Bryn Alyn - an autumn walk

Off to Llanferres yesterday for an autumn walk through the woods, along the ridge and back again. You can see the route here:


View Bryn Alyn in a larger map

It's a variant on a route in "Walking in the Clwydian Range" by Carl Rogers. A tiny domestic detail: whilst walking the Inelegant Gardener carries the guide book, preferring to navigate via prose and I carry the OS map - preferring maps. The track is from a Garmin GPS60, I don't use it for navigation but to tag my photos with location information for which I've written a little program.

We last did this walk in May, but I committed a terrible faux pas: the battery on my camera went flat and for some reason I'd not brought a spare and had deliberately left behind my second camera and my phone (which also has a camera, which is really crap).

Beech trees were definitely the best for autumnal colours, although birch produces an attractive pointillist effect, sycamore seemed best for kicking through.

At the top of the initial climb there is a little bit of limestone pavement, this is most famously found above Malham Cove but it's nice to find your own little patch.

Limestone pavement is formed when slightly acidic rain water dissolves the limestone producing deep fissures (grykes) between remaining blocks (clints). It looks like a fantastic place to break your ankle.

For reasons I can't explain I like the stray bits of ironwork left over from old fencing, parts of the Lake District are particularly good for this.

And to top it all off, a cow wearing a ginger wig:

This was one of many cows in a field we passed through, they were fine looking beef cows in a wide range of colours. We also had a "That's no cow, it's a bull" moment but I was reassured by remembering vaguely someone saying that you're okay in a field with a load of cows and a bull because the last thing on the bull's mind is going to be you. If this isn't actually true then I'd prefer to be left in ignorance, if you don't mind.

Professor Nutt and the classification of harm through the misuse of drugs

The sacking of Professor Nutt (now ex-head of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs) by the Home Secretary Alan Johnson, has been in the news today. The immediate cause of his sacking appears to have been this recently published paper which was originally presented as the "2009 Eve Saville Memorial Lecture" at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College in July 2009. The lecture appears to have been a policy discussion based in part on his classification of relative drug harm which was first published in The Lancet in 2007:

Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse, David Nutt, Leslie A King, William Saulsbury, Colin Blakemore, The Lancet, vol. 369, (2007), p1047-1053.

This classification of harm was based on assessment by two sets of experts: the first set of 29 from the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ register as specialists in addiction, the second set draw from a wider community involving members "ranging from chemistry, pharmacology, and forensic science, through psychiatry and other medical specialties, including epidemiology, as well as the legal and police services". The basic scheme was to ask these experts to assess the harm caused by a set of 20 substances (mainly illegal but including alcohol and tobacco) on a set of 9 measures:

This is done iteratively using what is called a 'delphic process', the experts make their initial numerical assessments independently in an initial round, but can then modify those assessments once they have seen and discussed the assessments made by others. Once they have reached some pre-determined finishing criteria they combine the average scores for each area to produce an overall measure of harm. They are pre-warned of the substances in question so they can go read up on them. The rankings of the two separate groups appeared to be very much in agreement. The resulting mean harm scores for the twenty substances are shown in the following graph:

The interesting thing about this group is that tobacco and alcohol (which I'm currently enjoying in the form of fine Chardonnay) are found in the middle of the range, below heroin and cocaine but above cannabis and Ectasy. A statement which in part has earnt Professor Nutt his dismissal.

Now you could argue that "The Lancet" paper is flawed, and Professor Nutt makes suggests for improvements in methodology, but the thing is: there is no competition. Current drug classifications into A, B and C are not made on an assessment of harm based on any published or transparent criteria. If Alan Johnson wants to argue that Professor Nutt is wrong on his evaluation of the relative harm of drugs he should do so on the basis of a transparent evaluation process not because he just doesn't like the advice he's been given.

Though I have not focussed on it in this post, the Eve Saville lecture includes this assessment of harm along with a discussion of other issues including the media reporting of deaths through drug misuse. It does also include some support for elements of government policy on drugs, in particular he says:

One thing this government has done extremely well in the last ten years is to cut away much of the moral argument about drug treatments. They have moved in the direction of improving access to harm reduction treatments, an approach that, I think, is wholly endorsed by the scientifi c community and by the medical profession.

Update
1st November 2010: Professor Nutt has published an improved version of this study in The Lancet (pdf), the process used is a little different and an attempt has been made to improve the relative weight given to different harms. This revised study finds that heroin, crack cocaine and metamfetamine most harmful to individual users and alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine most harmful to others.

Who Dr.?

After the big and shiny experience as an undergraduate I went off to do a PhD., to make me into a Dr. This was something I'd intended to do since a visit to the Campden and Chorleywood Food Research Centre as a school student; there we were shown around the labs and I was convinced that a career in science without a PhD. was going to be a serious uphill struggle involving the cleaning of much lab glassware.

The exact nature of a PhD. varies from country to country and from subject to subject. In the UK a PhD. in physical chemistry is typically 3 years long and the supervisor will usually have a big say in what the student does.

I did my PhD. at Durham University in the Interdisciplinary Research Centre for Polymer Science, supervised by Prof. Randal Richards. Prime motivation for this particular PhD. was the cash, it was funded by Courtaulds Plc and paid a research assistant salary. It also got me back to more big and shiny science, in the form of the neutron source at the Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory  (RAL) and with the added benefit that a very skilled technician made my polymers for me. This was good because I've never been "at one" with synthetic chemistry, the untidiness of the process didn't suit my temperament. Apocryphally the start of polymer science was a bit slow because the early polymer synthesisers couldn't crystallise their material, this led to much derision from other synthetic chemists who made lovely crystals from their materials, rather than black sludge that polymer scientists made. The molecular nature of polymers wasn't appreciated until the 1920's which is really rather recent.

So for 3 years I slaved away: I prepared samples - spinning thin films onto lumps of shiny flat silicon, I went down to the RAL for 48 hour experimental runs, I wrote FORTRAN programs do do data analysis, I read journal articles, I attended conferences, made posters and gave presentations. I observed, from a small distance, the activities of synthetic chemists.

The chap over the desk from me was a historical re-enacter, I watched as he made his own chain-mail.

It was whilst I was writing my thesis, entitled "Surface composition profiles in some polymer mixtures", that I first met with the elephant of despair. The elephant of despair lived in the library, he was made of a transparent material so you could scarcely see him and he was only about 6 inches tall. He stood in the gaps between the journals, waiting for when I would arrive to find an article and discover on the way a paper published 10 years ago which captured most of what I'd slaved over for the last three years. His plaintive trumpeting has haunted me on and off through the years.

I think the day I decided I wasn't going to make an effort to get "Dr." onto all my paperwork was the day I was in the bank the man in front of me was having a lengthy discussion with the cashier because the printed numbers in his saving book did not line up with the ruled lines. After he'd left the cashier turned to her colleague and said: "He had to complain, he was a doctor". As it stands the only people who call me "Dr Hopkinson" are my parents, one of my credit cards and the odd polite student.

For reasons I don't understand medical doctors appear to refer to PhD's as "proper doctors", whilst I've always considered myself a bit of fraud since I was not a "proper doctor" - who could potentially save your life. Perhaps they're just being polite.

And now I'm nearly a PhD. grandfather, I supervised three PhD. students of my own and one of these has a student who is about to do her viva. I don't have children, but I feel very 'parental' about my students - I'm immensely proud of them and their achievements.

Wordless Wednesday

Talkin' about my generation

My generation have all been wallowing in nostalgia at the Electronic Revolution strand on BBC4, in particular Electric Dreams - the 80's and Micro Men - the story of Sinclair and Acorn computers. We grew up in a golden age for programming, the generation before us had no hardware and the generation after us had no need to write their own software. We programmed because we had to.

I had a Commodore VIC20, cheaper than the BBC Micro, more classy and substantial looking than the Sinclair ZX81, available slightly before the ZX Spectrum. All of these lovely old machines available for your viewing pleasure at Centre for Computing History, along with many others. Look around the internet and you can also find all manner of emulators and manuals for these early machines. We wrote our own programs, or we typed in games from magazines - this was often a rather lengthy process and a bit prone to error.

I found the "VIC20 Programmers Reference Guide" here re-typed by Asbjorn Djupdal. Here's snippet: a program which allows you to enter the scores in each quarter for an American football game and then prints them out on screen in a table:

100 DIM S(1,5), T$(1)
110 INPUT "TEAM NAMES";T$(0),T$(1)
120 FOR Q = 1 TO 5
130 FOR T = 0 TO 1
140 PRINT T$(T),"SCORE IN QUARTER" Q
150 INPUT S(T,Q)
160 S(T,Q) = S(T,0) + S(T,Q)
170 NEXT T,Q
180 PRINT CHR$(147) "SCOREBOARD"
190 PRINT "QUARTER";
200 FOR Q = 1 TO 5
210 PRINT TAB(Q*2 + 9)Q;
220 NEXT
230 PRINT TAB(15)"TOTAL"
240 FOR T = 0 TO 1
250 PRINT T$(T)
260 FOR Q = 1 TO 5
270 PRINT TAB(Q*2 + 9) S(T,Q);
280 NEXT
290 PRINT TAB(15) S(T,0)
300 NEXT

Oh, this brings back memories!

To me programming and science (or at least physics) are intimately linked, almost the first programming I ever did was to visualise beat frequencies. To this day, if I want to really understand a scientific paper I'll implement the equations in a program, as often as not a few typos in the equations are revealed in this way and I'll have learnt exactly what the paper was on about. Teaching a student is a fantastic why to learn something, teaching a computer is almost as good.

Most the programming I do is of a workmanlike nature, it drives machines for measurements; it processes data; it analyses results; it computes equations, but there is scope in programming for a deep elegance, a pared down beauty which is difficult to describe - it's like finding the answer to a cryptic crossword clue - perhaps for an artist it's like finding just the right line to give a character personality. It's an algorithm that does what it has to do with the least effort required. I still program a lot for my work (relatively small stuff that only I will use), and it's not unknown for me to waste an hour doing something elegantly rather use the quick, dirty and obvious approach.

Programming is in my genes, in two ways really - my parents were both programmers from the sixties. We once found a leaflet advertising the Elliot 503 in our loft, 400sq ft of '60s computer with substantially less processor power than the most lowly of today's devices - this is the computer on which my mum learnt to program. Dad started on an early Ferranti of some description in the late 50's.

Earlier programming for me pretty much amounted to shouting verbs at things, possibly because I used FORTRAN which at the time was ALL IN CAPITALS. Programming today feels very different, it's more like visiting a library to get a book of spells to cast or the singing of a choir. I still enjoy doing it, in fact I'm writing a twitter client in C# just so see how to do it.

You might get the impression from all of this that programming is for the mathematically minded, but it isn't - it's really for the logically minded, for some mathematical applications maths is required but otherwise it isn't.

I taught the basics of programming to first year physics students a few years ago, and the thing that really shocked me was that, out of a class of fifty, only one had any real programming experience. There is hope though, I suspect programming still holds a fascination - my single data point: father and son sitting down to program the BBC Micro on Electric Dreams.

Wordless Wednesday

Twitter, rumours and physics

The twittersphere avoided making a bit of a mistake this morning. Wikileaks had obtained a new version of the BNP membership list, which they released (the BNP claim this list is a fake). Prior to release it was claimed that a peer of the realm was on the list and immediately post release that peer was named. Only it turns out it wasn't him, someone who styled himself Lord with a very similar name was the man on the list. Fortunately the released list was detailed enough that this could be checked, someone had the wit to check before blindly repeating the name. Once they'd done this they started correcting the false rumour (in what looks like quite a vigorous manual effort). It's worth noting here that the fact-checker appears to be a trained journalist.

But it could so easily have been very different. It could have been very difficult to establish the rumour was false, it could have been that the diligent fact checker stopped to finish his cup of tea before tweeting his correction, the rumour could have been re-tweeted by someone with many followers. All of these things could have happened but didn't, will this be true the next time?

On the plus side, twitter rumours do appear to be traceable back to source and it's very easy to find the individual rumour-mongers and put them right. This is certainly true for non-malicious rumourmongering (that's to say where people have not made a special effort to propagate a rumour, nor hide their tracks).

There is a scientific link here, modelling of all sorts of networks has long been a respectable scientific field. For example, there's Per Bak's forest fire model and work that follows on from there. More recently there's been work focussing more explicitly on computer networks and social networks. To a physicist Twitter represents an example of a simple system which has nodes (with ingoing and outgoing links) and messages that are propagated between the nodes. The nodes could be trees in a forest and the thing passed could be fire, or the nodes could be computers in a network with the message being network traffic; the nodes could be scientific papers with the messages citations of other papers. The physics doesn't care about the detail of these things, it cares about a small number of parameters in the system: how many links in and out of a node? What's the probability of a message being transmitted from one node to the next?

So there's an interesting bit of network analysis to do here. How fast can a rumour propagate on Twitter? What fraction of people refrain from tweeting a false rumour to stop it propagating? What's the best way to squash a false rumour?

Having watched the no doubt frenzied activities involved in squashing today's rumour. One useful tool would be an automated rumour-quashing robot. It would search for tweets containing the rumour (probably based on a manually selected keyword) and tweet the originator with a rebuttal.

Think before you tweet!

Confessions of a Twitter addict

Twitter is my new addiction, twitter is an elephant described by a group of blind men.

Instructions for using twitter:
1. Sign up here: www.twitter.com (It's worth selecting a short username)
2. Follow @stephenfry
3. Start twittering like a monkey

After a while things might start to become clearer.

Twitter all depends on who you follow; I started off following a bunch of people around Ben Goldacre (@bengoldacre) (who writes the Bad Science column in the Guardian), so naturally I ended up with a load of skeptics and science journalists. I therefore assumed that twitter predominantly contained skeptics and science journalists. But that's not true, twitter contains many groups and subgroups and they're invisible unless you go looking for them (or more precisely, follow them).   So finding people to follow is key, if you're not following anybody, twitter will be awfully quiet. It's also worth remembering that by default everyone can see everything you write.

Here are a few strategies for finding people worth following:

1. Keep an ear out for the rich and famous announcing their twittery-ness - don't expect them to say anything back to you but it does give you something to read. @Stephenfry has something like 750,000 followers, if he points to a website and says "Look at this", a large fraction of his followers simultaneous click the link....and the website falls over. @Stephenfry then tweets "Oh bugger".

2. Follow a hashtag and follow people you find there. You do this by searching for something like #xfactor or #electricdreams - if you follow the hashtag for a TV program whilst it's on then you get live commentary, which may be a good or bad thing. I was introduced to this with the debate between Lord Drayson(@lorddrayson), science and technology minister, and Ben Goldacre on science journalism (#scidebate). Twitterfall is rather good for tracking a hashtag, it automatically updates a search in real-time - new results fall from the top of the screen.

3. I searched for scientists under "Find People", birds of a feather flock together. David Bradley (@sciencebase) is compiling a list of scientist-twitterers to which you can add yourself.

4. Once you've found a few people, have a look to see who they're following and who is following them, services such as twubble or MrTweet will help you do this.

5. Try out a directory service like wefollow.

So what are they up to once you follow them?

Chatterers - some people are pretty conversational.
Linkers - some people just drop loads of links, sometimes this is automated, other times it's just what people do.
Pimpers - famous people pimp their newspaper columns and TV progs, the riff-raff like you and I pimp our blog posts. So overwhelming is this meme that I felt obliged to kick the old blog into action, in order that I would have something to pimp!
Proclaimers - some people are proclaimers, they produce a long stream of one liners. Some of them do it in the style of a historical character:

@KingAlfredRex Pærværted Skunke Signor Bærlusconi bemoanes hys Posytion as Moste Vyrtuous Manne yn Alle Ytalie... through noyse of Bangyng Head-Board.

Robots - some people aren't people, they're robots. Try a tweet with tea, oblong or wasp in it (prize for making any sense). I suspect a Monty Python fan wrote the @stoningbot. I'm scared to try putting two robots into a loop...
Britney and her sausage - the less said about this one the better, suffice to say if said lady starts following you best block her.

I must admit before I tried twitter I thought the 140 character limit was ridiculous (particularly since most people are not posting over SMS - which is where the limit originates). However, having used it for a bit - it's actually really neat. How many people can bore you in 140 characters? And fitting a thought into 140 characters is an interesting exercise. Some people do seem to be able to start an argument in 140 characters (but very few) - my twitter is very civilised.

The strengths of twitter are it's flexibility and simplicity; communities can coalesce around a hash tag or an individual very rapidly. Applications can coalesce around it's simple messaging and following system. If you don't like how your twitters looking, treat it like a big soft pillow - push it around until it's comfortable.

Basic twitter functions

There are five routes to seeing tweets on your twitter homepage:
1. Home - shows the tweets of those you are following
2. @[username] - shows tweets mentioning your username (Mentions)
3. Direct messages - shows direct messages (only you can see these)
4. Favourites - shows favourites tweets
5. Search - search for tweets containing a word or phrase

When you are posting a tweet:
@[username] directs a public message at someone. They'll see it as a mention, along with anyone following both of you. (Not realising this in the early days caused me some embarassment). If you put a character before the @ i.e. _@[name] then all your followers can see the tweet.

d @[username] sends a private message to someone (but doesn't work if they're not following you).

#[label] is a hashtag. Clicking on a hashtag will bring up a list of all the tweets containing the hashtag

If you like a tweet, you can retweet it, RT @[username] is the usual form for doing this although it's just convention and doesn't fire up any special behaviour.

With only 140 characters to play with you're not going to want to post full length links bit.ly and other similar services squash your links down to minimum size (and allow you to compose your tweet at the same time).

If you want to break the 140 character limit then you can use twerbose, although I suspect this violates the spirit of twitter.

There are loads of twitter clients around I use hootsuite  it's a web-based service and supports tabs so you can collect twitters and searches related to one area on one tab. To be honest, the twitter homepage does a pretty good job. If you're interested in getting more stats on your followers then tweepular is okay.

For the data visualisation fans here's a list of twitter visualisations, and trendsmap is fun too.

Wordless Wednesday

Superconductivity

This is a little post about superconductivity, lecturing and liquid nitrogen.

The lecture I remember most clearly was when I first demonstrated the Meissner effect in a superconductor. You can buy a little kit to help with this. It contains a little powerful magnet, a disk of a high temperature superconductor and a polystyrene dish. Put superconductor in dish, add liquid nitrogen to dish, wait for bubbling to subside then drop small magnet onto superconductor and this happens:

(A video is better, see here)
The little magnet just sits there, suspended above the superconductor, if you give it a prod it'll spin around on it's axis. It's magic! Now the first time I did this was live in a lecture theatre in front of fifty students. I'd not had a chance to try it out in advance, and I must admit I was a bit underwhelmed by the equipment provided. So I did the tippy-out-the-liquid-nitrogen and wotnot, and my first words thereafter were "Bloody hell - it works!" - the students seemed impressed too. Much poking of the little magnet with the plastic tweezers was done, and we also splashed around the liquid nitrogen for more fun. I did the demonstration the following year, but it wasn't the same without my genuine surprise and excitement.

Lecturing is a bit of performance (quite literally), I struggled with the format because I found it hard to get meaningful feedback from a large group of students. If you do it passionately and enthusiastically it comes across to the students, but that's difficult to sustain for lecture after lecture. If you get it spot on, it's brilliant but usually its just a chore (for both student and lecturer).

Just to explain a little more about superconductors: a superconductor is a material which conducts electricity perfectly - it's resistance is zero (not just small, zero). A light bulb, an electric fire or kettle would be utterly useless with a superconducting element, the electric current would flow through it without emitting any light or heat. Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered superconductivity in 1911 (having first worked out how to liquify helium to cool his samples). More recently a bunch of so-called high temperature superconductors have been discovered, the weird thing is these materials are ceramics - they don't conduct at all at room temperature and yet cool them down to liquid nitrogen temperature (-196degrees centigrade) and they conduct really well. As I've mentioned in earlier blog posts, superconductors are used for the making of big magnets and there are also some applications in very sensitive detectors. In principle they would be great for electrical power transmission, but the requirement to cool everything down to at least liquid nitrogen temperatures has meant they've not been economically viable.

Laboratory scientists take liquid nitrogen for granted but it's an utterly alien material, like furiously boiling water but at the same time deep-bitingly cold. It hisses as it's poured into a new vessel, wreathed in clouds of condensing water vapour. Liquid nitrogen splashed on a laboratory floor will chase dust bunnies around with distinct droplets of fiercely boiling liquid, like tiny hovercraft. The droplets vanish without a trace.

Wordless Wednesday

Schrodinger's flippin' cat!

There comes a time in a blogs life when a bit of a rant is called for, here's mine or at least the first one. To be honest it's a fairly discrete, civilised rant - because that's the sort of chap I am. It's about cliches in science.

Quite some years ago, Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay entitled "The case of the creeping fox-terrier clone", published in "Bully for Brontosaurus". In it he describes how he was writing a piece on evolution using the time-worn example of the horse, and in particular an animal named hyracotherium also known as eohippus or "The Dawn Horse". The problem for Professor Gould was that he found himself on the point of typing that eohippus was "the size of a fox-terrier", the thing is he had no idea how big a fox-terrier was! That's right, Prof Gould (who I think writes very nicely) was about to commit a cliche to paper, and rather admirably he stopped and had a bit of a think instead. Now the reason he was about to write this was that he'd read it many times before, it's a very standard story in evolution. He wasn't alone, many writers have written how "eohippus was the size of a fox-terrier", and doubtless many of them had no idea how big a fox-terrier was. Many readers have, no doubt, read those words, nodded sagely to themselves and said "All is well, I know that eohippus was the size of a fox-terrier". It's not really the cliche that's the problem, the problem is that we've gone through the motions of communicating an idea, but sort of failed. Just in case it was bothering you, a fox-terrier is about the same size as eohippus, or roughly 40cm at the shoulder ;-)  I reckon that's about the same size as a large lamb.

This isn't an isolated example, science writing (and education) is riddled with cliche, not just cliche in word, but cliche in thought. My own bugbear is Schrödingers cat, of whom surely everyone must have heard. Erwin Schrödinger was one of the fathers of quantum mechanics.



 (I have a bit of a weakness for lolcats)

Briefly, Schrödingers "thought experiment" is as follows: take one quantum mechanical system (a radioactively decaying material is common), one cat, one diabolical system to kill the cat based on a random event from the quantum mechanical system and one opaque, cat-proof box. Combine ingredients and wait...now open the box. The argument put is that prior to opening the box the cat is in an uncertain state between dead and alive (which is true of the quantum system, atoms in the radioactive material could be said to be decayed and undecayed simultaneously). 

However, Schrödinger prefaces this thought experiment thusly: "One can even set up quite ridiculous cases." Schrödinger didn't think his cat was genuinely in some weird half-way house between dead and alive he was quite clear that it was very definitely one or the other and the problem was that for systems obeying quantum mechanical rules this wasn't the case. That's the useful point in this thought experiment: "There's something weird that goes on between the quantum and the classical and we don't know what it is". Yet time after time you see this experiment described without the critical proviso. People go away with the false impression that undead cats exist!

oh dear I can feel my self getting a bit incoherent now... special relativity, I've taught special relativity, it's genuinely a marvelous intellectual leap that solved a couple of serious problems in physics. It has some real world applications (understanding my old friend the synchrotron, GPS satellites, lifetimes for relativistic muons in the atmosphere etc). But the text book examples we give to students are rather worn, nope, "worn" is the wrong word. "flippin' ridiculous" gets a bit closer. Here's one:

"You have a 10 meter long ladder, and a 5 meter long shed. How fast must the ladder enter the shed in order for it to appear to fit inside to a stationary observer?"

I can tell you the answer: it's "really fast" - some large fraction of the the speed of light. To put it another way, a ladder travelling at the requiste speed could travel the length of the equator in something under quarter of a second, that's probably a little faster than your reaction time and I'm sure you have an intuitive feel for the length of the equator. My point here is that (1) You're going to struggle to get your ladder going that fast (2) if that ladder's going past you that fast, the absolute last thing on your mind is going to be "ooo...look, the 10m ladder is fitting into the 5m shed". If your shed is in a vacuum then you won't get killed by massive plasma shockwave, but how many sheds have you seen in a vacuum? For part 2 of this experiment one may find some halfwit has placed a concrete block at the back of the shed to check the ladder really is fitting into the shed by bringing the ladder to an instant standstill inside the shed. Once again, when ladder hits concrete whether ladder fits into shed is the least of your worries. Assuming that you were in a vacuum, your ladder/concrete collision is going to release "absolutely loads" of energy - fusion bomb scale. There you go, I've lost it completely now. Special relativity teaching is full of everyday objects (trains and rulers are typical) traveling at implausible speeds, and it really winds me up!

Don't get me started on "Alice and Bob", the quantum cryptographers and if one more string theorist tells me that all the extra dimensions are "curled up very small", there's going to be some hurtin'.

And relax... I feel better now that I've written it down.