I’ve uploaded an album of photos to Facebook, which consists mainly of stupid signs I have seen about my various travels. You may have a look at it if you like, even if you don’t have a Facebook account. (You’ll need an account to view and post tags and comments, though of course you can still comment here.)

One or two have been on the blog before, but they haven’t been on Facebook so I included them anyway.

I had what may be the worst lecture ever last week. I mean, it was easier to sit through than many I had as an undergraduate, but at least they did, if you could bring yourself to listen and having listened remember any of it, contain some information. This one… well, it did have information in it, and some bits were relevant. Other bits were even true.

I say some bits were relevant. Of course, it was all relevant. Granted the lecture was to dental PhD students and the lecture covered relativity, SI units (wrongly), string theory, gravity, religion and how mercury thermometers work (without mentioning that you shouldn’t use them), but all those things connect to dentistry, which is of course the Master Science from which all other sciences flow:

(I love that lecturers put slides on the intranet now. It makes it far easier to mock them.) In fact, he said, all sciences connect to dentistry, “except perhaps oceanography”. So now you know. As such, here’s a slide which clearly impacts directly upon dentistry:

I’m not convinced it makes any sense to unify one thing (such as alpha-decay) with itself, but there you go. I also like that he’s put “planets” and “apples”. Because really, Newton did “unify” the theories behind the motion of planets and that of apples, but the way it’s presented here — and there was not a spoken word of context for this — makes it look like there was a Theory Of Apples.

The lecture was actually delayed because the lecturer had forgotten it was on and turned up forty minutes late.

He stated that there are five SI units (there are seven) and that the second* is defined by astronomy (it isn’t).

In this slide, he explained that while science was good at finding secondary causes, religion was the path to true understanding:

I can’t say I was pleased with this slide (not least because he’s used a famous quote from a vocal atheist to make his point).

I didn’t like this slide either, but that’s just for composition reasons:

I don’t mean to just sit here and reproduce all his slides. I want to stop somewhere about where I think “fair use” ends. So here’s just a couple more of the most laughable:

I know it looks like I’ve resized the second one badly, but I promise you that’s what the original looked like.

Honestly, this lecture sounded like he’d been told to give a lecture but not what it ought to be about, so he tried to cram the entirety of mankind’s scientific achievement into forty-five minutes in no particular order. He failed. He bounced between sciences (but not oceanography) like a crazy lecture pinball, offering a few facts (and/or lies) about each but no real understanding of any.

I mean honestly, how am I (or anyone else) supposed to learn anything from this drivvel? This took two hours out of my day that I could have spent writing reports which would have saved me time I could have used to write programmes which would have saved me time I could have used to fix all the comupters in the building which would have saved me enough time to actually do some research. But no, it’s a requirement for my PhD that I sit through this nonsense.

Here’s a research question for you:

Why?

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Note: this entry has been edited slightly after various comments pointed out an error. In the spirit of honesty I have left the comments in so you can see what error I made. I’m not certain why I’ve done that.

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*That is, the unit of time called “the second”, not the second SI unit.

Here’s a delightfully heart-warming story. Well, a story, anyway.

It’s the story of a comedy show called Allah Made Me Funny. It’s a Muslim comedy show which will be on at Dundee University in a couple of weeks, which Dundee describe as “comedy from an Islamic perspective that is not just for Muslims, but for everyone, [which] we are showing it as part of our Islam awareness week at the university… to show the comic side of Islam and show that it is not just a serious religion,” with “nothing in it… that is offensive to the religion”. (You can watch some on the website. In fact, it’ll start chatting at you the moment the page loads. Probably I should have mentioned that sooner, and indeed probably now I should go back and edit it in, but I won’t.)

The show will not be on at Glasgow Caledonian University, because some Muslim students there complained. I don’t know if they found the title offensive (it looks offensive but patently isn’t if you give it a moment’s thought) or if they just kind of assumed it would be offensive, or maybe they’d seen the show and Dundee’s spokesman was just lying, but it would seem that Muslims can now be offended by “comedy from an Islamic perspective”.

And yes, I am a little annoyed that the university caved in to the complainants, but more than that I’m shocked at how fucking stupid these people are. They’ve complained, implicitly on religious grounds, about something designed specifically to soften the perception that their religion is an over-sensitive, mental one that complains about everything. Unfortunately the article didn’t name the morons in question, so I can’t award Religious Crackpot Of The Month to them by name, but if they’re reading this then they know who they are. Or more probably they don’t because they’re so utterly and enormously brainless.

From the Manchester University postgraduate accomodation guide:

You should also note that if you require accommodation from September the closing date for applications for accommodation is the 31st August.

How am I supposed to get anything done with restrictions like that placed upon me?

Apparently, Oxford University is to introduce a contract between itself and students.

I remember some years ago when I was in sixth form our school tried introducing one of these. It essentially said that we had to try hard, and we were informed that we had to sign it or we could be expelled. Enough students simply refused to sign it that the whole thing was abandoned — nobody got expelled because of course that would put the school in breach of contract, as we’d already started the course and only now were being given this contract. Oxford have, rather more cleverly, applied this contract to future students only.

The aim is to stop students signing up to a degree course, flunking it, and suing the university for not teaching them properly. This is a fairly reasonable goal but they’ve gone about it the wrong way. Personally, I’ve never been to Oxford University, so I don’t know what the teaching is like there, but I do know that an alternative way to avoid being sued for breach of contract is to stick to the contract.

The fact of the matter is that the universities do not pay the students. The students pay the universities, and when you pay for something you have a right to get something of a reasonable standard in return. If I want to spend thousands of pounds on a degree course I have no intention of completing then that is my preoragtive. The day a university pays me is the day I will feel obliged to live up to their expectations (although as the government would be sibsidising your degree, you have an entirely seperate obligation to them to at least try to pass the course). (I feel I should probably also mention here that I personally was, in fact, paid by the university. I was on a scholarship scheme, however this didn’t even cover half of my tuition fees, and in fact was dependant on my attaining certaing grades anyway. It was not so much a case of “we’re paying you, so you’d better do well” as it was “if you do well, we’ll reward you”.)

Apparently, all this was sparked by a university paying out £30,000 to a student who complained about teaching standards there.

The student who sued them wasn’t complaining that the teaching was bad, he was very specifically complaining that the lecture theatres were overcrowded and that there were errors in the assignments given to him. That sort of thing is very easy to prove, or, if the lecture theatres aren’t overcrowded and the assignments don’t contain errors, disprove. I realise Oxford is a widely respected university with an excellent reputation, but there’s no guarantees. You can’t try out a university. You can’t go to more than one, at least, not without spending thousands of pounds at each. Most people have nothing but second-hand and often out-of-date accounts of universities to help them make their decision, and most of the second-hand accounts are from people who only went to one university, have nothing to compare it with, and generally had a good time because that is what univerisity is all about (as much as they told us otherwise). If you are supported by a grant for the first half of your course you have the option of given up on it and going somewhere else. With grants there was some motivation for universities not to be crap. As it is any student who feels their university is failing them has the following options:

Legal action — a great option, except that it is expensive, time consuming, hard work and potentially disasterous if you lose. Students, as a rule, couldn’t afford to do that.

Change course — and abandon the thousands of pounds and years of your life you’ve invested in the course. Most students can’t really afford to do that either.

Complain to the university — which is great news for next year’s students, but won’t change a thing as far as you are concerned. It fails to solve the problem at hand, and hardly seems worth the bother.

Lump it — most students in this situation choose this option. (We know this because the one whi didn’t must have had at least enough coursemates to overcrowd a lecture theatre.) It essentially means that they’re doing their own work, as well as work the university ought to be doing — say, proofreading the assignments. Then the University sees that people are managing to get good marks and assumes its teaching is up to scratch. But it’s the only way to come out of the situation with a degree and any money at all.

There’s basically no recourse for students when universities fail them, and since there’s no way to try out a university before committing to a three year course, there’s really no reason for universities to bother maintaining standards as long as they can maintain their reputation, and this is the problem with Oxford’s proposed contract. In its current state it makes students’ responsibilities very clear, but not the university’s. It essentially states “I, the student, acknowledge that it is my responsibility to try my best to earn a good degree, and if the university feels like helping me out then I should be grateful”. That won’t do. Worse still, if the university makes you sign a contract that clearly spells out that the university is free to choose how much teaching you are entitled to then they have a very easy get-out clause if you do complain about the standards or availability of teaching. That is an incredibly dangerous precedent. I only hope that prospective students do what current students are famous for, and refuse to accept any such thing.

I was assurred years ago that physics was a good employable degree. Don’t worry, I was told, you don’t have to get a job related to your degree. It shows you can put the work in and get a result. It shows commitment. It shows that you can learn something and pick up skills. Blah blah blah.

Today I discover this is a lie.

If I want to apply for the job of website designer, what do I need? Why, that would be a website design degree. If I want to write software I’m expected to have a degree in that, and if I want to design kitchens I need a kitchen design degree. I don’t know why I would want to design kitchens; I have no intrest at all in them, but it’s a good example of a job demanding a degree that nobody in the world will have.

This is, of course, the problem with these degrees. I know a man with a degree in greenkeeping. That opens up approximately four only incrementally different jobs to him, but it closes them off somewhat from everyone with a proper degree, because why would you hire someone with a degree in chemistry when there’s someone with a degree in precisely the job you have advertised?

What am I supposed to do? Be a physicist? Alright, so I’m clearly qualified for it, but it would mean working with physicists, and four years of being at university with them was quite enough for me. It’s rather disspiriting applying for a job you know you don’t meet the stated requirements for, but it’s the only way to get any job at all, especially when it was the computer science A-level that put me off the idea in the first place. That was mostly outdated, idealised nonsense that had nothing to do with any computer I’ve ever seen. You learnt it, and then were examined on it, and then tried very hard to forget it before you accidentally mentioned it to someone who actually knows about computers and looked like an idiot.

Taking the web design as an example: clearly I can design websites. I have two. Some people don’t have that many ears! But how am I supposed to convince someone of this in an interview? I’m terrified that the degree courses will teach you words I don’t know for things I do:
“So, do you mind if we ask you a few questions to assess your knowledge of HTML?”
“Go ahead.”
“What is the Carnegie Principle in the context of Front And Back Extrusion?”
“Come again?”
Then I go home and Google it and it turns out to mean “make sure you use the American spelling of ‘centre’ in align tags” or something else equally obvious and I’ve just told the interviewer I didn’t know it.

So now I’m stuck with a degree nobody wants, skills nobody will ever know about, and no job. Great.

You never know how much you really need something until it’s taken away, when you would give anything to have it back. This is the idea behind striking; if enough employees of the same industry just stop working for long enough society is disrupted enough that their demands are met. It doesn’t always work, but it can be very effective.

Today is Day One of the two day strike by the AUT, and tomorrow is the one-day strike by the NUS. The AUT is the union the lecturers belong to, and is campaigning for equal pay. The NUS is the student union and is a little miffed about fees. Unfortunately, neither strike will have any effect on anybody at all. I will use myself as an example here, simply because it will require minimal research on my part. As a member of the NUS, I am pressurised to skip university tomorrow. There are several small problems with this plan:

1. All students (in theory) have Wednesday afternoons off anyway.
2. I have the whole day off thanks to cunning module selection.
3. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
4. If the AUT is on strike there won’t be any lectures to skip.
5. Students have no power.

Students do not provide a useful service to society until they graduate and get real jobs, at which point nobody will notice that they all took a day off a few years ago. Therefore, striking will not effect anyone. In our department, the students who strike will still have to do the work, they’ll just do it later. That won’t inconvenience anybody except the students.

Similar problems affect the AUT’s proposed strike:

1. There are (in theory) no lectures on Wednesday afternoons anyway.
2. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
3. If the NUS is on strike there won’t be any students to lecture in any case.
4. You will only inconvenience students, and students have no power.

In my specific case I have only three lectures on a Tuesday. Two of them are given by the highest paid lecturer in the department, so the chances they would be cancelled in favour of an equal pay campaign were never very high. The last one is Physics in Review, which is a waste of time anyway and only generally has three students turn up. And they were glad it was cancelled.

Today was our eighth ‘physics in review’ session this semester. Each session lasts an hour, and they are organised into pairs. We get the questions in one week, and work though a few. Then we have a week to look over the rest and go through the difficult ones in the second session. It doesn’t work that way. No, not at all.

What actually happened was that we would pointedly ignore the question sheet all week and sit in silence for an hour while the tutor went through the remaining questions. Unfortunately, the tutor is so incredibly dull that we almost can’t bring ourselves to listen to a word he says. It isn’t our fault, of course. The university decided to schedule this for 4 to 5 in the afternoon, so by the time we get there we’ve been in lab for six hours and those of us why can be bothered to turn up are too tired, bored, and drained to participate.

It wasn’t always like this. We had more energy at the start of the semester, but, according to the Heisenburg Principle, that was never going to last. (And people say I don’t pay attention in Quantum.) In fact we once paid so much attention that two of us answered a question in two very simple and very different ways, both of which were much simpler and quicker than the one the tutor was doing on the whiteboards. I made the mistake of trying to explain this to him, and discovered a lot more about psychology that physics by doing so. Instead of seeing the very obvious way my method arrived at the answer, he tried to find out how my method was related to his. It wasn’t. He was integrating things, differentiating things, and other quite superfluous mathematical verbs, while I’d used geometry and simple algebra to solve the same exact problem and arrive at the same exact answer.

This is why nobody spoke in today’s session. He went through four questions. The first one I’d solved in five minutes on half a page, whereas his method took two pages and half an hour to complete. I already knew what would happen if I tried to explain my method, so I didn’t. To be honest, I can’t understand for a second how he managed to miss my method, or why anyone would ever want to do it the more complicated way. The second question he went through nobody had even looked at, and ditto for the third. The last question was in fact rather easy. Unfortunately the wording of it was so strange it wasn’t until he explained the answer that we understood the question.

The simple fact of the matter, though, is that we still don’t have time to look through the questions. We have other things to do, like labwork, an essay, magnetohydrodynamics homework, and getting a gold medal on Nobody Rides For Free. We can’t waste time on things that aren’t assessed. Even if he tried to report us he couldn’t — he has no idea which one of us is which. We frequently skip sessions and he doesn’t seem to notice.

I missed the fifth session, in which a question sheet was given out. Also in that session, the review papers were given out so we could give anonymous feedback on the module. I didn’t realise this until I arrived at the next session. I remembered earlier in the course he told us in previous years people had asked on these forms for the question sheet to be handed out a week early. In his experience, he said, people didn’t look at the sheets so the exercise was pointless. That seemed quite plausible to me. It was obvious to me that this whole pointless exercise was going to be repeated this year, but he went through the motions anyway because as I have mentioned he is blind to the obvious unless it can be explained using calculus somehow.

Needless to say, everyone who showed up asked for the questions in advance again. In the next session he did what he always does; he picked a question, asked if anyone had looked at it, and then picked someone at random to glare at until they admitted they hadn’t. This time he also asked why we wanted the questions in advance if we weren’t going to look at them. He picked me. This was not a good idea, because if he had enough memory to recognise us, he’d have known the following facts:

Having missed the last session I hadn’t got a review sheet and therefore couldn’t possibly have asked for the questions in advance.
Having missed the last session, I hadn’t got the question sheet in order to have looked at it.
Of course there was no way he could have known that given the review sheet I would have written on it “I just want you to know that if you start giving the questions out earlier, I will compensate by starting to ignore them earlier”, but I think the other two points are sufficient. He gave out the next sheet early. He’s stopped doing that again.

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 τ-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.)

I am entering my third year of university just about now, and I am therefore receiving my third student loan. The first one was simple. I filled in the form, they processed it, and I got a nice pile of money. The second, you may recall, went less smoothly. I missed a signature from the form and had to go to the Student Support Centre (which I couldn’t find) and fail to give a number, because 118-118 didn’t exist back then. Apparently, we filled the form in wrongly this time, and somewhere buried in all the pointless extra bits was some way to tell them, possibly in some kind of a skip-code, that my brother was starting a degree and I would therefore like extra money, please. The extra money isn’t enough to be worth chasing up now, but the letter that arrived this morning certainly is.

For background information, in the first year, my course was “BSc/MPhys Physics”, then for the second year I switched to “BSc/MPhys Physics with Electronics and Instrumentation”, and this year I’m doing “MPhys Physics”. I can see how this might confuse the Student Loans Company, so for simplicity’s sake I didn’t bother to tell them that I had switched from doing “MPhys Physics with Electronics and Instrumentation” to “MPhys Physics”.

Somewhere along the line they must have got very confused, because today they told me I was doing “BSc Physics with Electronics and Instrumentation”, which is as wrong as you can be without suggesting I’m doing “BA Geology with Russian Studies” or something. Of course, I don’t mind them thinking I’m doing electronics, or for that matter instrumentation (whatever that is), but they also mentioned that as the BSc course is three years long, my student support now stops in July. It also means they think I’m graduating in June, so I don’t get the full loan for this year. Since I already applied for the full loan, however, this means that I have applied for more money than they now think I deserve and I don’t appear to be getting a penny from them ever again. I suppose I’ll have to sort this out, or else I will have to save up this year rather better than I have been doing, and that will be exceptionally difficult if British Gas don’t get on the case and sort out my little problem with them.

Or rather, that should be, my big problem. My little problem with British Gas is that their billboards claim that they are — I forget — about 10% (I think) cheaper than NPower, while the small print explains that this saving assumes you take advantage of British Gas’ gas-and-electricity-together discount, but ignore completely the fact that NPower have precisely the same offer. (My tiny, niggling, rather geeky problem with British Gas being they insist on using that bloody awful font).

My big problem is that a few days ago, they sent someone called Suaun (which is a spelling I’ve never seen before either, but you must believe I typed it correctly) round to ’sort out’ the billing. Now, as I have mentioned before, nobody ever tells me anything, and this is why I (and apparently Adam) was so blissfully unaware that we get our gas from NPower. Personally, I am of the opinion that if anybody should know this already, it would be British Gas, but then, there is very little motivation for them to go the their customers’ houses with their little clipboards. So, Suaun very quickly runs through a little spiel, ticks a few boxes, and tells me that the previous tenants used British Gas and hadn’t sorted out anything about leaving, which does sound like their style — I suspect it was them who let down our fire extinguisher. So, he shows me where to sign and I sign it, on the grounds that if it’s a problem he told me I could phone up and cancel everything anytime in the next week. (This turned out not to be true.) This was Monday. On Wednesday morning I called their pointless little sales team, on the number marked “to cancel your contract phone this number”.

“British Gas Sales Team.”
“Hello? I’ve got a contract I’d like to cancel, please.”
“Okay, can you tell me your reference number?” This was the first I’d head of any reference number, and I think we all know by know how the rest of this conversation could have gone, so I shorthanded the whole lot.
“Yes, if you tell me what it is and where it’s printed I can.” (This turned out not to be true, either.)
“It’s printed at the top of your confirmation letter.”
“I haven’t got a confirmation letter. You sent someone to my door.”
“Alright, then,” If, as now became apparent, the number was not actually required, why had he asked me in the first place?

Their phone-monkey then politely informed me that it would be quite impossible to cancel my contract because they hadn’t got it. I asked how they could possibly not have it, I had handed it to one of their employees two days ago, and they told me that it takes about three weeks to get into their building. I asked how it was possible to phone up and cancel a contract within a week if it didn’t arrive for the best part of a month, and they told me if I filled in the “cancellation slip” on the back of the contract it would arrive before the contract, despite a couple of days’ head start, and the contract would be cancelled before anyone even looked at it. I spent ten or so thoroughly dull minutes in a queue at the post office to spend 38p posting the damn thing to British Gas, but that was OK because they weren’t actually getting the 38p. Besides, if, in a few weeks, I don’t get written confirmation that they have cancelled the contract, I’ll phone them up until they send me some. As well as being sensible business and economic practice, this also puts them 38p out of pocket as well, and I’d like that.

When I was filling in the slip, I noticed for quite the first time that Suaun had also signed me up for electricity, which is preposterous because as I must have complained about before we have a token meter and therefore shouldn’t get any electricity bills from anyone at all, let alone a gas company.

Which reminds me, I owe Lizzy £10 for the electricity. I should go sort that out.