The From Hell series on television a while ago neatly filled a niche in the market: a dirt cheap programme people will watch and then talk about. Eventually, it emerged that there aren’t actually enough bitter disputes between people who want to be on TV to keep many of these series going. This was a problem for producers, because it might mean they have to start thinking again and come up with something original. Soon, they hit upon the answer: Wife Swap.

The principle of Wife Swap is quite reasonable. The women swap lives for two weeks and experience a different way of living and, in week two, impose their own rules to try and improve it. Unfortunatley (for the people on the programme) the families who will swap with each other appear to be chosen by the same people who chose which answers will vanish when you go 50:50. They are chosen deliberately to make good TV. For those of you who are wondering, “good TV” is the same thing as “despair”.

Usually, at least one couple will split up after the programme is made. At least once a new couple has formed from the shards. But at least that programme has a point to it. After Wife Swap today Channel 4 showed an advert for a new programme, in which two families who have never met are sent on a holiday together. The idea seems to be that there is no holiday they could go on together that they would both enjoy, and then they fight for a week or two while we all watch. It worries me slightly that people are happy to ruin other people’s lives just to make a TV show, but not half as much as it worries me that people apply for these programmes. I can only assume that one person pressures the other into agreeing to do it.

On the other end of the spectrum, there is a new programme coming soon which promises to be a cheap laugh and is actually quite original. It appears to be a traditional quiz format, but with added distractions (in fact, the show is called Distractions), such as buzzers which electrocute players when they are pressed. It is, in many ways, a work of sheer, pointless genius. Unfortunately, they appear to have seen fit to insert Jimmy Carr into it. It should be made clear that there is nothing on this Earth which can be improved by the addition of Jimmy Carr. He can be seen on the advert doing his ‘baffled by everything around him’ act. He looks around blankly with the look of one who is either about to ask “why?” or kiss an imaginary person, but if we’re lucky then maybe he’ll be rendered harmless by a strict format as he was on Your Face Or Mine?. That said, you couldn’t make that show worse no matter who hosted it — I rather suspect the producers worked this out and that’s how him, Josie D’Arby and her congenital throat condition got the job.

There aren’t too many good hosts out there any more, though. Anne Robinson is just awful, Dale Winton is slightly more camp than a row of pink-checked tents with lace edges, Chris Tarrant really wouldn’t work any more on any other programme, and that only leaves Jimmy Carr, and Ant and Dec. Ant and Dec, of course, count as one celebrity. When you look at the big catalogue of celebrities you can book for a programme, they’re the payer on page six with a little box marked “two Geordies count as one choice!”. And the thing about Ant and Dec is that they have something built into them that automatically makes you like them. I have no idea how they do that. (If I did, it’s unlikely I’d be sat here writing a website when I could be out putting my new power to good use.) Unfortunately, it also seems to make you automatically dislike the programme they’re presenting. This could be a problem for the programme producers, you would think, but really, when the programme is “I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here” there’s not much damage they can do, and I think they showed incredible restraint making fun of it as little as they did.

Evolution is a ruthless system, but it is one that has worked well enough for most life forms so far. The trouble is, when mankind evolved to be a particularly intelligent, social creature* we also developed morality†. This is of course good news for mankind, but it does mean that evolution doesn’t work for us any more. This is again a good thing for everybody individually, but it does mean that from the point of view of the species as a whole we are doomed to a future where random mutations are all passed on because it would be ‘discrimination’ not to. So what can we do?

The fact is that the population of the human race is spiralling out of control and the majority of it seems to consist of idiots. Yesterday I saw a panel of chefs on television patiently explain to a viewer that it was entirely safe for her to eat an aubergine even though she had an egg allergy. Apparently she was worried that egg-plants were related to eggs somehow. The fact that one is a brittle shell containing nutrients for a chicken fœtus and the other is part of a plant didn’t seem to offer any clues to her, or presumably any of her friends. It worries me a little that people like this are allowed to raise children. It seems to me that there is a good chance they’ll forget they have children and leave them in the car or something. Or they’ll feed their children something poisonous because they don’t know any better. If they did this deliberately, of course, the government would arrest them and have their children put into foster care, but even though it’s extremely obvious to me that they are going to unwittingly injure or kill their children is a fantastically stupid way, the common view is that it is their inalienable human right to have children. (The children, of course, will inherit the Stupid Gene and find it even harder to survive this hostile family environment.)

In China, of course, the population problem is even worse than here, and they implemented a rule of “one child per couple”. This keeps the problem nicely in check, but if we want to survive as a species without evolution we should offer two children to couples who would be better at raising them, and no children at all for the couples who would try to dry their children in their microwave ovens. Stupidity is a major enemy of the human race and it must be conquered. Some people will undoubtedly say that this is unfair, but there are enough people who can’t have children through no fault of their own and that isn’t fair either. We may as well introduce some kind of a system to decide.

The other problem with random genetic mutations is that they frequently cause diseases. I firmly believe that in a few years (maybe decades) we will have the technology to detect which sperms and eggs carry the diseases and which do not. That will mean people with genetic disorders will be able to have children which are their own, free of disease, and yet not genetically engineered. Once this is invented, and stupidity is bred out of the gene pool, we will have beaten evolution. Let’s hope it’s along soon, then.

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*Some parts of it exhibit only one of these traits and become taxi-drivers or computer programmers. Some parts exhibit neither, and become university professors.

†Again, some people didn’t, and they became advertising executives.

Today, I had an experience which resulted in me resolving never to buy another sandwich from the coffee bar at uni. It has been harder and harder to find a ‘harmless’ sandwich (that is, any sandwich with not too much salad, and not in a baguette) in the selection, and as a result I had to try the “Turkey Salad”. It was terrible. The turkey was alright, and the egg was fine. The vegetables were the problem. The tomatoes, for example (and I realise that they are technically a fruit) were clearly not ripe. Now, I understand that the Whistle Stop Café doen a rather excellent line in fried green tomatoes, but personally I want red ones in my sandwiches. And I object in principle to cucumbers. They are almost entirely water, and taste like it. (Over 67% of the world’s fresh water is trapped in cucumbers.) This was a particular problem in this sandwich, because quite apparently it hadn’t been defrosted properly. My sandwhich contained ice. Bearing in mind that it is entirely possible to go to Bakery 164 just across the road from uni and pick up a fresh sandwich, I think I’ll do that in future. I could probably use the exercise.

A few weeks ago me and Adam met our neighbours. That is, the neighbours to the right of us. To the left is a haulage firm who let off fireworks for a laugh and Adam suspects may be a front for the mafia, and below us are yet more neighbours. We don’t know them, but we know when they get text messages because the sound travels pretty well.

We weren’t trying to meet the neighbours, though. we were only out taking advantage of a 3-for-1 drinks offer and randomly chatting to a couple of guys. Adam was rather suprised to see them again, let alone to see them outside our house having a fight, and more suprised still to learn that we live next door to them. We don’t know them very well, though. All we know is that they seem to need a lot of shelves*. We know this because there is almost always the sound of a power-drill punctuated by a repetitive banging noise against the wall, and the worst part is it sounds distinctly like they’ve made it through to the cavity and will arrive in our house in a few days.

With all this irritating noise, it is really fortunate that we are no longer disturbed by BT’s automatic irritating noise service, which used to phone us up and beep at us. The bad news, though, is that this is because our phone line doesn’t work. Apparently, the story goes, a car hit the green box thing by the side of the road. This didn’t do any damage, but it knocked the door open and drunk students thought it would be really funny to pull out some wires at random. Then we walked away without touching it and some skutters, who have fewer inhibitions about interrupting hundreds of people’s phone service for a quick giggle pulled out some wires at random. We’re still waiting for it to be fixed, and I would be willing to bet we’re being charged for the privelidge.

Of course, that’s by no means all the irritating noises we have to put up with. There seems to be at least one emergency a day whose solution requires a loud siren to drive past our house and demonstrate Doppler shift. The road noise carries surprisingly loudly into our living room, but none of the irritating noises compare to the idiot taxi driver behind us. (We just have neighbours everywhere.)

His daily routing seems to involve arriving at the house early in the morning (that is, early in the student morning, so maybe about 10:30) and announcing his arrival with a short blast on his horn. When nobody appears within five seconds, he hits it again, and again, and again, for longer and longer with less and less gap. Then later, he will go back outside, open all the doors and the boot of his car, turn the stereo up as far as it will go, and play bad music at everybody.

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*Though Lizzy insists we also know that she fakes it. Nobody else shares this belief quite so strongly, which either means Lizzy is wrong, or else she’s just very good at it.

Earlier today I tweaked the settings on my banner exchange. I turned off a couple of banners (one of which had been shown to 800 people and failed to generate a single click), and more specifically targeted the remainder, so that they would be seen only on English language sites based in English speaking countries, but not ones about gardening, and so on. While I was doing that, I read up a little on the various ways of increasing my web traffic (read: slowing down this site for your inconvenience). According to their articles, the best thing about online adverts (which aparently aren’t as worthless as the media would have you believe — though that said the article that said this was taken from BBCi, who have at least as vested an interest as the media who repeatedly tell us the internet bubble is about to burst) is that not only do you know how many people saw tham, you know how many of those people clicked on them.

This is all well and good, of course, but the fact remains that even if someone clicked on your advert, if they are there because you have lied to them and told them they have one a prize, it is very unlikely to result in any sales. (According to all site-promotion sources, your website is selling something. I don’t understand this viewpoint, myself; I’m fairly sure I couldn’t ship you an AS3 Alarm System even if I wanted to.) It is odd, therefore, that of the hundred default banners you can download and customise from E-BannerX, the first ten or so are “WINNER!” animations, and the next ten or so are fake error boxes. And of course, nobody bothers to customise them. Largely for this reason, I would reccomend against clicking on any flashing coloured bars marked “You have 12 new messages from singles in your area!!1!” at the top of these pages.

Of course, there is a law agains false advertising, so if they don’t send you a prize after you click on their banner, in theory you have a case, though of course this depends on the phrasing of the banner. I’m not encouraging you to sue every idiot with a geocities account and a GIF animating programme, but you have to be aware it is illegal, or the next bit doesn’t work, so listen carefully: these banners were uploaded from E-BannerX’ website, which suggests you use them if you can’t be bothered to make your own. E-BannerX’ terms and conditions do not allow websites which encourage illegal activity, and as I have just shown, their website does just that. They have their own banner exchange at the top of every page, so presumably they are in breach of their own conditions and should close their own account immediately.

When we got back to university this year, we were struck almost immediately by just how small the laboratory is now. The trouble, of course, is that the entire physics department is slowly being bought by the computing department. Well, when I say ‘entire’, that isn’t technically correct. It would be far more accurate to say that they are only buying our part. We’ve lost most of the third and fourth year labs now, we’ve lost large chunks of the mechanical workshop, and we’ve lost a computer cluster altogether. Interestingly, not one member of staff’s office (which all contain computers of their own) has been sold, and the research deck (which houses all the staff’s pet-projects) has remained entirely intact, despite having corridors as wide as most people’s living rooms. In fairness, it would be hard for the computing department to use corridor space bought from the research deck effectively, not least because there are only twelve men in the world who can find their way around it, but this is not a good trend, because my view of the future is that it will need an awful lot of physicists to invent all the things which so clearly need inventing.

My view of the future, it should be noted for the record, is rather warped — or at lease I hope it is. I fully expect that if Arnold Schwarzzeneger can be governor of California we are in for a very poorly dealt with few decades. This, in turn, means that any slight problems will be magnified by an inability to fix them efficiently, and therefore the economy will be in major turmoil. This has two main implications: firstly, since football is totally invincible, FIFA will use their control over the World Cup competition to influence all governments’ decisions to the point where they will effectively rule the world, and secondly, currency values will be so volatile that one day you will be able to afford a large country house, and the next day you won’t be able to afford a Lion bar. I expect people will get around this by adopting the WHSmith ClubCard reward point as the new standard currency. I also expect people will start to use electric wheelchairs not because they need to but because it’s easier.

But there are still a lot of things which need inventing. We need to invent a digital radio which is also a mobile phone, and can be worn like a tiny hearing aid by people who have perfect hearing anyway. We need to invent bass speakers which are loud, but which also sound a bit like the instrument which was recorded. We need to invent jam which comes in slices like cheese does.

First, though, we need to invent a way of storing music on discs. You probably think we have a perfectly adequate system for doing this already, but that is either because you are willing to put up with a lot of crap from record companies, or because your approach to listening to music is “out of box, into wall socket, listen to songs”. Don’t get me wrong; that’s a perfectly acceptable approach, but as a geek and a physicist I simply cannot take this view. There was a time, of course, when there was only one format you could buy music in — vinyl. This made things very simple. When cassette tapes first came out they made it very easy to record or copy music, and distribute it for free. This angered the record companies, who felt they should be paid huge amounts of money for delivering songs written and performed by other people to the general public, so they responded by ignoring the problem entirely. Luckily for them (or they thought so at the time) CDs were invented. At first people thought that CDs would fail because you couldn’t record on them, and in doing so demonstrated that three million people really can be wrong. CDs were, as you presumably already know, a roaring success. Later, some enterprising soul devised a way to make CDs in a drive which would fit into a home computer. Since CDs are digital media, it was then very easy to make perfect copies of any music you felt like copying. Around the same time, another equally enterprising but probably less sociable soul devised away to compress music to preposterously small files whilst keeping an impressive amount of quality, and broadband internet connections became extremely common. This made the record companies extremely angry indeed, and they set about solving the problem the only way they knew how — by suing everyone they could think of. First, they sued the person who wrote Napster. Then they sued the people who share music with it. Then they went after people who download music from it. Three students in America were asked for about nine hundred thousand dollars compensation after their hard disks were checked. Then the answer came along. Sort of. DVDs were just what the record companies wanted; they were high-capacity and digital, but couldn’t be copied nearly as well as CDs, they were region-coded so they could stagger releases for maximum profit (which almost worked), and most importantly, they were completely incompatible with CDs so people would have to buy their collection for a third time. (Of course, there were various other formats along in the meantime, most notably the MiniDisc, but that was only really used in car stereos so it clearly doesn’t count. In fact, I have only known one person ever to buy music on MiniDisc, and that was only because she thought it was a cassette.) The trouble with DVDs, though, is that they were first designed for videos and computer data, and now noone can quite decide how they would be best deployed to store audio recordings, or just how much people should be allowed to write to them with their flashy new DVD recorders, many of which will end up as the dusty digital equivalent of the Betamax. And that’s why we need to think of a standard which works properly and stick to it, before we all end up with record collections which cannot be enjoyed without eight or nine different machines to play them with.

This may seem like a very pessimistic view of the future, but I would rather buy a third copy of Rockin’ The Suburbs on whatever format comes next and pay for it with ClucCard points than wear silver bodysuits with triangles and aerials on them all day. On the other hand, I suppose, the future might equally turn out to be pretty much like the present but with taller buildings.

I just saw an advert for a new “way to say thankyou”. They didn’t go into any details about what exactly they would do to convey your gratitude to another party, but that’s alright because you can always “see special packs of Andrex for details”. It made sense when Quality Streets did it; I for one would be happy to receive a box of chocolates. I can’t imagine I would feel the same way if someone presented me with a special toilet roll for my troubles.

Right at the start of this year, I told everybody that I did not ever want to become a physics lecturer. The issue is not so clear cut now, though. A few facts have come to my attention which have made the prospect variously more appealing, less appealing, or often both.

The first is that there seem to be an awful lot of offices around the department with names on the side, many of which don’t appear on the timetable. These people have offices, and presumably therefore salaries, but no actual teaching duties. More appealing. Many of these offices, though, have up to nine names on the door. Less appealing, particularly if one has to share with Mike Reis.

The second fact is that you do not need to know very much about mathematics (more appealing), physics (less appealing), or indeed anything at all (much less appealing). For example, it is a widely held belief amongst the lecturers that by modelling bus timetables as a Poissonian distribution you can explain why they come in threes. As much for my own pride as anything else, I am going to choose to assume that the majority of the readership have no idea what a Poissonian distribution is, and rather that attempt to change that I will simply say that this is a false assumption, improperly analysed, misinterpreted, and similarly hacked around to produce an effect seen more frequently in the imagination than on actual roads, and if I did explain the Poissonian distribution to you you would probably be thinking “how could they be so stupid?”, “that needs a name?”, or perhaps “you’re boring me. I’m bored”. Another prime example showed itself in a tutorial today. A question was posed about how long it would take to spool 10m of tape onto a reel, and was intended to test our knowledge of calculus, particularly integration. One student had solved the problem rather neatly by using an arithmetic series, which is almost calculus, but not quite. I took one look at the question, thought for a minute or so, and announced that I could solve the problem in about two minutes without going anywhere near any calculus. I was lying, in fact. It would only take one minute. I was asked how, explained it a couple of times, and then gave up and let the professor fill a couple of whiteboards with formulæ for a quarter of an hour and arrive at the exact same results we had. Another example it that Dr. Clarke has now held on to Adam’s essay for an entire year, and has failed to even start marking it.

I think I’d like a job where I got an office, broadband internet, no actual work, and incompetence would not be noticed.

About a month ago, I received a text message from O2 informing me that my phone charger was incredibly dangerous and should be replaced immediately. I phoned them up (at great personal risk) and arranged to be sent a replacement. Within about three weeks it arrived, which makes me suspect they have great faith in Sony Ericsson batteries. The text was very vague on the subject of what exactly the danger was, but the covering letter with the replacement went into a little more depth, saying that using it may cause “personal injury, fire, and/or electric shock”. At this point, I considered sending them Adam instead, since he carries those risks in rather greater amounts. Today I was on the internet and the Sony Ericsson website told me exactly what was wrong. Apparently it could explode at any moment.

There is, apparently, a risk of pressure building up inside the charger, causing the back panel to fly off injuring people and exposing the electric parts inside. That was the second strangest thing I saw online that day. The strangest was that, linked there directly from the University’s CampusWeb page, I found myself reading an online student diary on the BBCi website. This, of course, is not that strange; there are many student diaries online as evidenced by the fact that you, for all intents and purposes, are reading one right now. (This site has been described as a glorified weblog before now, and I would very much like to know who glorified it.) The strange thing about this one is that I had met the student in question at a party on Saturday. I have every intention of reading that page next week. It might be interesting.

After my first year project went so badly, and my second year project went about as well, the university has given me a break, and this year I will be doing four separate projects, and I won’t be looking at anything more than a micron across all year. The “mini-projects” are one essay and three open-ended lab experiments taking between two and four weeks each, and must be submitted with a two-page report on each at the end of next semester. These are not those reports, and I’m not sure those reports will ever exist. It’s way too easy to look at a deadline like that and think “They’re due in in May, whereas Worms 3D comes out next Friday”.

Scanning Tunnelling Microscopy (STM)

Using a scanning tunneling microscope is a lot like making love to a beautiful woman, in that I never quite know if I’m doing it right, but that’s okay because I haven’t got one.

The experiment is to take some pictures of a few samples using a scanning tunnelling microscope. A machine with a name like that is obviously going to be a large chrome machine made of lots of perpendicularly intersecting cylinders. It’s clearly what it should look like. Of course, it doesn’t. We were really rather disappointed when it turned out to be a rather squat beige box roughly half the size of a Nintendo GameCube on its side.

The machine works by moving a metal tip (ideally only an atom or two wide) about a micrometer or two across a sample and reading the height of the sample at that point. It generates a height map of just the sort Hogs Of War uses, and I for one would be entertained by the idea of someone trying to play strategy games on a diffraction grating. Actually, now I came to actually type the words, it doesn’t sound very entertaining at all. Since the tip is suspended an Angstrom* above the sample, it is very sensitive to vibrations of any kind, and it is very easy to break it by jumping up and down at the other side of the lab.

For this reason the microscope is mounted on a table designed to isolate it from any vibrations, and this table works very well provided Richard Heaton doesn’t sit on it again. The microscope is connected to two important objects. One is a tiny metal tip we had to make ourselves using wire cutters and pliers out of Platinum-Iridium wire. The other is a computer. Well, nominally a computer. To be specific, Elonex (who I thought only made sub-par mouse mats) combined a 50MB hard disk with a painfully slow chip and a version of Windows written over a decade ago, and it still crashes at random. I honestly believe that the metal tip is worth considerably more money than the computer could ever fetch.

And to make matters worse, the software the computer is running would score very poorly were it entered as an A-Level project. For a start, it has no validation code. Quite the reverse, in fact; the default settings don’t actually work. Once you get the hang of everything, it is, though, entirely possible to create a series of good images. The trick, apparently, is to make sure that the computer doesn’t override any valid settings with its default garbage, and to make sure the lab is very quiet. This, though, is made more difficult by the fact that the NMR scanner is located just next to the STM, and has noisy coolant running through it. Nor is it helped by the investigation into sound waves at the other side of us. Having established this unhelpful pattern, the university decided to place the pancake flipping catapult just across from us. To get around this, we came in when the lab was open we weren’t officially supposed to be in it. Exactly what the problem was with this I couldn’t say, since nobody else uses the STM, and we weren’t disturbing anyone, but apparently it isn’t allowed. When we explained this, we were told that we could come in on a lunchtime, when not only are we not supposed to be there, the lab is closed, often locked, and the supervising staff have left and we could be stealing the valuable Platinum-Iridium wire for all they know.

But not to worry, the demonstrator tells us that this is a difficult experiment, and the others will be better…

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*Angstrom: A unit of length equal to 0.0000000001m. It is pointless, stupid, and I prefer microns. (A micron being equal to a micrometre, which is a unit of length a millionth as long as a metre. The word micron derives from the word micrometre because it sounds cool and because Americans can’t pronounce it wrongly.)

Raman Microscopy, or, Dynamite With A Laser Beam

At the start of this experiment, the sum total of what I understood about Raman microscopy is that it was probably invented by someone called Raman. For this reason, the first week of this experiment was purely research. This meant, for the first time since I got to University, I had to visit the library.

The Edward Boyle Library was built in a year and named after someone called Edward Boyle. As you enter, you pass between two metal devices which automatically delete your memories of the instructional meeting at the start of each year. Fortunately, the system for checking books out is fairly straightforward. Go to the computers, enter some keywords to find what book to get, it lists the appropriate books. Some of these will be marked “unavailable”, meaning that you cannot read this book. These are usually located in something called the Cage. I don’t know where (or what) that is. You then try to remember where it says the book can be found. You go to the right floor, then the right subject, then back to the computers because you’ve forgotten where it was, then to the right sub-section. You find the book you want isn’t there, so you check out a subtly different one you feel slightly surprised didn’t appear on the computer, and take it back to the lobby. You then have a choice between joining the queue of people waiting to have their books issued, or doing it yourself in ten seconds. It amazed me there was a queue.

In conclusion, I rather like the library; it’s populated almost entirely by girls and you’re not allowed to talk much, so it doesn’t matter that I daren’t. (For some reason I can’t seem to find the bar — I’d be alright then.)

After the research week, came the research week. This was due to a last-minute change in schedule not being properly communicated to anyone at all. On the Monday and the Friday we met Dr. Batcheldor, who told us a little about everything, and set us on our way. It turns out, apparently, that Raman microscopes cost about £75,000. (It may have been £750,000 in fact, but it doesn’t make a lot of difference to a student who is thousands of pounds short of being able to afford a pencil. Besides, it’s only one order of magnitude out, and that’s quite good for the experimental physicist.) For this reason, we aren’t allowed to touch the Raman microscope. To get around this, Dr. Batcheldor had built one. This was very much fitting with his general attitude — his first presentation to us was one he’d prepared for the judge in a case he was an expert witness in which had used Raman microscopy to determine what was in some pills or other.

Perhaps the most important thing he said, though, was how to turn the thing on. It seems the PSU on the computer is gone, and therefore it frequently turns on only about halfway, and has to be physically turned off and on again. Then he told us that there was a good chance we would be made to demonstrate the experiment to some prospective undergraduates on the Tuesday afternoon. This seemed alright, since we had about seven hours to get this thing working before then.

Of course, we didn’t know then that the computer had been set up to give us no access priveliges at all. This meant we were not allowed to monitor the CCD temperature. (A CCD array is exactly the same thing as a digital camera but sounds more scientific. It also needs to be cooled to a very low temperature.) The instruction manual suggests we check the CCD temperature, and when we tell it to, the software doesn’t do it. Well written software, one would think, would bring up a dialogue box saying “You do not have the access rights to do this,” or “Error. Cannot check temperature”. No. This software just ignores you completely.

Luckily, on the Tuesday things went rather better. We managed to calibrate everything without any major hitches, and even got a set of textbook Raman spectra out of the thing. The prospective undergraduates were not very impressed, though, because our demonstration has been moved to Thursday and therefore they missed our winning streak completely.

Thursday came and Thursday went, and since there were no prospective students on tour that day, we didn’t have to do anything. This was lucky, because we were a bit stuck. After we’d taken all the spectra (”I’m off to lab to focus a high power laser onto TNT. I may be some time.”), the instructions (which had already suggested we check the CCD temperature told us there was a button we should be pressing to split some files into smaller ones the software supported better. Unfortunately it didn’t exist. Apparently someone had replaced it with a different button that didn’t seem to do anything helpful. We decided to ga and ask Dr. Batchelder about it, but unfortunaltely, being semi-retired he only works three days a week, and well, we aren’t at all sure which ones. I ran over to his office, which is hidden away in the depths of the Research Deck. Fortunately I had the room number written in the lab book. Unfortunatley, this was not only the wrong number for his office, it wasn’t even close. It wasn’t even a real room, let alone the right one. Eventually I found a postgrad who helped me (by accidentally bumping into Dr. Voice who knew exactly where it was). When I eventually found it, I was told that he’d just set off and that if I ran I might catch up with him before he got there. I didn’t.

A lenthy trawl through the help files and a short email conversation later, we discovered two things about the elusive button:

1. How to put it back
2. It didn’t do what we wanted it to anyway.

We had found a way to do it without the button, though. We just had to load each file (we had about forty), split it manually, and close it again before doing the next one. Then we had to convert them to ASCII files. Then we had to combine the ASCII files into a particular sort of graph which is very awkward to make in Excel. And when I say “we” I mean “I”, because Chris can’t work computers.

Oh, well. We’re all done now, and we even rigged it so the next group won’t need any stupid button. Aren’t we nice?

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

Week two of the NMR experiment is drawing to a close, and the demonstrator still hasn’t told us what we’re doing. (You remember Mike Reis, right?) We know what to do, and how to do it, but until we’re told exactly what it all means, we don’t have to do any thinking. It could be done by a six year old, and he would have as much idea what he was doing as we do. It’s a waste of our time, spending 6 hours taking results unless we understand the process. We may as well be given the results. It would be quicker. In fact, though, it’s worse than that. Occasionally an error message would appear, and while they’re a welcome break from the routine, we haven’t a clue what to do about them, and we can’t ask because Mike was away for days on end. Lee is of the opinion they want us to feel busy.

It isn’t taking. On Tuesday I got so bored waiting for samples to cool to the right temperature and waiting for the NMR machine to finish scanning things I set every five-dial variable resistor in the lab to 24,601Ω. As it turned out there was only one of them, but I set it anyway. In the next few days I intend to do some research and discover exactly what I’ve been doing all day today. For all I know I might have spent my morning furthering Mike Reis’ evil scheme for world domination.

And the software to do it is another ancient, poorly-written affair. Having grown sick of Windows 3.1 in the first experiment, we now have to use DOS. DOS. I haven’t used actual DOS for years. This software is a little better than the STM software. While some of the menus cannot be escaped without setting the Ï„-values, there are at least some validation checks. They don’t work terribly well, though, and sometimes refuse input because it doesn’t like whereabouts in the edit box you typed it.

Part two of the experiment is to analyse the data you have collected. This means doing some research, and this means going to the library again. This time, as well as a couple of useful books, I found a battered, dusty old tome marked with a yellowing sticker “ANDREW — Nuclear Magnetic Resonance”. Unfortunately the best book has been reserved by an unknown party and until they pick it up, get bored of it, and return it, the University’s policy is “I’ll let you glance at it”. There is at least one NMR textbook that was created on a typewriter. You can tell because it is entirely in Courier and the equations have all been mangled to fit into one line of standard ASCII.

The Assessment

The lab module is assessed by looking at the laboratory notebooks. This requires them to collect the books in and mark them over Christmas. That wasn’t a problem. The viva wasn’t until two and a half weeks into the new semester and they gave the books back on the first day anyway. Well, that is to say they gave five of them back. Everyone else had to wait another week or two. I had to wait two full weeks, leaving me with two days to prepare for the viva. It was a push, but it could be done.

When I say they marked the lab books, that isn’t strictly true. I mean, really, that they kept them. The only difference between my book before and after Christmas was that they had inserted a sheet of paper which would have given me a detailed breakdown of my marks had they bothered to fill it in.

While I was waiting for the department to finish ignoring my lab book, I got an email from Dr. Marrows explaining that he hadn’t ignored my book yet, and would need to have it. His email was entirely in lower case. Out advanced laboratory module is being marked by a man who cannot capitalise. I emailed him back saying that I hadn’t got it, and when I did get it back I wanted to keep it for a while to sort out my viva. He replied, essentially saying “no book, no marks” and explained that he had been off sick and that was why he hadn’t marked my book, so I went to ask Mike Reis if I could postpone the viva. No. He said I should go and ask Dr. Marrows much the same thing. When I eventually found his office (which is located deep in the dark heart of the labyrinthine research deck, where strange creatures roam the corridors and space folds back on itself to make sure you can never reach your destination) there was a note on the door saying he was off sick for the week. At first I thought the note was out of date — he’d been off sick and hadn’t removed the note — but the date at the top of the note begged to differ. I kept my book. His secretary didn’t need to hold it for a week.

The viva wasn’t the usual farce, as it turned out. In fact it was a whole new type of farce I’d never even seen before. Essentially it consisted of Mike Reis donning a black cloak and a Time Gauntlet, and booming “JUSTIFY YOURSELF” at us, but without the convenience of being marked by ourselves. (I could bribe myself easily because I know what I like.)