jonathan.rawle.org

Imagine you are on an airliner and due to land shortly, and you have the window seat for the view. But there is no being held in a stack, no seemingly endless circling while below you see houses of all the people whose lives are blighted by aircraft noise, no seeing all sorts of famous landmarks of the city. Instead, you suddenly notice a ship on the sea beneath you, and think just how large it looks – the plane must be flying rather low. Just at that moment, before you realise what is happening, the plane is touching down on the runway, at the airport you didn’t even see approaching.

This scenario isn’t entirely make believe, but is the experience of millions of passengers per year landing at Hong Kong’s international airport. The airport, opened in 1998 and designed by Britain’s own Norman Foster, is situated on a man-made island. It replaced an old airport that was hemmed in at the centre of the city, with no room for expansion, and with scary approaches over densely populated areas.

The UK government this week announced that they would be considering a number of schemes to expand airport capacity. In 2010, they ruled out building a new runway and terminal at Heathrow Airport. One of the options they are looking at is building a brand new airport in the Thames Estuary, possibly at least partially on reclaimed land.

Heathrow Airport is becoming a national disgrace. It is at capacity, as the airlines will be quick to tell you, but the last thing we need is expansion of Heathrow. The airport is in the wrong place, among residential areas of London. Any expansion means demolishing hundreds of homes and blighting thousands more. The noise and pollution for people in the area is horrendous, and transport links congested. With perhaps the exception of the most recent Terminal 5, the terminals are rather scruffy and tired, and the central bus and rail stations a bit run-down. The whole huge, sprawling site is a mess. The airport is hardly the best first impression to present to foreign visitors.

There are currently two main proposals for estuary airports. One has been dubbed “Boris Island” after the London mayor. But the other, located on the Isle of Grain, is by none other than Norman Foster. This detailed proposal also includes a new Thames Barrier to protect London from flooding and produce renewable electricity, as well as new transport links. An airport in such a location could see passengers travelling into central London as quickly as from Heathrow (from where getting into London fast presently means taking the world’s most expensive train) yet aircraft taking off or landing at the new airport would do so over the sea, not over people’s homes. There would be much more capacity, so the airport could be a major European hub airport, and the whole site could be planned carefully from the start, rather than just develop almost by accident from a small military airfield.

There would certainly be challenges in constructing an airport in that location, and these have been much discussed in the press this week. But this is the 21st century, and problems can be overcome by engineering solutions, unlike the problem of an airport in the middle of a densely populated city with no room for expansion.

But there is one important principle that I believe must be stuck to if an estuary airport were to be built: Heathrow Airport must be closed down. We don’t need an additional airport, we just need to replace the current one with a better one. The owners of Heathrow, Spanish-owned BAA, have said that closing Heathrow would be a disaster because it employs 10,000s of people. They seem to assume that none of the staff would transfer to the new airport, and that none of the businesses servicing Heathrow would move either, which doesn’t quite seem a valid assumption. A larger airport would support even more jobs. Yet there are also huge gains to be made from demolishing the terminals and digging up the tarmac. Heathrow occupies a site the size of a medium-sized town. The mind boggles at the thought of how much the land would be worth to developers in that location in west London, particularly as it would no longer be blighted by being close to a major airport. The number of jobs it would create could be phenomenal, and new housing would relieve the serious shortage in the capital. The sale of the land would surely pay for the new airport (although those in the know seem to think foreign investors would pay for it anyway).

The opportunity to create a whole new suburb of London is even more exciting than the opportunity to create an airport the country could be proud of. One day “Heathrow” could be a the name of the newest and most desirable part of London, rather than shorthand for the place people like to spend as little time as possible.

Tonight I was at the Royal Albert Hall to hear the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra under Zubin Mehta perform some of my favourite works, including Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol, and the popular Bruch violin concerto with Gil Shaham as the soloist.

Unfortunately, a small number of people in the audience chose to spoil the concert with protests against Israel. During the first piece, Webern’s Passacaglia, a group started to sing some sort of protest chant. The orchestra continued to play, being the fine professional musicians they are, and the people causing the disturbance were escorted out. However, further interruptions followed, although these all occurred between pieces of music, so all the remaining musical works were heard by those who had gone to the hall to hear them, and indeed the Israel Philharmonic are an orchestra with a splendid sound.

I’m not going to link to the BBC’s story about the disruption to the Prom, as it is (at least at the time of writing) somewhat misleading as it suggests the audience booed the performers. In fact, no-one booed the performers. A small number of people in the audience, who clearly have no interest in music, shouted slogans that were more or less unintelligible, which simply caused disruption. At this, the rest of the audience booed the protesters and shouted for them to be thrown out, which they were. Each time, the performance then continued, and the performers received rapturous applause at the end.

As far as people in the hall were concerned, the protest was pretty pointless. I have no idea what the protest was about or what the message was, other than that they are, obviously, against Israel. Most people in the audience, like me, were not there because we support Israel, but simply because we are music lovers. Many people attend regularly; some even attend every single concert. So when people booed the protesters, they were on the whole not doing so because they are pro-Israeli, but because they are annoyed and angered that someone should disrupt a concert like that. Those causing the disruption probably have no idea about the Proms or classical music and do not care. However, the disruption failed to get across any message about why people should not go and see the Israel Philharmonic perform, and I suspect the majority of people leaving the hall this evening will feel at the very least a little less sympathetic towards the Palestinian cause.

Some people travel long distances to attend the Proms. Others, from all corners of the world, might be staying in London and decide to drop in to catch a concert. Often they will have no clue who is performing, but just go there for the experience. As a Proms regular myself, I know only too well the mix of music buffs and foreign visitors found in the arena. This evening it was exemplified by the young, foreign woman whom I overheard ask the man next to her who the people were who disrupted the first piece. It was her first Prom and probably her last. Hundreds of people have now had their taste of what’s ordinarily a piece of quintessentially British culture ruined. To quote a tweeting twit, I think the protesters should try thinking of people other than themselves. It’s also just as well all the idiots were in seated areas. Had they chosen to stand in the arena, I doubt they would have lasted five seconds.

There is a time and place for protesting, but a concert attended by thousands who have no connection with Israel is not it. Perhaps if they had found a more appropriate time and place, their message might have reached people. As it happened, it’s hard to see that anyone was the winner.

A while ago I read about the Erdős number, which is a measure of the “collaborative distance” between a researcher and the late, prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős. (His surname is pronounced something like air-desh, with a slightly rolling “r” in the first syllable, a bit like a Scot saying “err”…) It is related to the concept of six degrees of separation, a hypothesis that everyone in the world is linked to everyone else through no more than six mutual acquaintances, except that the criteria when calculating an Erdős number are more stringent, as two people must have co-authored a scientific paper together for the link to count. Anyone who wrote a paper with Erdős has an Erdős number of 1, their collaborators have an Erdős number of 2, and so on.

Erdős numbers are primarily for mathematicians, but it is possible for researchers in other fields to have an Erdős number as much collaboration cuts across the boundaries of different disciplines. So I decided to see if I had an Erdős number myself. The American Mathematical Society have a collaboration distance calculator which can take the names of any two mathematicians, but has a shortcut to add Erdős as the second person. As it is a Mathematical Society, the database only covers mathematical journals.

I tried a few names in the calculator, and eventually found that the key to finding my Erdős number is Derek Raine, a professor in the Leicester physics department who has published research in more mathematical areas such as cosmology and quantum field theory. He has an Erdős number of 4, thanks to a collaboration from when he was at Oxford University. Unfortunately, I am still three more connections away from Derek, which means I have an Erdős number of 7. Here are the seven steps:

1. Alladi, K.; Erdős, P.; Vaaler, J. D. Multiplicative functions and small divisors. Progr. Math., 70, 1–13 (1987)
2. Rodriguez-Villegas, F.; Toledano, R.; Vaaler, J. D. Estimates for Mahler’s measure of a linear form. Proc. Edinb. Math. Soc. (2) 47, no. 2, 473–494 (2004)
3. Candelas, P.; de la Ossa, X.; Rodriguez-Villegas, F. Calabi-Yau manifolds over finite fields. II. Fields Inst. Commun., 38, 121–157 (2003)
4. Candelas, P.; Raine, D. J. Quantum field theory on incomplete manifolds. J. Mathematical Phys. 17, no. 11, 2101–2112 (1976)
5. Brandt, D.; Fraser, G. W.; Raine, D. J.; Binns, C. Superconducting Detectors and the Casimir Effect. J. Low Temp. Phys. 151, Nos. 1–2, 25–31 (2008)
6. Binns, C.; Howes, P. B. et al. Loss of long-range magnetic order in a nanoparticle assembly due to random anisotropy. J. Phys. Cond. Mat. 20 055213 (2008)
7. Rawle, J. L.; Howes, P. B.; Alcock, S. G. Crystal Truncation Rod Measurements from Buried Quantum Dots. Surf. Rev. Lett. 10, Iss. 2–3, 525–531 (2003)

Apparently, most people with an Erdős number have one lower than 8. Of course, I may have another, as of yet undiscovered, path to a lower Erdős number, through connections either with the same or different people. So perhaps I should say that my maximum Erdős number is 7.

There is also the question of what counts as a publication. I did once produce an Institute of Physics branch newsletter with Derek Raine, so if I could count that, I would have a quite respectable Erdős number of 5! In any case, six degrees of separation holds true: in terms of acquaintance I’m less than six steps away from the great mathematician.

Google have recently launched their “Plus One” feature, which is part of their latest attempt to build a social networking platform to rival Facebook, known as Google+. Now I don’t like Facebook, or any social networking site for that matter. Yet I have decided to trial Google +1 buttons on some of my pages. The reason is – and this could also be what makes Google’s latest attempt more successful than previous ones – +1s are likely to be used to help order search results in the future. That could mean that sites not using +1 will drop down the search rankings.

Privacy and other wider questions aside, there are some more technical issues with Google +1, or any buttons or scripts included from external servers, for that matter. Google give two code alternatives that can be used to place the buttons on pages. Unfortunately, one is not valid HTML or XHTML at all, and the other is only valid for people using the experimental HTML5. The other issue is that you need to include a Javascript from Google’s server, and people are reporting that this slows their page load speed significantly.

So how did I resolve these two issues? The first step is to replace Google’s non-standard <g:plusone> tag with an ordinary <div>:

<div id="plusone"></div>

The ID can actually be whatever you want. Then place the link to Google’s Javascript right at the end of your page, just before </body>:

<script type="text/javascript"
   src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js">
{"lang": "en-GB", "parsetags": "explicit"}
</script>

The language can be whatever you choose; the important part is the “explicit” setting. Finally, just after you load the Javascript, you need a call to insert the button in place of your <div>:

<script type="text/javascript">
gapi.plusone.render("plusone",
   {"size": "standard", "count": "true" });
</script>

“plusone” needs to be whatever ID you gave the <div>. The size and count options set the style of the button as usual.

One final refinement is to specify the size of the button to ensure a space is left for it in the layout until it loads. To do this, you can place another <div> around the one for the button and set the width and height of this in CSS. You can’t simply set a width and height for the button DIV as this is completely replaced by the Jacascript function.

<div id="plus"><div id="plusone"></div></div>

#plus { width: 106; height: 24; }

Google’s full documentation has a table of the height and maximum width for each style of button (maximum as the width can vary if there is a count following it). In fact, the code above is all on that page somewhere, although it doesn’t explain why you might want to include the button in this way.

If the button implemented as above, the user’s experience should be just as good as it was without it. Strictly speaking, the page load time is still increased, but the extra time is simply spent adding the button to the page. The rest of the layout should appear before this.

You will find a +1 button in the sidebar at the end of each blog post, and below each of my photographs. If you see something you like, you know what to do!

The furore over phone hacking has once again put Rupert Murdoch’s proposed takeover of BSkyB into the spotlight. In the past, many people, including both me and Vince Cable’s fake constituent, might have assumed that Murdoch already owned Sky. So how did it come about that he only owns part of it?

The answer is that BSkyB was formed by the merger of two rival satellite broadcasters. In the ’80s, companies bid for the licence to operate satellite TV in the UK, and the winner was a consortium calling themselves British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB), with Rupert Murdoch losing out. The authorities placed quite stringent conditions on the new broadcaster, and the whole scheme was rather ambitious and costly. They had to launch their own two satellites, Marcopolo 1 and 2, to transmit the signals. They decided to use a more compact, square antenna known as a “Squarial”, rather than the conventional-looking round dish. The broadcasts were made using a superior standard, which included digital sound, and would have enabled widescreen and high definition pictures. The programming was also of a high quality, with a dedicated highbrow arts channel.

Murdoch, however, had a trick up his sleeve. Through his acquisition of European satellite broadcasters, he was able to launch his Sky TV service, which was carried by the existing Astra satellite. Although the content was regulated like other British TV stations, Sky had none of the other restrictive conditions of BSB’s licence. The service was broadcast using the standard PAL system, so didn’t require specialist hardware to decode the signal, and was received using the round satellite dishes that became synonymous with council housing in the early ’90s. The programming was, shall we say, rather more populist entertainment than that offered by BSB.

For reasons I don’t quite understand, Sky suffered from poor advertising sales. BSB, meanwhile, struggled with the costs of their expensive set-up. Within a couple of years, the two companies merged, with the resultant entity known as British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB. Murdoch therefore only had a part share in the company. In terms of operations and programming, though, it was effectively a take-over by Sky. The new service was branded as Sky, the Marcopolo/Squarial system was phased out over the next few years, and most of the former BSB channels were closed. Former Sky customers never received the arts channel, and it was soon closed for BSB subscribers too.

It’s worth thinking about what might have happened if both services had continued. Increased competition could only have been good for consumers. Maybe it would have driven up standards in programming. Most significantly, Sky may never have become as dominant as it is now, and may not have been able to outbid all other broadcasters when it came to sports rights, for example. But sadly that wasn’t to be, and the Squarial went the same way as Betamax video and HD-DVDs. And if Rupert Murdoch has his way, he’ll soon finally be in the position he wanted to be in the late ’80s: owner of the UK’s only satellite TV broadcaster.