o Zoe and I were up at the crack of dawn (well I woke up at about 6am cos I couldn’t sleep!). We had to head down to NOAA to be “vetted and approved” entry into this government facility. NOAA stands for National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (It’s basically the NASA of the atmospheric/oceanographic worlds!!!!). It is set in the foothills of the Rockies and the view from NOAA is beautiful. They even have an observatory up there!

I was really ill today – Zoe infected me with her lurgi! I was truly suffering by the afternoon and felt quite conscious about coughing through everyone’s talks! As far as the meeting went – I learned lots about what some of the dominant research groups in the field are doing.Zoe and I both gave our talks and got some feedback and ideas on what to do next. The conference dinner was held at Dushanbe Teahouse which was beautiful! they serve about 40 odd teas there including one from Newara Eliya!

Thursday was pretty heavy going at the conference, not entirely convinced i understood all of it. I did learn some new stats methods though, that i shall try out. On Thursday I finally managed to find a swimming outfit and went for 1/2 hour swim in the pool at the hotel. The pool was a bit weird though – it was really warm, like the temperature of a hot tub [I actually started to sweat whilst i was swimming some lengths!]

So my colleague (Zoe) and I flew out to Denver on Monday for an Ozone Trend workshop at NOAA in Boulder. We were lucky cos we managed to nab bulkhead seats so had oodles of room on the plane (quite ironic bearing in mind we aren’t the tallest of people!!!). It was daylight for the whole duration of the flight so it was a little difficult to snooze on the plane. We arrived in Denver at sunset and had the fun and games of hiring an automatic car (with Zoe only having driven one once and me never having driven one before!). The 40 min drive from Denver to Boulder was “interesting”, but I am glad that I downloaded the CoPilot Live from the iphone app store before i came out here – it meant I didn’t need to read a map in the dark and get travel sick!!!

By the time we arrived at the Boulder Outlook Hotel
it was really late and we were shattered. The hotel itself is lovely, we have a massive room and there is a pool, sauna, climbing wall and video game room! Interestingly the hotel has a “zero waste” policy so almost everything is recycled.

On Tuesday after a much need rest Zoe and I decided to walk the boulder Creek Path. Having lived in Milton Keynes it is like an uber wide redway that follows Boulder Creek from the town centre right up into the mountains. Its very popular with joggers/cyclists. We walked to Pearl Street (the pedestrianised shopping zone), which apparently is really famous for being so different to typical US shopping town centres. To us though, it was like a typical British high street. After having a look at all the outdoors shops and CRAZY Halloween stores(!) we ended popped into the Walnut Brewery where we sampled some local beer! After this we went up back on Boulder Creek path and followed it to Settlers Park. From there we took the Red Rocks Trail and got up a bit higher. We headed back to the hotel by sunset. All in all it was probably about a 10 mile round walk.

My overall impression of Boulder is that it is extremely different to other US cities/towns I’ve been to. Everywhere is very pro recycling and green (lots of solar panels on roofs etc) there are pedestrianised areas and yo ACTUALLY see people using them(!), cycle paths, footpaths, hiking paths etc and more importantly the waitresses/waiters don’t harass you all the time with the really fake banter (I refer back to Tuscon where the the staff at breakfast told Cat she had a lovely English accent (she is Portuguese!)).

So last week I handed in my thesis. Four years of toil and torment finished. In all it was 82,217 words, 303 pages, 151 figures and 27 tables. Although a fair whack of that was in the appendix, so it doesn’t really count.

I’ve been working as a post-doc for the last year, so I have been writing up in my spare time, that has not been a great deal of fun I have to admit. The odd thing now is that I don’t know what to do with my spare time, well actually it’s more that I am struggling to sit and do nothing! Ho hum, I am sure the apathy will kick in again when it can be bothered.

Just that pesky viva to think about now.

So we are enjoying our holiday out here in sunny Sri Lanka. And what makes it all the more nicer is to gloat about how nice it is here when you are all (by all I suspect I am just talking about my sister) busy working away 🙂

We stopped in a rather nice hotel when we arrived in Colombo, the kind of place where diplomats go to do diplomacy. Well I assume that is what they were doing. I should probably qualify diplomats – they were Canadian.

From Colombo we were picked up in our private tour car, which is to take us all around the island for a week, at stupid-o-clock in the morning. I can only assume that that translated into ridiculous-o-clock time in UK time that I was still living my life by.

First on our mammoth trip was the elephant sanctuary. It’s a nice place where orphaned elephants can go and be protected. So we sat in a restaurant and ate while the elephants were washed just below us, then off to the feeding place to see them munch.

From there we went up to Sigiriya which is an old palace complex that is in ruins now that they found a while back – proper Indiana Jones stylee. Much of it is on top of a very tall rock formation. As it happens there are lots of hornets nesting on the rocks, and the day before they had been getting angry and stinging people. So just as we were about to make it to the top one decided he didn’t like my leg and dug his stinger in. Now I just looked this up and hornets belong to the vindictiveus bastardus class of bugs – i.e. the ones that sting you that don’t die – so I hope he caught hay fever from me and sneezes his way into the path of a bus.

Today we went to a spice garden and saw lots of the local stuff they grow here – including cocaine. They also insisted on giving me a massage, and since I am always up for random men to rub my semi-naked body I thought I would give it a go – t’was nice. We also went to a batik factory and spent far too much money on cloth type things. From there we went to the temple that Buddha’s tooth is in.

Now we are in Kandy and tomorrow we will head out to see a tea plantation – hopefully I will get to try lots of different types…

I will upload some of the many photos when I get a chance – although something tells me that would take an age from this internet connection.

One of the nice things about being here is that people seem to think I am great! Several kids have said that I am beautiful – in fact at one of the religious monuments a bunch of school kids stopped looking at the statues and started staring at me. I could get used to this.

So our first paper from the Schome Park Pilot has been published! This one was based upon the initial data that we collected in our early days in Second Life. The basic jist of it is that Second Life works well for distance learning 🙂 If you are interested in what we did have a read of the paper. I image that this will be my only publication in an educational journal!

Just a quick post this morning!

Today is our 7 year anniversary….yes 7 years ago today Olly and I went on our first date (how sweet!). It doesn’t feel like we’ve been together that long, sometimes I wonder where the 7 years have gone – but it is documented in here.  Unfortunately I’ve been at our own flat for the past week so Olly and I are apart for this anniversary 🙁

I also got my start date for my job in atmospehric chemistry research….I start on the 16th March…woo finally!  Although I have loads to do here still (thesis) AND need to swat up on my new job :S

In other news….I cut 16″ off my hair yesterday – pics are on facebook!  No I’m not bald!

I realised I never actually posted about the results of all my allergy and intolerance testing!  Around October 07 I stopped cutting out the foods I thought was making me ill and ate a full and varied diet for three months.  Then around xmas 07 I had an intolerance test as well as ear -nose- throat specialist look at my ears/palate problem.

It turns out they aren’t related….I still have an unknown probably “inhalent” allergy that causes the itchy palate/nose/mouth which they won’t be able to treat.  The consultant said that my blocked ears will get worse and worse on exposure to the allergen, then in the future when it gets really bad i will have to have an operation to “laser” my ear/nose tubes which are getting hardened on response to the allergen. I also have IBS and am intolerant to lots of foods:

dates, crab, mussels, white pepper, spinach, leek, pear, mushroom, raspberry, olive, egg yolk, kidney bean and grapes.

I’m not too sure about some of the foods, but I (and Olly) have suffered when I eat pear, olive, egg yolk, kidney beans and grapes.  Not good! Eating these gives me a lot of digestive problems, which sometimes last for days or even up to a week.  Then some food (red wine, mayonnaise dip type things, Pizza hust pizza) also make me feel incredibly nauseus for two days or so after eating them.  I learned this the hard way after multiple visits to pizza hut to test whether it really was the pizza that was making me ill!

So anyway, it makes sense that when I cut out the wheat/dairy I was also not eating a lot of products that contained egg yolk.  So I spent most of last year adapting all my recipes again and tried so many different substitutes for egg including: egg replacer, cornflour, banana etc but nothing turned out right 🙁

Then a few weeks ago I read an article on the internet about people with egg intolerance being able to tolerate duck eggs.  I suppose this is similar to people that are intolerant to cow milk but can drink goat milk.  So Olly and I had a right job finding duck eggs in our new home town….we tried Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Marks and Spencer – none of them sold them.  Then we visited a tiny Waitrose, the size of an express convenience store, and they had them….mind they were £2.35 for 6 eggs.  They were free range, and larger than chicken eggs.  That weekend I had a duck egg overload – I ate a fried duck egg sandwhich and made my “special” scrambled eggs.  Then I monitored my symptoms.  I didn’t feel sick/nor wanted to vomit (a good sign).  Only thing was i got a little constipated – but no where near as bad as when I eat some things!  So conclusion is that maybe I can eat duck egg but VERY occasionally so as not to aggrevate my IBS.

A quick note on what duck eggs taste like/look like.  When you fry a duck egg, it looks like a chicken egg .  The fried egg has a thicker egg white bit and the same yellow yolk as a chicken egg.  To me it tastes the same as a chicken egg, but then I haven’t eaten chicken egg for over 1 year now, so I prob have forgotten the taste LOL.

I can’t wait to use the eggs in baking….

So I am in La Palma doing my astronomy thing. Or rather not doing my astronomy thing because of the weather 🙁 I am supposed to be using an instrument called FIES on the NOT to do radial velocity measurements with some of the folk from Queens to look for exoplanets, but alas it is too cold.

(The rest of my photos are on the photos page.)

Last night we observed until about 1:30 when it got cloudy, and when I say cloudy what I mean is the clouds descended and we were in them. Then tonight we got as far as opening the dome when it got too humid again, so we had to stop. Ordinarily when the humidity drops you can start observing again, but the temperature here is cold, very cold, so everything is freezing. We had to drive down from the telescope to the residence, and we had the support astronomer drive with us – as the roads were frozen. His advice to us when driving down was not to wear our seatbelts so we could jump out of the car if we start sliding towards the cliff edge. Hmmm. Oh well we made it down anyway and am now sitting in the residence. The temperature is rising now though, so we may end up going back to the telescope tonight….

My journey here was fairly uneventful, I came via Madrid (and didn’t lose my luggage), then Tenerife. The only thing that did phase me somewhat was when I saw the tiny little plane that goes from Tenerife to La Palma, it was a tiny little two propellar engine jobbie. Ho hum, it got me here I suppose.

Tomorrow I go back down the mountain in the afternoon, but my flight back doesn’t leave until Sunday, so I have to spend a night in that four star hotel with the indoor waterfall and heated swimming pool.

It’s a tough life this astronomy malarkey.

I had an interview for a position at Leicester University today, and guess what, I got it 🙂

The position is an archive scientist, working with the LEDAS stuff and the superwasp stuff. The LEDAS side is looking after the hardware and software of the X-ray archive server at Leicester, so lots of web interface stuff to huge X-ray databases 🙂 The superwasp stuff is along similar lines; looking after the hardware and software of the archive. This is fast becoming one of the biggest astronomical databases in the World, so lots of things for me to break. Then there is the research side too, I get to do independent research too!

So all in all it really is an awesome job for me, since I do the web stuff as a hobby this is kind of merging of my job and my hobby 🙂

They said I can start at the beginning of November, so by then I need to have finished decorating the house and sold it. Then I can go and move up to Leicester. Oh yeah, and I need to finish that minor task also known as my thesis….

Imagine a place where a giant raccoon can sit in a Japanese garden next to a green lady with wings, designing a satellite experiment with high school students from all over the country. This may sound like the deluded babblings of a mad man, but such a place really exists. Well, virtually. This place is Schome Park, and I am that raccoon.

Schome Park is a private island on the teen grid of Second Life®. It is owned by a group of researchers at the Open University exploring the cutting edge of educational theory. With over one hundred schools across the U.K. (and more in the U.S.A.) registered in Schome Park, we are toying with the very foundations of education as we know it.

Second Life is a virtual world where residents can create whatever objects they can imagine, programming them to behave however they wish. Each resident has an avatar that they can personalise; we have had everything from a brain in a jar to people with blue skin. This allows a degree of anonymity that breaks down any social barriers built by real life communication. The only departure from this anonymity is the distinction between adults and those under 18 via their avatar surname. One of the fundamental ideas behind Schome Park is that everyone can, and should, teach everyone else. It’s an idea that works, with the majority of activities being student-led and evaluated, giving them the responsibility of moulding their own education.

In collaboration with the Schome educational researchers, we (a couple of space science Ph.D. students also at the Open University) have successfully used this virtual world to engage teenagers in space science. We have entered a student team in a national competition run by Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. (SSTL) and The British National Space Centre to design a satellite instrument for launch in 2010.

Exploiting the virtual environment of Second Life means we have not been restricted by the limitations of the real world – a great advantage when designing things that are out of this world! Using aspects of this virtual environment, and the supporting Schome forum and wiki, we have overcome our geographical separation and proposed an instrument to record Earthshine from Low-Earth Orbit.

Earthshine is sunlight reflected off the Earth onto the Moon. We have built scale models of the Sun-Earth-Moon system in-world, to understand the scientific principles behind the Earthshine phenomenon and the proposed instrument. The instrument (S.C.H.O.M.E. – Spectroscopy, Climate and Habitability from Orbital Measurement of Earthshine) comprises a spectrometer currently being adapted for the ESA ExoMars mission combined with simple optics. This will take albedo measurements from the Earth, and its apparent “signature”, as would be seen from outside the Solar System, can be obtained. More specifically, the instrument will record in the visible/near infra red wavelength range, where features of minerals/soils, vegetation, oxygen, water and ozone are visible, some of which are key indicators of life.

The application of measurements from the S.C.H.O.M.E. instrument are two-fold. Firstly, our proposed instrument can record the signatures of the only planet we know that harbours life. Earthshine measurements can therefore serve as a reference for assessing the nature of and the habitability of exoplanets. This ties in with the big budget missions such as ESA’s CoRoT & Darwin and NASA’s Terrestrial Planet Finder and New Worlds Mission which are all directed to discover exoplanets and assess their habitability. Secondly, such Earthshine measurements can also be input to climate models. This will help us to assess solar heating effects due both to albedo and specific spectral absorption features of components of surface cover, thus aiding our understanding of our changing planet.

Having been selected as one of six finalists in the competition, we have been working with engineers from SSTL and more scientists at The Open University to develop the instrument further, and have just submitted the final proposal. With restrictions on mass, space, power and money (100g, 10cm³, 1W and a £100,000 development budget) will our virtual satellite become a reality? The winner is announced at the IAF in Glasgow on the 3rd October. So, watch this (virtual) space!

To find out more visit www.schome.ac.uk