I'm at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly, 2010, the biggest gethering of European geoscientists, in Vienna, May 2-7. This is my first time here and its huge: over 9000 participants. Merely finding the talks and posters is a challenge (they supply a USB stick with the abstracts and agendas as they can't print them all! The first day I spent mostly at the exoplanet stream (and putting up my own poster). Some neat stuff on show: summaries by Borucki on Keplers findings (on the Hot Jupiters they found :" these things glow like a blast furnace; forget life"). He points out that when they look for Earth sized planets, radial velocity confirmation would take 1000s of hours on 10M telescopes - so it won't happen. hmm. Steve Unwin on SIM: neat astrometric mission for planet hunting and galaxy measurement. A targeted mission list, unlike the Gaia survey; to fly in 2016 if the Decadal survey says yes. 20% of time available under the general observer program, so get proposals ready ? Nestest poster idea: Anomalous night-time temps on Mars, Gonzales et al.. Finding hot spots on Arsia Mons, a volcano. Explained by air rising from 100km long lava tubes. We've seen pit entrances to caves on Mars with HiRISE, etc. here they model heat output from a pit entrace/exit and imply 100km caves. Oh to go exploring... Tinetti points out that we lack proper spectra, both experimental and theoretical, for high temperature and pressure gases such as methane, etc. Hmm, I know a group in Galway that might be able to help ... Helmut Lammer raised an interesting point at the poster session, that many groups ignore the stellar wind when looking at H2 atmospheres around exoplanets. Theis grossly inflates the apparent H2 atmosphere. Without taking this into acount it would be easy to mistake H2 detections with a Neptune-like atmosphere. He points to a 1.7M UV telescope that the Russians are planning to launch that would help do UV measurements when Hubble is gone. Lena Noack gave a talk on convection in tidally-locked planets (with related poster Low-lid formation on Super-Earths and implications for the habitability of Super-Earths and Sub-Earths). They argue that no covection can be expected in the mantle, and hence no geodynamo or magnetosphere. This could be a problem for holding an atmosphere. Time to check for planetary magnetic fields. Break out the polarimeter ? Oh, and it seems that That Damned Volcano is closing Irish airspace on Tuesday. Might be an idea to go to the meeting about it. Hope it clears by Friday ... Tags conference, astronomy

I'm at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly, 2010, the biggest gethering of European geoscientists, in Vienna, May 2-7. This is my first time here and its huge: over 9000 participants. Merely finding the talks and posters is a challenge (they supply a USB stick with the abstracts and agendas as they can't print them all! The first day I spent mostly at the exoplanet stream (and putting up my own poster). Some neat stuff on show: summaries by Borucki on Keplers findings (on the Hot Jupiters they found :" these things glow like a blast furnace; forget life"). He points out that when they look for Earth sized planets, radial velocity confirmation would take 1000s of hours on 10M telescopes - so it won't happen. hmm. Steve Unwin on SIM: neat astrometric mission for planet hunting and galaxy measurement. A targeted mission list, unlike the Gaia survey; to fly in 2016 if the Decadal survey says yes. 20% of time available under the general observer program, so get proposals ready ? Nestest poster idea: Anomalous night-time temps on Mars, Gonzales et al.. Finding hot spots on Arsia Mons, a volcano. Explained by air rising from 100km long lava tubes. We've seen pit entrances to caves on Mars with HiRISE, etc. here they model heat output from a pit entrace/exit and imply 100km caves. Oh to go exploring... Tinetti points out that we lack proper spectra, both experimental and theoretical, for high temperature and pressure gases such as methane, etc. Hmm, I know a group in Galway that might be able to help ... Helmut Lammer raised an interesting point at the poster session, that many groups ignore the stellar wind when looking at H2 atmospheres around exoplanets. Theis grossly inflates the apparent H2 atmosphere. Without taking this into acount it would be easy to mistake H2 detections with a Neptune-like atmosphere. He points to a 1.7M UV telescope that the Russians are planning to launch that would help do UV measurements when Hubble is gone. Lena Noack gave a talk on convection in tidally-locked planets (with related poster Low-lid formation on Super-Earths and implications for the habitability of Super-Earths and Sub-Earths). They argue that no covection can be expected in the mantle, and hence no geodynamo or magnetosphere. This could be a problem for holding an atmosphere. Time to check for planetary magnetic fields. Break out the polarimeter ? Oh, and it seems that That Damned Volcano is closing Irish airspace on Tuesday. Might be an idea to go to the meeting about it. Hope it clears by Friday ... Tags conference, astronomy

Thanks to Joey Hess for the request to set up tor bridges. I wholeheartedly agree, and recommend the video he points to. I've installed a Tor bridge at home, and recommend others to do so. For the most part, I'm not politically active at the moment - I'm doing a PhD Part-time, and thats consuming all my "spare" time, other than work and family. Just given a blog site, however, one subject strikes me as very important - free speech. Hence the side links to Amnesty International, etc. In Ireland this campaign has a particular focus at the moment - the Repeal of the Blasphemy Law. This law came into effect in Ireland this January. While the government claims that this law will 'never be used', its bad in several ways. Firstly, it promotes the ideas of censorship as a method of hiding social issues, and secondly it may actually be used, as pointed out in : <object height="300" width="400"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><param name="movie" value="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1"><embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="300" src="http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=5196379&amp;server=vimeo.com&amp;show_title=1&amp;show_byline=1&amp;show_portrait=0&amp;color=&amp;fullscreen=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="400"></embed></object>Blasphemy is a Victimless Crime from Limerick Blogger on Vimeo. Basically, with Europe-wide arrest warrants, if two European countries have criminal blasphemy laws, then someone may be extradited to face prosecution in another country. While the Irish government says they will never prosecute, they open the possibility of say, Irish citizens being extradited to Greece to safe prosecution for blasphemy. On a wider level, I recommend Index on Censorship. It keeps documenting the cost of censorship around the world, and has been instrumental in campaigning for Libel reform in the UK, which is ncreasingly important for open scientific discussion. Tags censorhip, free-speech, politics

[So much for at-least-one-post-a-week : I'm now back online, courtesy of a new router]. In the this week is another announcement from the CoRoT group: CoRoT-7 is the first star (outside our own) known to host two Super-Earths. Two planets of 1.6 and (max.) 21 times Earths' mass, and the smaller one at least is rocky (the outer planet has not been seen in transit, so we can't tell yet). Its not the first Earth-sized planets to be discovered: as my supervisor points out, <http:>PSR 1257+12 holds that record, as well as the one for the first exoplanet to be found. As usual, Exoplanet.eu gives the details: CoRoT-7b has a flurry of papers to its credit already. CoRoT-7b transits its star and is the first Super-Earth with a clear radius measurement. Together with a mass calculated from a radial-velocity measurement by the HARPS spectrometer, they calculate a density of 5.5 g/cm3, and so its shown to be a rocky world. CsoRoT is a hot A-class star, and CoRoT-7b orbits only 2.5 million km from it. Because of this, it is unlikely that it has retained an atmosphere (it'll be way too hot), and is expected to be tidally locked: with one face permanently pointing at the star, one in permanent darkness, the two sides will be both too hot and too cold for life. (Is there a Goldilocks, twilight zone? unlikely: the tidal forces will be too high, and with no atmosphere to moderate matters, there can be little hope for life). Still, while it may not support life, it could help answer important questions, such as how many terrestrial planets are there out there. Most of the planets discovered to date have been gas giants, which are easier to discover. But are there lots of rocky planets hiding between the giants ? One way of answering this might involve the disks from which the planets evolved. One trend we've seen is that (gas giant) planets are more likely to be found around stars with high metallicity (astronomers are strange in calling all elements heavier than helium a metal). But our Sun is strange in being comparatively depleted in 'refractory' elements such as iron or silicon. Is this important for the story of terrestrial planets? Melenendez et al. have a paper on arxiv.org on this topic. They find that most stars similar to our sun found not to have giant planets have elemental abundances similar to our Sun: perhaps they have undiscovered rocky planets instead ? Tags astronomy, exoplanets, planet-of-the-week

Adrian von Bidder raises an interesting discussion on why public health care is difficult. Basically, it comes back to the challenge:

How much money should be spent on this person's illness? which is a very, very bad question. We try to sidestep it by only taking about statistics etc., but no matter how you look at it, you either do 20'000  per week medications for 80 year old patients who will die soon anyway and get a system society can't pay, or you don't and you get a system where the rich are better off than the poor.

The problem is, the majority of health costs are in the last few years of a persons life: when the body is breaking down. If viewed from the problem of health-care funding vs. eg. education, you have an ethical dilemma: is it worth it ? Here there are no easy answers. Nick Bostrom wrote a very interesting and persuasive essay a while back, The fable of the Dragon Tyrant. In short, we are getting somewhere with regenerative medicine While cures are hard to come by at this stage, there is a growing realization in medicine that senesence, what we used to call "old age", is curable. But we have a lot of psychological defensive mechanisms to help us cope with the carnage of old age that make us deny the problem: if we look afresh at "old age" knowing it to be curable, any delay in doing so is abhorrent. From a public, societal perspective, we spend a fortune every year on health. But we do so in a very disjointed way: we pay colossal amounts for health care, but also for basic health science: in the US, for example, the budget for the National Institutes of Health is about 30 billion dollars. Nearly twice that of NASA. Similar figures are spent in Europe, but there is this strange gap in the middle: the drug companies and medical industry. We start the development of new drugs with public money, and we buy the drugs with public money, but the choice of what drugs and treatments are developed are left to private industry, that is, a profit motive. This results in many cases in expensive treatments to treat symptoms rather than necessarily cure the problem. Faced with the huge costs of geriatric medicine and senesence, the response should be co-ordinated: funding a cure will be expensive, but save a fortune (Think, instead of a pensioner slowly dying and 'being a drain on resources', of 'experienced citizen in the prime of their productive, tax-paying years'). Instead of funding the basic science alone, we should be funding the complete drug and treatment development publically, only farming out the actual manufacture to private industry. It is silly to spend a fortune to keep merely keep someone alive at the age of eighty or so, when we know for a larger investment (bigger than a private company can do), we can cure them properly. The solution to the dilemma, then, is to stop thinking of the elderly being a drain, but actually applying our public efforts in a co-ordinated manner to solving the carnage of old age. Tags politics, health

At work I've been promoting the use of pkg-config and modules to solve the problems of avoiding hard-coded paths and an environment where we've multiple compilers. In summary, "module load intel-cc" to load the intel compiler, "module load netcdf-intel" to, which among other things appends /ichec/packages/netcdf/4.0-intel/pkgconfig to $PKG_CONFIG_PATH, and then:

NCDF_INCS :=  pkg-config netcdf --cflags 
NCDF_LIBS :=  pkg-config netcdf --libs 

in the application code. Replace "intel-cc" and "netcdf-intel" with "gcc" and "netcdf-gcc", and it builds with gcc. This would work better if upstream supplied .pc files, which means the next stage in world domination is to send patches to do just that. But it's not that easy, apparently. netcdf (for example) supplies two libraries, libnetcdf.so and libnetcff.so, with the second including code only needed for Fortran. So, for gcc I have the following netcdf file:

prefix=/ichec/packages/netcdf/4.0-gcc
exec_prefix=$ prefix 
libdir=$ prefix /lib
includedir=$ prefix /include
Name: netcdf
Description: netCDF libraries, include files and development tools (gcc version)
Version: 4.0
Libs: -L$ libdir  -Wl,--as-needed -lnetcdf   -lnetcdff 
Cflags: -I$ includedir 

While for Intel I have:

prefix=/ichec/packages/netcdf/4.0-intel
# Add fortran libs 
forlibs=/ichec/packages/intel/fce/11.0.081/lib/intel64
exec_prefix=$ prefix 
libdir=$ prefix /lib
includedir=$ prefix /include
Name: netcdf
Description: netCDF libraries, include files and development tools
Version: 4.0
Libs: -L$ libdir  -lnetcdf -L$ forlibs   -lnetcdff -lifcore
Cflags: -I$ includedir 

The main problem is that --as-needed is not understood by non GNU-ld linkers, and must be conditionally removed somehow. Any ideas ? (There is a second wrinkle of needing to add additional libraries for Intel Fortran here, but I'm sure I can remove that with the addition of more .pc files.). A second issue is that --as-needed can break otherwise working pkg-config usages. Thanks to galtgendo at PhP Bugs for this example:

alastair@ailm:~$ cc -o testx  -Wl,--as-needed  pkg-config glib-2.0 --cflags  test.c  pkg-config glib-2.0 --libs 

works, but:

alastair@ailm:~$ cc -o testx  -Wl,--as-needed  pkg-config glib-2.0 --cflags    pkg-config glib-2.0 --libs  test.c
/tmp/ccsUEwtk.o: In function  main':
test.c:(.text+0x20): undefined reference to  g_print'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status

The problem being that --as-needed removes libraries as unnecessary before the linker sees the test.o code. Tags programming, debian, work, pkg-config, shared-libs, lazyweb

From the exoplanets mailing list:

A 1.9 Earth mass exoplanet (period 3 days)
has been detected around Gliese 581 (Mayor et al).
See
http://exoplanet.eu/planet.php?p1=Gl+581&p2=d
It is the lightest planet detected up to date around a main sequence star.
In addition, the planet Gliese 581 d has a revised period of 67 days,
bringing it in the habitable zone of the parent star.
Jean Schneider

Gliese 581d is now more solidly inside the habitable zone; it was considered before to be on the outer edge of the habitable zone (this work moves its believed semi-major axis from 0.25 AU to 0.22 AU). Gliese 581d was a maybe for habitability (see this Centauri dreams article for example), depending on cloud cover, etc. Now its definitely in. The new Gl 581e is beyond the classical habitable zone. These planets are quite close in: Rory Barnes and colleagues at Lunar and Planetary Laboratory in Arizona did some good work on the habitability of Gliese 581 c (paper online) and concluded that it would be tidally heated to such a degree it was probably never habitable. Such tidal heating might make Gl 581e habitable; time to run the model again. Correction: On reading the ESO Press release and paper (via) it appears that Gl 581e is inside the orbit of Gl 581b, and too close to the star to be habitable. To date, planets have been labelled b, c, d .. as they are discovered, and they've been discovered shortest-period first, so 'b' also meant closest to the star. Now Gl 581e is closest to the star, with a period of 3 days. Tags exoplanets, tides, astronomy, habitability

In college at the students union elections we once had the pleasure of seeing a candidate run into the lecture theatre during a break, give a 30-second stump speech, run out, and (accidentally), run in the other door to the same theatre, give the same speech to the same class, and leave without realising his mistake. But at least this was college politics, and a friendly audience. It takes a government minister to stand up in front of a rally of his opponents supporters and accidentally denounce them ... (Wrong rally blunder in India poll, thanks to the BBC). Tags politics, humour, links

I've added a Debian Meteorology section to the DebianScience page on Debian Wiki. The aim is to add the free and open-source meteorology packages I currently maintain and work on at ICHEC to Debian. So far I've packaged CDO (Climate Data Operators), and am working on EMOSLIB, an interpolation library. Enrico Zini is packaging GRIB API. Other interesting packages include the OASIS coupler and the VISIT visualization software, and adding support for meteorology data formats to /etc/magic, with desktop icons and mime filetypes, etc. Tasks to investigate include (1) What other software are people interested in, and (2) getting added to Debian pure blends in Alioth. Tags debian, work, meteorology, climate

I bought With Speed and Violence: Why Scientists fear Tipping Points in Climate Change to investigate the concept of tipping points in climate change: how real are they, and what ones might exist. A lot of points are labelled 'tipping points', such as the melting of the Arctic; but, if we successfully reduced CO₂ to pre-industrial levels, would they revert, or would we have passed a point of no return?

read more

Tags review, climate, tipping-points

At ICHEC one of our tasks is to help users build their software on our supercomputers. Mostly we have to change paths, etc. in code bases that are used by a handful of scientists, and we don't want to exacerbate the hard-coded path problem. We also have multiple versions of certain libraries and compilers installed, which we select using modules: to do this, you select your software environment with e.g.

$ module load intel-fc/11.0.082  netcdf/4.0-intel

This selects the compiler version, and library version. Then, this places appropriate paths in $PATH, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. While this is useful for selecting, eg. compilers, its often not great for many build processes that expect library paths, etc. hard-coded. I also dislike adding random environmental variables: it loses the Single Point Of Truth that describes the configuration. So I've come up with the following pattern. First, record the modules used (eg. library version) in config.log if configure is used. To do this, add the following to the autoconf file or system headers:

# AC_MODULES_OUTPUT
# -----------------
# Check if the system runs 'modules', and if so, record the modules environment in the config.log
AC_DEFUN([AC_MODULES_LIST],
[AC_CACHE_CHECK[modules output if present],[ac_modules_output],
(ac_modules_output= module list 2>&1 )
if test $? eq 0; then
 AC_MSG_RESULT([Output from 'module list' was:\n $ac_modules_output])
fi
])

Secondly, For all packages, ensure that a pkgconfig package file exists. For example, we have multiple MPI implementations on our SGI system. For MVAPICH, we have a modules file:

stokes2:~$ module show mvapich2-intel
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/ichec/modulefiles/mvapich2-intel/1.2p1:
module-whatis    MVAPICH2 1.2p1 (Intel 11.0.074) 
conflict         mvapich2-gnu mvapich2-intel 
prepend-path     PATH /ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel/bin 
prepend-path     LD_LIBRARY_PATH /ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel/lib 
prepend-path     MANPATH /ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel/share/man 
prepend-path     INCLUDE /ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel/include 
prepend-path     CPATH /ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel/include 
prepend-path     FPATH /ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel/include 
prepend-path     PKG_CONFIG_PATH /ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel/share/pkgconfig 
-------------------------------------------------------------------

We add a file mpi.pc to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH for each MPI implementation. So, mpi.pc looks like:

# MPI pkgconfig file for mvapich2-intel
# Normally only used to get variables $prefix, etc.
prefix=/ichec/packages/mvapich/1.2p1-intel
exec_prefix=$ prefix 
libdir=$ prefix /lib
includedir=$ prefix /include
Name: mpi
Description: netCDF libraries, include files and development tools
Version: 1.2p1
Libs: -L$ libdir   -lmpichf90 -lmpich -lpthread -lrdmacm -libverbs -libumad -lrt
Cflags: -I$ includedir 

This then means we can add the following small patch to our target software (in this case a climate code COSMOS):

 #########################################################################
 #
 #  MPI message passing root directory of the chosen compiler
 
+  # Get default MPI ROOT from the pkgconfig file if possible
+  pkg-config mpi --variable=prefix 2> /dev/null > /dev/null
+  if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then
+    MPIROOT= pkg-config mpi --variable=prefix 
+  fi
+
   if   [ $compiler = ifort ]; then
     export cc=cc
     if [ $CHAN = MPI2 ]; then
-       export MPIROOT=/sw/sarge-ia32/mpich2-1.0.4p1-pgi
+       export MPIROOT=$ MPIROOT:-/sw/sarge-ia32/mpich2-1.0.4p1-pgi 
     elif [ $CHAN = MPI1 ]; then

Such a patch is generic enough to be useful outside our institution, and means the code can build out-of-the-box on many systems. Now to add mpi.pc to Debian ... Tags programming, autoconf, modules pkg-config, ichec, work

While everybody agrees the current patenting system (especially software patents) is broken, there is little agreement about what to do about it. Many would like to return to some earlier state "when patents worked properly". So here is a proposal, not necessarily a magic bullet, but a step. The point of patents is/was to make a process "patently clear". Anyone who has read modern patents knows they are anything but clear: they are written in legalese, and engineers and inventors are recommended not to read them: it is both pointless, and dangerous: dangerous, because wilfully infringing patents triples the damages awarded compared to just being ignorant. In other words, you are unlikely to realise that you are infringing a patent (it is so poorly worded) and will accidentally infringe it, earning extra penalties for you diligence in checking. So the solution: Explicitly make patents something "a person with ordinary skill in the art" shall be expected to have read.

read more

Tags patents, politics

For the day thats in it (a salute to all triskaidekaphobians out there ...) It appears that the project under Bush was shut down due to an accounting error. According to Physics World:

A $500m accounting error led to the Bush administration scrapping a carbon capture and storage demonstration plant last year according to a report by the US House of Representatives committee of science and technology. The project was scrapped because costs appeared to have ballooned from $1bn to $1.8bn when in fact it had only risen to $1.3bn. 

Oops. Tags oops, co2, friday13

Titan, by Stephen Baxter describes a near-future manned mission to Titan, Saturn's moon, by Space Shuttle, no less. This is the first book i've read by Stephen Baxter, and will probably not be the last. It's well written, the most science-based outer planets mission story i've read in since Arthur C. Clarke, though with a pessimistic edge. The story turns on a waning NASA using its remaining hardware on one big mission, to Titan, where life may have been discovered. Most of the book concentrates naturally enough on getting to Titan, rather than what they found when they get there, but Baxters ammonia-based chemistry is intriguing. The physics of what it would be like to walk on the moon are a little underdone, though. Its an understatement to say that Titan is cold: serious work on insulation would be needed to stop your base melting the "permafrost" and sinking. While we don't know what life might be present, it would be good to imagine the real tasks involved in being there. But it's his idea that NASA and others really don't want space that is most interesting. That the military want space as their baliwick, and would rather frustrate the development of technologies so that no other nations or groups interfere is well worth thinking about. To a degree, I would agree: frustrate, but not he puts it, stop. Sooner or later the technology has other uses on Earth to the point where even amateurs would launch their own satellites. The vast bulk of technology development for future space use will be done not only on Earth but for Earth use: the minaturization that NASA and the military did for the space race in the 1960's now happens for consumer electronics. 3 D fabricators are being built for prototyping, and the prospect of getting a self-contained space mission together (not reliant on Earth) draws closer. I fully expect private groups, rather than national efforts, will be the first to colonise outer space, assembling pre-existing technologies. Tags review, sci-fi, titan

While driving home from Letterfrack to Moycullen last night after a pleasant days hillwalking with the family, we saw frogs on the road. Hundreds of them. Over the course of over more than more than twenty kilometres, we saw frogs apparently crossing the road. Can anyone tell me what was going on? It didn't look as though they were going somewhere in particular. Has they all recently spawned (unlikely) or where they looking for somewhere to spawn ? This was in the early evening: its possible that they all got to the road at dusk. That part of Conemara is all boggy hillside, with individual widely spaced houses. From up on a hill, the linear feature of the road (the N59), especially in the wet, might have been mistaken for a river. Did they head to the road to spawn? Tags frogs, rainfall, conemara

From Today's Astronomy & Astrophysics there were two papers from the Geneva Observatory / Grenoble team on The HARPS search for southern extra-solar planets:

• XIII. A planetary system with 3 super-Earths (4.2, 6.9, and 9.2 M_e )
• XIV. Gl 176b, a super-Earth rather than a Neptune, and at a different period

These are probably part of the 45 super-Earths tentively announced by M. Mayor last June at the Nantes conference on super-Earths. He showed radial-velocity diagrams for 45 or so planets in an impressive display, but only gave details of three at the time, while the rest were being peer-reviewed, etc. Now they're drip-feeding out. Interestingly, this now makes 3 out of 7 super-Earths do far discovered as being around M dwarf stars, and another multiple planetary system. It looks more like the "metallicity" relation (larger and more frequent planets around more metallic stars) seems to be more true for gas giants than terrestrial planets. Super-Earths (potentially rocky planets, though heavier than Earth) look more abundant around low mass and less-metal stars. Now, down to work examining the characteristics of these planets. Rory Barnes and colleagues at LLPL, U. of Arizona have also been looking at these three planets around HD 40307, to determine if they are super-Earths or mini-Neptunes. They have an interesting technique of modelling the tidal circularisation of the planet backwards in time, based on its current measured or estimated eccentiricity. Tidal circularisation makes the orbit of close-in planets more circular (decreasing the eccentricity, e, to zero), dumping the energy into tidal heating of the planet (and the star). Doing this for Gl 437, for example, they showed that it would be hotter than Io, with a volcanic surface and couldn't be habitable. For HD 403007b, Hence they believe the planets are not terrestrial-like, but may be more Neptune-like. So, could these planets have oceans ? Tags astronony, super-earths, neptunes, exoplanets

Why it is vitally important that eveyone goes to bed early tomorrow night ... With thanks to Wunderblog. Tags christmas, youtube, physics, qed

I was installing SPlint - Secure Programming Lint - on our new machine at ICHEC yesterday, when:

Compiling flags.c...
flags.c(151): warning #1011: missing return statement at end of non-void function "argcode_unparse"
          
  ^
flags.c(265): warning #188: enumerated type mixed with another type
    allFlagCodes (code)
    ^
flags.c(292): warning #188: enumerated type mixed with another type
    allFlags (f)
    ^
flags.c(390): warning #188: enumerated type mixed with another type
    allFlags (f)
    ^
flags.c(459): warning #188: enumerated type mixed with another type
    allFlags (f)
    ^
...

Compiler warnings from a Lint tool. A commercial compiler (Intel) admittedly, but nevertheless.

read more

Tags programming, work, compilers

Storm World, by Chris Mooney is an account of the development of the science of Hurricanes and their links to Global warming, against the background of Katrina and the politics of global warming.

read more »

Tags climate, review, politics, hurricanes

On turning forty, some buy a Ferrari: I got a Brompton bike. A bit more practical (have you seen Galway's roads?), but still fun. I've spent a fair bit abroad this year (ten weeks away on various conferences and working weeks, not including numerous visits to Dublin), lamenting the easy transport while i'm visiting some nice cities. So, the Brompton. I got the S2L model, the lighest 'standard' model, and the Brompton bag for carrying it aboard planes. I also got the lighter cover and saddle bag, but that has not been as useful as I thought it would be for travelling by train. The Brompton bag, at 2.4 Kg is recommended for planes; its 5 mm padded nylon, quite study (and you can pack socks, etc around the bike, allowing a little extra carrying).

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Tags cycling, travel, brompton