Debbie, PA to Mr Screwtape: Football Crazy, Football Mad

Hiya! Just sweeping up the chicken bones, cigar butts and beer tins. My Guv'nor, Mr Screwtape had a few too many and is snoring at his retro desk, his horned head resting on his traditional-style blotter.

The Boss, His Satanic Majesty, came down to watch the football with Mr Screwtape down here in Reception. We can get it on the Contracts and Arrivals screen, the giant HD plasma over the reception desk. Mr Screwtape explained that the combined subscriptions saved us the cost of going topside. The Boss asked about 'adult channels' and my Guv'nor looked baffled, as usual, so I said that if there were any, they were definitely part of the package and nothing extra had been ordered. The Boss looked fleetingly annoyed, then went back to acting as if I don't exist. Suits me.

His Satanic Majesty was in a good mood for once as he had taken off his business suit and was slumming in a Hawaiian shirt and roomy shorts. They don't chafe his hide. His red pelt is regrowing, judging by the curly wires peeping out around his hocks. He has given up being full-body waxed as he has broken up with his girlfriend Miranda, at least for the time being. She insisted on him being peeled each month and while he can dish it out, he can't take it. The howls used to rattle the stained glass windows in the firmament. He was celebrating his freedom with an enormous Cohiba glowing in the corner of his mouth and scratching himself luxuriously with his long nails as the new hair poked itchily through.

Mr Screwtape got in to the spirit of things by dressing in antique football strip and blowing an ancient shrill whistle. He claimed he got it from George Best in return for the succession of beautiful women George had bedded, but when I checked the file, it seems very little business was done with Best. A few passes to him which defied physics, but that would have been no use if he had not had his own gifted feet. Still, Mr Screwtape has an old autograph book of his most important signings and Best is in there, so they had some private business which didn't show in the main sequence files. The Boss had better not find out; he's apt to turn nasty if he thinks his representatives are trying to cut HellCo out of the deal.

Lord Lucifer and Mr Screwtape settled themselves on the Barcelona office chairs, their hooves up on the leather upholstery, with beer, pizza and chicken legs laid out within reach on glass coffee tables. They like to throw the bones over their shoulder as they once saw Henry VIII do, so I learned to duck. His Excellency clicked his fingers imperiously every time he wanted a ring-pull popped and the can appeared in his hand, as if by magic. I did more running than Rooney.

At the end of the match the Dark Lord was on his feet, shouting his approval at Fabio Capello and saying that he must get a pair of glasses with a heavy black line across the frames, it obviously made people take you seriously. He'd been feeling as if people didn't treat him as if he was quite real. More like he was some mythic joke character, and he wanted to improve his public recognition. He looked at the pictures, the cameras sweeping the pitch and the crowd and then looked accusingly at Mr Screwtape.

"Screwy, there's a lot of people there. A lot of demand unsatisfied. We should be exploiting that."
"Yes, Sir" said Mr Screwtape "and we have agents on the sideline in every team in the country. I'm particularly proud of the Parent's Recruitment campaign. We've had several referees abused and assaulted already, and the players are only seven years old."
"See, that's your trouble, Screwy. You don't think big. Junior league, pah. A game that size and there must be millions of dollars we could be earning through selling moody tickets, fixing the outcome of games and betting on them. And that's before HellCo have made a single signing. What are we offering these people?"

Mr Screwtape was doing the goldfish thing with his mouth again. I coughed and broke in.
"Your Highness, we've been wondering if you would condescend to captain the HellCo team. We are negotiating with several prominent talent agents".

The King of the Underworld preened and slapped Mr Screwtape on the back, knocking the pea right out of his whistle, which rolled away under the reception desk.
"I'll show you how it's done, Screwy, it will be like Cloughy and Taylor, like er, er, er,..."
"Morecambe and Wise, Sir" I suggested.
The Lord of Chaos looked at me and narrowed his goaty eyes, but decided that treating me like unwelcome chewing gum on his hoof was still the way to go.
"Call me when you've got the lads assembled, and I'll take over" he roared, then took himself happily off, burbling about wild parties and wilder women.

Mr Screwtape looked crestfallen.
"Are we really negotiating with key players, Deborah?"
"I'll have to get the files, Mr Screwtape, as I understand you have some expertise in the area".
It was Mr Screwtape's turn to fix me with a hard stare.
"There are no files Deborah, and I'll thank you to remember I have been doing this job for several millenia." He clicked his fingers and this time some real magic happened. The autograph book appeared. "There are some people with whom one has a cordial relationship regardless of anything else. The angels couldn't save George Best and I couldn't sign him. He was the architect of his own downfall."
"What happened to him, Mr Screwtape, Sir?"
"The usual. There was a hearing. The moderators took in to account the violence against women and the thefts. I appeared against him."
"Against him? And yet he gave you his autograph?"
"So you admit you have been going through my personal belongings. He had done me a particular service and I repaid it by prosecuting very lightly."
"Service?"
"Yes. I wanted George Carman QC very badly. His was a valuable contract, and it wasn't easy as he was a leading lawyer of his generation, adept at wriggling. Best helped me goad him by seducing Carman's wife. In fact, he was happy to oblige. ".
"What happened to Carman?"
"He's down on Deck Three with the Specialists. The charges included trying to have Best killed, even though he was Carman's drinking chum.The moderators found it most unsporting". He continued thoughtfully "Even when you tell them all Best did, there was still that spark, that recognition of someone who had been given a gift - two if you count the looks - and yet those very things helped destroy him. One wonders; if he had been as ugly as Rooney, would he ever have got in to some of the scrapes? Perhaps he'd have stayed on the straight and narrow. Unfortunately."
"Mr Screwtape - you could have got Bestie killed!"
"Don't be silly. Carman was happy enough to give a woman a slap, as was Best, but Carman was fundamentally a cowardly bully. So long as nobody was prepared to do it for Carman, Best was safe. He was a much bigger danger to himself than anybody else was."

He was subsiding in to a reverie of past successes, but time was pressing.
"Mr Screwtape, Sir, there's another match on Sunday and it might not end so well, His Excellency is expecting a football team to manage and you have yet to corrupt an entire international industry".

"A demon's work is never, done, Deborah" he sighed "And by far the most difficult part is that FIFA have got in to the corruption business well ahead of us". With that he popped the rings on the remaining four tinnies of Wife Beater, downed them in swift sequence and slumped senseless at his desk.

I wonder if I can get a line up to Cloughie for emergency football advice?

See ya!

Debbie, P.A. to Mr Screwtape.

Debbie, PA to Mr Screwtape: Football Crazy, Football Mad

PMQs 23rd June

Harpy getting slaughtered was very entertaining.

Comment to come from Goodnight Vienna.

PMQs 23rd June

The heat is on for international robot race

Four Australian and eight overseas technology teams are gearing up this month for the elimination round in the international challenge to find the next generation of fully autonomous robots that can carry out defence missions in the battlefield of the future.

The grand challenge event will be held in South Australia in November this year, with close to US $2 million up for grabs in total prize money for the competing Multi-Autonomous Ground-robotics International Challenge (MAGIC) teams.

Greg Combet, Minister for Defence Materiel and Science, said a panel of Australian and US Defence scientists will evaluate the robot prototypes developed by the 12 shortlisted teams in Australia, USA, Canada, Turkey and Japan for MAGIC.

The 12 teams were narrowed down from 23 entries originally received for the competition.

(Picture) Seven Sci-Fi Weapons from Tomorrow are Here Today

“The MAGIC Technical Assessment Panel will visit each of the 12 teams over the next few weeks for an intensive evaluation of their concept demonstrators which will result in a list of five finalists,” Mr Combet said.

“The final teams will be announced in July, giving the selected teams four months to refine and continue development of their concepts.”

“Each of the finalists will receive further research grants of US $50,000 to complete their projects for the Grand Challenge,” Mr Combet said.

The MAGIC initiative is jointly organised by Australia’s Defence Science & Technology Organisation and the US Department of Defense.

“MAGIC aims to develop fully autonomous robots capable of conducting dangerous missions and keeping soldiers out of harm’s way,” Mr Combet said.

The four Australian teams include the University of New South Wales; MAGICIAN (a collaboration between the University of Western Australia, Flinders University, Edith Cowan University, Thales Australia and ILLIARC Pty Ltd); Sydney company Strategic Engineering in association with the University of Adelaide; and Melbourne company Numinance in association with La Trobe University.

The international teams include Northern Hunters (Canada), Chiba University (Japan), Cappadocia (Turkey), Reconnaissance and Autonomy for Small Robots Team (USA), Cornell University (USA), University of Michigan, Team VACAS (Virginia Tech, USA) and the University of Pennsylvania (USA).

The heat is on for international robot race

RAF Harrier Crash Lands in Kandahar May '09

RAF pilot 'lands' badly, stays with it until it starts to get a little warm and then decides it's time to bail:

H/t Neptunus Lex and Dasvince

Update: An 'Aviator' writes in the YouTube comments:
"Harrier pilot/instructor from years ago. Looks like pilot is doing conventional landing with nozzles pointed almost full aft. Comes in too fast with too much rate of descent, raises nose and pulls power to bleed airspeed, then you hear engine throttle up probably trying to wave it off. Hits the ground with way too much rate of descent and plane comes apart. Conventional landings rare in Harrier due to high speed at touchdown. Plane prob had emergency of some kind. "

RAF Harrier Crash Lands in Kandahar May '09

More LHC fun –Halfway there

 
From XKCD, where else?

People often express their frustrations at the perceived lack of progress with these big hyped-up projects, seeing as how the next scientific breakthrough is always just over the figurative horizon.  That’s because these endeavours are always phrased in terms of palatable timeframes in order to not lose the attention and interest of a public so increasingly used to instant gratification. If it was explained that all of science is essentially a series of tiny incremental recursive changes, constantly and slowly adding to and revising the work that has gone before in steps barely perceivable to a lay audience,  it would be a lot harder to secure funding –at least as long as the laypeople control the purse strings (which they do overwhelmingly in this line of work, for good or bad)- especially when political terms of office are measured in 4-6 year increments.

So what we end up with is science press releases and the associated reporting pared down to the language of the ‘real’ people (while financial and sporting news is left with all its jargon and specialist language intact for some reason), and every potential discovery is always described as ‘revolutionary’ and is inevitably predicted as being a bearable round figure of months/years away. The reality is often somewhat at odds with this; science is a ruthless, hard-faced bitch who cannot be reasoned with, who laughs at our naive attempts at self-improvement and thinks nothing of wasting entire careers down blind alleys of non-discovery.

All that said, the LHC (upon which I have given my reckon before, here and here) has the potential to actually produce revolutionary results (no, really) –what with it eventually destined to show us why mass has mass and all that. It has broken new records for beam energy recently (previously held by Fermilab’s Tevatron), cranking up each individual proton beam to 3.5TeV apiece, for a combined collision energy of 7TeV.  You might remember that it was originally designed to be run at 14TeV, but they are being a bit cautious with it at the moment, lest they break it again.
So they are going to spend two years running it at half strength before being shutdown for all of 2012.  During that year they’ll be checking -and modifying where necessary- the splices between the superconducting magnets, one of which was responsible for the unpleasantness in 2008. And then in 2013 the energy will be ramped up to its maximum of 14 TeV. Probably.

There are and have been plenty of naysayers criticising the perceived lack of engineering rigour that has resulted in the expensive modifications and protracted operating programme, but the thing to remember here is that there is no previous LHC-building experience to learn from. This is the only one that is or is ever likely to be built, and although the people involved have worked on accelerators all over the rest of the world, they are all very much learning on-the-job. 
Frankly, based on what I’ve seen is involved in the running of our comparatively tiny synchrotron at ISIS, I’m amazed at all the problems they haven’t had.  For all of the handful of issues that the LHC has been seen to have, they’ve had literally thousands of systems and subsystems working just fine.  It’s an awesome feat of engineering.

So on the 30th March they’re going to start the first science cycle using the half-power beams, which should provide plenty of new results to tide them over before the ‘proper’ runs in 2013. During this time they should be able to observe particles indicative of extra dimensions or supersymmetry, as well as the properties of the W and Z bosons and the top quark.  Although finding the much vaunted Higgs particles, although possible, will probably have to wait until we get the full-fat beams, as any evidence will probably be hidden by background signals at these energies.
Remember that part where I said how real-world science has problems gelling with the hype?  Well listen to my hype when I say we’ll get there in the end, but reality is not malleable to the whims of headlines. 

If you want to watch the webcast of the first physics run on Tuesday, you can get the details here. 

More LHC fun –Halfway there