Posts by D L Clements 13 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Aug 2007
If this goes bad then it'll cause problems for all the astronomy projects in the Atacama desert in Chile. They're all towards the Bolivian border, and there has already been a case of astronomers held at gunpoint, taken into Bolivia, robbed, and then abandoned at night in the high desert to make their own way back.
Great stuff, but of course this all comes out just at the time the UK is pulling out of Cassini ( see eg. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/jonathanamos/2010/02/cassini.shtml). Of course the US knows when it's on to a good thing and has extended the mission until 2017. All the extra science in the years to come will go elsewhere, in spite of the fact that the UK has put a lot of effort into the project and made some fundamentally important contributions.
Nice one Gordon and Peter.
Stop, because that's what's happening to the UK contribution to Cassini.
As far as I can tell, no GPS (unlike iPhone 3G) and no tethering ('tooth or otherwise, like the iPhone).
I really don't understand why the operators want to block the use of these devices as 3G modems when so many of the phones they already sell do the job very well. It's the dealbreaker for me with the iPhone. I'd hoped Android would be different, but no.
Looks like I'll be staying with Nokia...
Interesting that the same government that is scaling back research into particle and nuclear physics, with their cuts to STFC, now wants to have more physicists to make the UK more nuclear.
Since 80% of undergraduates in physics cite particle or astrophysics as the motivator for getting them into the subject it sounds as if there'll be no Brits to do the work.
Joined up government or wot?
When STFC was formed last year it inherited a roughly 80M shortfall from CCLRC. This was meant to be sorted in the CSR but it wasn't. The merger has been botched, thanks to GB, whose idea it was in the first place as Treasurer at the time, and AD who failed to fund it in the CSR, aided and abetted by DIUS who seem to have ignored what warnings came from STFC about the damage from the shortfall.
It's a clusterfuck and while the blame gets passed around real damage is being done. Jodrell is just the start - UKIRT, the ING telescopes, the whole of ground-based Solar Terrestrial Physics and much more are on the line, and there's similar damage to particle and nuclear physics.
It now seems that Denham was advised that his chosen settlement for Physics in the spending review <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/2008/080116/full/news.2008.446.html">would do severe damage to the subject</a> and that more money was needed to maintain the UK's standing in the field. Perhaps he should reread his own speech and follow the advice he was given by scientists and restore funding. At 80 Million it's peanuts in terms of the rest of government spending.
If there is to be a new generation of nuclear power stations who will actually build and work on them? With the recent cuts to physics funding, including nuclear physics and related fields such as particle and astrophysics, there's likely to be a grave shortage of the experts needed for nuclear power.
Perhaps some linked-up thinking is needed here.
The No 10. petition on physics funding is <a href="http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Physics-Funding/"> here</a> if you want to sign.
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