sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLIX

The latest batch:

not in a pear tree

 View from our kitchen window:

snapped on my phone through the kitchen window, so a little bit of reflection on some pics

This red-legged partridge was pecking around under the birdfeeder, on which was a great tit flinging seed around.

By the time we got a proper camera with a bigger lens, this bird had flown.

four or five planet evening

Clear skies, cold still weather: good seeing.  So, about half past six this evening, we looked for the planetary alignment.  We saw (with the naked eye) faint Mercury close to the still faintly pink horizon, spectacular Venus dominating the western sky, bright Jupiter near the zenith, and red red Mars a little further round.  Binoculars made them brighter, but still point like, except for Venus.  I could convince myself I could see Venus’ phase, but it was so bright, it was hard to be sure.

Later, 8:30-9pm, it was much darker, and we used the big telescope.  Venus and Mercury had set by then.  Jupiter was lower down, but still visible: we could see all four Galilean moons, and some dark bands on the planet itself.  Mars by then had moved close to the zenith.  Last time we tried to view it at that angle, we couldn’t see through the finder, so we bought a 90 degree adapter for it at AstroFest a few weeks ago.  It works!  We got to see the red planet as a disc.  Beautiful.

We had a quick look at the Pleiades, as they were in the vicinity.  My god, it’s full of stars!

We then used the autofinder to try for Uranus.  We could see a bright object near the centre of the field of view.  It could have been a very small disc of a planet, or just a point source of a star.  I choose to believe it was Uranus.

So, definitely four planets, and maybe even five.

relaxing train

While waiting for my train from Glasgow Queen Street to Edinburgh, for the first leg of my journey home, I was amused to see the destination on this other train:

view from a hotel window

I'm in Glasgow, visiting some colleagues at the University of Strathclyde, for our new LoCoMo project that started after I retired!  Yesterday afternoon we had a good chat about a paper (from a different project) that has been stalled since pre-Covid times, and figured out how to solve the issue.  I have been tasked with writing the new section we agreed on, as I now have the time!  Today we talked about the new project.  Tomorrow I'm looking forward to a lab tour, to see what the experimentalists are up to in quantum computing with Rydberg atoms (we are doing some vaguely related theory, but looking at cool kit is always fun).

Meanwhile, this is the view from my hotel room window (nice hotel: very quiet!)

scanners upgrade in vain

 Last night, my Windows 11 machine did an update, to version 24H2.

Today, my Canon scanner didn't work.  After switching it off and on again, and unplugging and replugging the cables, I resorted to Google.  Apparently this is a "known problem" (since December 2024!), and the solution is ... undo the upgrade.

Start > Settings > System > Recovery > Go Back

I now have version 23H2.  And my scanner works again.

new toy

AstroFest has a lot of exhibitors.  Last year we bought a small SeeStar telescope, and a dome for the big telescope we bought back in 2020.  This year we were a little more restrained.  

We had recently been looking at Jupiter with the big telescope; we had also tried for Mars.  But Mars is high in the sky at the moment, which means the telescope is almost vertical.  We have a 90 degree adaptor for the eye piece, but not for the finder scope.  It was too difficult to limbo down to look up through the finder, so we didn't see Mars.  Thanks to this year's AstroFest, we now have a 90 degree adaptor for the finder, too.

A quarter of a century ago, August 1999, we viewed the total eclipse of the sun.  For that, we bought a Lightline Solar Projector, a clever cardboard tube and lens contraption that allowed us to project an image.  We have been using it since to view the sun, but it's not particularly good for seeing sunspots, and is getting a bit battered.  We have a solar filter for the new SeeStar telescope, which gives us a spectacular view, but takes a while to set up.  While wandering around the exhibits, I saw a variety of "solar binoculars", binoculars with built-in solar filters, so they can be used to directly view the sun (and nothing else!)  I was debating whether to get a pair, when one of the other attendees struck up a conversation.  She said she had bought a pair previously, and had spent many a happy time watching the sun.  She convinced me, so I bought a pair.

The weather forecast is cloudy for the next week.  So I'll have to wait to try them out!

view from a hotel window

Another year, another AstroFest.  We stayed at a different hotel this year (next door to the previous one), in the hope it would be quieter: it was!  But the view wasn't quite as interesting:

Two days of fascinating talks again, on aurorae (the ones last year were some of the most southerly viewable ever), Mars, forthcoming eclipses, astrophotography (the quality of "amateur" photography today is streets ahead of professional photography several decades ago), black holes, observatories on the moon, star surveys, the UK Space Agency, star formation, the Antikythera Mechanism, exoplanets, and Enceladus.  Something for everyone.

And the exhibitors had bigger than ever telescopes on offer, including one mount with four large telescopes on it!  A bit beyond our budget, but nevertheless, the shape of amateur things to come?

The train down (Thursday afternoon) was 12 nearly empty coaches.  The train back (Saturday evening) was eight packed coaches: we had to stand.  Two different people offered me their seat: I must look older than I think I do!  I politely (I hope) declined: I had after all been sitting down all day at the event.

sequestering carbon, several books at a time CXLVIII

 The latest batch:

book review: The Big Picture

Sean M. Carroll.
The Big Picture: on the origins of life, meaning and the universe itself.
Oneworld. 2016

---

In this ambitious work, Carroll covers an enormous range: fundamental physics, cosmology, epistemology, complexity, consciousness, morality.

He shows how (our best current understanding of) fundamental physics allows no room for any ghosts in the machine. He explains the philosophical position of “poetic naturalism”, and how it can be used to tell (well-founded, scientific) “stories” about the emergent macro-world that don’t need to reduce everything to quantum physics, but how this necessarily means we have to omit certain aspects when telling these stories. And he introduces Bayesian reason as a technique for improving understanding at all levels.

This is a bold endeavour, cramming much profound material into 50 chapters, each less than 10 pages, but adding up to over 400 pages of fascinating material. He has interesting insights on a wide range of topics, not just his own speciality of quantum physics, but also epistemology, emergence, complexity, and more. It is a deeply humanistic account, yet grounded in the cold hard light of the constraints of physical reality.

Highly recommended.

out of this world problems

Jupiter has been prominent recently.  We observed it using our SeeStar telescope.  It was a visible disc, but a bit small, with faint bands juuuust visible.

Last night was clear, so we decided to try using the big telescope in the dome to get a better view.

Last night was cold.  The dome was frozen shut.  Oh well.

Raman SOM

Daniel West, Susan Stepney, Y. Hancock.  Unsupervised self-organising map classification of Raman spectra from prostate cell lines uncovers substratified prostate cancer disease states.  Scientific Reports, 15:773, 2025. doi:10.1038/s41598-024-83708-6

This started out as a feasibility study, to see if Kohonen Self-Organising Maps (SOMs) could be used to cluster minimally preprocessed Raman spectroscopy data taken from individual cells.  SOM an unsupervised learning approach, and can cluster high dimensional data (here, over 1000D) down into a 2D visual representation.  We had Raman spectra of prostate cells, some cancerous, some not.  Could a SOM distinguish these two classes?

We blinded the data, so that the system did not know which spectrum was in which class, to ensure this was truly an unsupervised exercise.  After some fiddling about to understand what values several parameters should be, we fed the data in, and looked at the resulting map.  We could see three clusters.

Had it worked?  We unblinded the data, and yes, one of the clusters was the non-cancerous cells, and the other two clusters were cancerous cells.  Why two clusters?  Well, it turns out the mapping process had managed to discover two distinct classes of cancerous cells.  Further research is underway to investigate these differences.

So yes, it works, and better than we had hoped!