"Houses Made of Wrecked Ships"

The Victorian church of the Holy Trinity and All Saints at  the village of Winterton-on-Sea, Norfolk, snapped by my wife as we hiked around it last week. The tower is seven stories high, built to serve as a landmark from the sea, but many died on the notorious shifting sands off Winterton Ness,  and many of the church graves are of the drowned. In 1722 Daniel Defoe (who wrote Robinson Crusoe)  remarked on all the houses of the village being made from the timbers of wrecked ships.

You shall not leave!

....the German Civil Service!

The benefits of Germany’s 4.5 million Civil Servants (Beamter) are enticing. They have a job for life, health insurance and a generous pension.  Among the Beamter are the German professoriat, which indluded me from 1998 until 2007.  Now I had always assumed that some measure of employment permeability between the German Civil Service (Beamtenschaft) and rest of the world would be actively encouraged. Not so, it seems…

 Now there is indeed a strong conflict of interest argument against too frequent personnel switches between the high-level bureaucrats, who regulate industry, and industry itself. However, for most civil servants, including the professoriat, hindrance is against the national interest.  But, as Ansgar reminded me in the pub last Monday, in Germany employment as a Beamter is expected to be marked by a higher-than-normal degree of loyalty on both sides, with the above-mentioned benefits being matched by faithfulness and dedication to the State. Indeed, the new Beamter's first task is to swear a solemn oath of loyalty. Leaving the Beamtenschaft is tantamount to treason, so that’s why in doing so you forfeit your pension, you see. It’s a punishment for failing in your loyalty.

You have revealed your true colours.  You shall not leave.

Bear Caught at the Lab

 (Photo: Jason Richards)

A black bear was recently caught at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at ORNL.

HFIR may well be an efficient means for scientists to scatter neutrons but a black bear appears to be an efficient means of scattering neutron scientists.

The Tennessee Titan..

..may be ready for the next football season. And, no, I didn't accidentally omit the plural.

The Tennessee Titans (plural) are themselves in good shape but apparently "still  missing a few pieces here and there to be a really good team".  The same could be said for the Tennessee Titan, the ORNL DOE supercomputer.

Frank Munger reports that the remaining GPUs needed for the new system may be delivered in August-September - in time maybe for the new football season. The question remains as to whether Titan will win the Supercomputing Superbowl - the Top500 competition. We'll know the answer later on - maybe in time for the February Football Fiesta itself.

Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

The German baritone Fischer-Dieskau, who just died aged 84, was best known for his work with German lieder and, among British, for his 1962 singing Britten's War Requiem in Coventry Cathedral, which had been destroyed by a bombing raid in World War II.

However, I remember him most for the 1968 Deutsche Grammophon recording of Carmina Burana by the Deutschen Oper Berlin conducted by Eugen Jochum. Fischer-Dieskau is rough and coarse in the drunken debauchery of  In Taberna, and gruff in the Abbot's song. But above all, smooth 'DiFi" radiates sensuality in Omnia sol temperat and Circa mea pectora:

"My heart sighs for your beauty and I am tortured.
Send a message! Send a message! My beloved does not come!
Your eyes shine like the rays of the sun, like a flash of lightning, giving light to darkness.
May the gods grant me what I have set myself to do,  to unlock the bonds of her virginity.
Send a message! send a message! My beloved does not come!"

Monster Tornado - 25 miles from my house

A  hike along the Rabbit Creek Trail in the Smoky Mountains the other day. Hot it was indeed, but the heat was tempered by the shade from the tree cover omnipresent in the mountains of the Eastern Seabord...until, suddenly, surprisingly,... we were in fresh air, open, exposed (above). Every single tree uprooted or simply snapped.  This is where an monster EF4 tornado had hit on April 27th 2011, clearing a track a mile wide and 11 miles long (see below).

Here's what an EF4 did to a populated area (St. Louis, Missouri) a few days earlier:

And Knoxville TN? 

Well, the same storm that created the Rabbit Creek Monster damaged my roof, which I had to replace. 

And, no, the insurance didn't cough up the dough.  

Maybe it would take an EF4 to convince them?

Well, at least there's an educational side:  the Smoky Mountain EF4 dispels the myth that tornadoes never happen in mountains...

A Solution for Scientific Publishing?

Is there a better model for scientific publishing?
There are two major current problems: the cost of publishing and access, and the inequities of the peer review process. Both could be cured at once.

We need ONLY ONE, publicly-run, open-access scientific publishing domain to which ALL ARTICLES are uploaded for free, in whatever format wished for by the authors and without prior peer review. This domain would subsume all existing primary research publishing. After an initial, publically-funded development phase, the small costs of maintaining this domain could be obtained through discreet advertising revenues. The model thus obviates both the need for  charging huge amounts for access to  journals and the need to charge authors for each publication submitted.

Once an article is uploaded it will easily be able to be found by a keyword search, such as exists in PubMed or Web of Science. Reviewing would not be solicited but would be open and online, in the fashion of "comments" to a blog entry.  Any given article might thus receive many or no reviews. No reviews would be anonymous: only registered reviewers who have revealed their identities would be allowed to post comments. Many of the reviews are likely to be incompetent, but the reviews would also be open to review, and ranking, as would the reviews of the reviews etc..

In the above system there would be no need for a decision to be made a priori as to whether an article is "of sufficient general interest" before publication - this would all be decided by the readers afterwards: a points system could be devised whereby an article gains prominence depending on how many times it is accessed from different computers, cited later on, and on the reviews received. As an article rises in points, so would its visibility in the web domain. Extremely hot articles would be expected to very rapidly gain prominence.

Any objections?