedagogy, just a sort of package that aims to use some of the existing methodology in a way that people can take advantage of, townloads at a time. I think the biggest development is in the thinking of administrators: the idea that traditional universities might find it useful to make these things available, completely free and accessible to anybody with a computer and internet access.

We had a bit of a conversation today about MOOCs. It made me talk to one or two other people. I learned some things:

• some big universities have already got together to form MOOC delivery consortia: Coursera, edX, Udacity
• Edinburgh was the first university in the UK to become seriously involved in MOOC delivery, but with results that should be classed as "mixed", and a range of student experiences
• one key, maybe the most important, to making these "massive" is that they're free. This also means it's easy to drop out again, no matter how good your intentions, if the rest of your life gets in the way. If completion rates reach 50% my feeling is they're doing really well
• mixed experiences continue, I think maybe mixed both in the experience the institutions provide and the expectations students bring
• we're absolutely on trend, man (well, late getting there): there is a MOOC hashtag in Twitter

You can see the appeal to us in what-used-to-be-DACE: the walls of the academy not just surmounted, but dissolved. There are so many reasons this won't happen, some obvious, others needing more digging out. But lots of them are there. Millions of comments will, I know, appear immediately below. For now let me conclude by noting my inordinate pride in the neologism, "townloads".

Lisa Tuttle

Years ago, maybe 1992 or 1993, the science fiction writer Lisa Tuttle was a speaker at a day school we organised in DACE. At that time Channel 4 was keen to build up a relationship with people who were interested in its science documentaries. It set up a "Channel 4 Science Club" and instigated the Science Line which provided expert follow-up following Channel 4 science documentaries. People could telephone Science Line following those documentaries and leave their questions. One of a network of experts would provide an answer within a few days. Jo Brodie recalls Science Line here.

Derek Jones, the Channel 4 producer behind Science Line, also established relationships with many of the university adult education departments across the UK. There were a lot more of them then! Many of us set up events specifically intended as follow-ups to Channel 4 documentaries. At the end of the TV programmes there would be an announcement that such events would happen and contact details for a list of them. This was a couple of years prior to widespread computer ownership and the emergence of a widely accessible internet. It was still necessary to announce a phone number and have people telephone for further details. I remember particularly a day school to explore fundamental physics - relativity, black holes, cosmology, quantum, mechanics - as a follow-on to A Brief History of Time. Made by the great Errol Morris this programme was first and foremost biography of Steven Hawking, so there was lots of room for a more in-depth discussion of the scientific ideas. With the Channel 4 publicity push we attracted 70 people, a lot for one of our day schools, many of whom were not aware Glasgow University offered this sort of thing for the public. Some of them may still be coming to our courses and events for all I know. I particularly remember three guys who had left home (Crewe, if I remember correctly) at 5.00 AM to join us. They went to several of the university events ("we were at Cambridge's but yours was better!").

Another such day event took a scientific look at some of the various nightmares offered by science fiction: enviromental catastrophe, alien invasion, intelligent machines taking over. If I remember correctly there was a series of documentaries with the collective title of "New Nightmares". We (Ann Karkalas and I) had fun mixing up the science fiction and science fact elements, very much also a theme of the Channel 4 documentaries. The lineup of speakers for our day school mixed literary types and academics. Lisa Tuttle contributed as a science fiction writer. Ann had discovered that she lived in Argyll so was - more or less - local and available without spending a fortune on air fares. I'd never heard of Lisa Tuttle and was intrigued that such a person would have somehow descended on my native heath. I found a book of her short stories and was very impressed. In person I remember somebody surprisingly unassuming, given the strong, steady eye of those stories, and also, well, slightly guarded. Maybe she was wary of academics (an understandable reaction). Before she spoke I wasn't sure how she would come across but I remember a very interesting, thoughtful presentation which went down well.

I came across Lisa Tuttle's name again today, by accident. I was somehow surprised to learn from her blog that she still lives in Argyll and has even set a fantasy tale on an isolated peninsula reminiscent of Kintyre. It was strange also to learn that she has worked as a temporary librarian in Campbeltown Library, where as a teenager I scoured the shelves every few weeks, when new books came in, looking particularly for those bright yellow Gollancz science fiction covers.

Perhaps we'll see Ms Tuttle at another of our events one of these years - hope so. Anyway, steeped as it must be in the feel of Kintyre and mid-Argyll, I bet that "The Silver Bough", this newest, peninsular novel, is really good and that you and I will enjoy it.

PS (added next morning) I should note the other speakers on that day: Peter Meadows addressed global environmental threats; we had a double act from Chris Boyce and Duncan Lunan on extraterrestrial life and alien invasion; Susan Stuart spoke about artificial intelligence, saying much more interesting things than her remit would have suggested. I still get a kick out of the jumbling together of several different academic disciplines.

carrots

What a super lunch we had on New Years Day, thanks to my clever, lovely wife. A very rich steak pie was joined by some rather special veggies, winter greens (what is that? didn't exist when I was wee) and a very tasty, garlicky carrot puree. There was lots of the carrot puree and we finished it off over the next couple of meals. Are carrots really good for night vision? This afternoon I wondered about carrot consequences.

I wasn't enjoying a day of Access students' UCAS applications. By late afternoon I needed air. It's only 15 minutes in the car out into the forest and moors beyond Eaglesham so off I popped.

It was 16.00 when I left the car. On 3 January, in Glasgow, the Sun sets at 15.57. Most of the Eaglesham Moor (now thought of by many as Whitelee Windfarm) was blanketed in mist, or rather low cloud. No sun-drenched walk awaited.

From the car I headed off along the track through the forest, that will take you to the top of Myres Hill. There were windmills there long before the now-huge windfarm got going, first a variety of experimental designs owned (I think) by the National Engineering Laboratory, then a couple of bigger, 1 MW NEG Micon turbines. A couple of years ago this track went only to Myres Hill. With the expansion of the Whitelee Windfarm there are other options and I took one of these.

It was dull as I set out, as you can see at the left, and it got duller. I followed a track that led up to the east end of the windfarm proper.

The photos were taken with the camera on my phone (HTC Desire C if you care about such things). I was sort of interested that I could take photos at all. I expected useful light to disappear very quickly, inside the cloud with the Sun below the horizon. But photos continued to be possible (if dull).

Every so often my ears told me I was passing close to a turbine, in particular as I came to the end of the forest. The Whitelee turbines are 110 m tall. One of them obviously lurked quite close. Its sound came from well above my head, probably just 10s of metres away but it was completely invisible; a huge, undoubted but rather spooky presence. Very shortly after this I came to a sign that said "Turbine no 103". There was no longer enough light for photos - the attempt shows just blackness. I could clearly see several tracks now, heading off into the windfarm proper. Any further progress would come with a real risk of failing to find the correct way back so I turned round.

For some time I'd been aware of just how isolated I was. Nobody else was near. There are houses round the edges of the Eaglesham Moor but there was almost certainly nobody else in the middle of it, certainly not walking about for "pleasure"; windfarm employees possibly but nowhere near me. I felt special. It was such a pleasure to be there I couldn't understand why more people weren't sharing it.

It was getting darker and darker, an hour now since sunset and inside fairly thick cloud, but I could still see. In particular, I could see the reflections of trees in the boggy ditches at the sides of the road. Where was this light coming from? Was it the remains of the day or the glow of the city? I wondered briefly if all those carrots in the last couple of days had helped (nonsense of course). Wherever it was coming from originally, the light was diffused all through the cloud so that it shone weakly from all over the sky. It struck me that it might actually be slightly brighter, inside the cloud with very dull light coming from all around, than on a nice clear night with light coming only from the direction of the recently set Sun. Probably the answer is known, in some classic book on radiative transfer. Perhaps in a future blog post... (or the comments?).

On the way back I took a different route. I knew that another, different track would take me back to the car more directly, and was familiar enough with those tracks to have no trouble finding it. It's a much older track, however, not maintained, and I hadn't expected it to be so muddy. Although it never actually got so dark I couldn't see, I was grateful that I could use the phone as a torch on a couple of occasions, to negotiate the sections that looked flooded.

The lights of the few houses at the end of the public road were rather a spooky sight through the cloud, but also a reassuring one and I was able to make my way back to the car without any problem beyond rather squelchy feet. The name of this place seemed chosen for this foolish outing: Carrot Farm.