Wednesday 3 February 2016

Spectrum 2

Described as a single mass spectra of horse heart myoglobin, which I presume to be something a lot more complicated than whatever was the subject of the last post.

No idea what all the noise at the bottom of the graph is about.

Readers should note that this blog having hit the 2,000 post mark, I shall now be moving off to the next volume, volume 3, at reference 1. Orange banner a bit unsightly, but when I set it up I did not notice; maybe I will find out how to do something about it.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/.

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Spectrum 1

A mass spectrograph from what I take to be a relatively simple sample. Lifted from google.

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Bells of Bond Street

Off to Albemarle Street again last week, to hear Carol Robinson tell us about her adventures in the land of mass spectroscopy.

Being a little early, I took a stroll around the area, with the first item of note being Asprey's, where I could buy one of the suitcases illustrated left. Now as it happens I had a long and happy relationship with a company of suitcase makers called Globetrotter, starting around 45 years ago, that is to say when Globetrotter was still a brand to be reckoned with, the suitcase of choice for civilian flight crews. And they were still turning up at car boots sales when we arrived at Epsom. But at about that time the brand took a nose dive: while the suitcases looked much the same, the quality of the materials was not and they no longer wore at all well, which did not do, given that they were still expensive. I think the brand is now more or less dead, but these suitcases from Asprey's look very similar indeed. Perhaps they bought Globetrotter up and luxurified their products; added the trimmings which converted hard wearing & practical travel goods (work goods in my case), into luxury items for people who like to flaunt their money in airport lounges.

The second item of note were the bells, properly the Atkinson's carillon, up until this point occasionally seen but never heard. Carilling away very cheerfully, perhaps to mark the fact that it was 1900.

The lecture hall was as full as usual, with one rather incongruous couple, not particularly young, turning up in an approximation to full-dress punk gear.

Robinson, aka Dame Carol Robinson, started out by telling us of some of the former scientists who had lectured from the very desk that she was lecturing from, an eminent line which included, as well as Faraday, her own doctoral supervisor and her supervisor's supervisor. She also explained that having started out with mass spectroscopy when she left school at 16 to become a laboratory technician, she never really left. Not only that, she managed what I imagine is the unusual feat of climbing back into the front seat of research after taking an eight year career break to have a family. An entertaining and engaging speaker, who did not stand on the dignity of her professional eminence. She also had the manners to include small mug shots of lots of her team - many of whom were there - in her visuals.

She explained that her career had been a successful punt on what had seemed to others to be an unlikely field - using mass spectroscopy to look at large molecules - proteins and such like - rather than the very much smaller - by orders of magnitude - molecules which the machinery had been used on up until that point. But she wanted to be in a field where she had a chance of making an impact, rather than some established but heavily populated field in which it would be hard to stand out from the crowd. A punt which has, in the event, paid off handsomely.

At which point my very limited knowledge of mass spectroscopy began to break down. I thought the idea was to take a small sample of whatever it was you wanted to analyse, to heat it up to the point where it broke into its constituent elements and then to squirt the resultant ions through an electrical contraption which measured the mass charge ratio of the ions, plotting the result as something which looked very like the sort of thing you got from light spectroscopy. The next post gives an example. And with a bit of experience you could say what all the peaks were, add them all up and so say what it was you started with.

It seems that things are a lot more complicated than that, and apart from the difficulty of converting samples into a spray of bits small enough to work in the spectroscope without completely destroying it, the idea now seems to be to observe how the process breaks these large molecule into chunks, chunks which result in tell-tale signatures on the spectrograph. Chunks which tell you something about the three dimensional structure of the large molecule - typically a very long chain folded up into something three dimensional and very complicated. Structure rather than analysis is the object of the exercise. I think the sort of thing you might get here is shown at the next but one post. One rather striking visual was of a molecule which looked and behaved rather like a spinning top and was something to do with supplying energy to or from a cell.

It would have been interesting to have been told something about how much all this equipment cost - say compared to the scanners used in hospitals - and about what sort of skill sets the teams using it needed to deploy. Did they need plumbers, electricians and statisticians - as well as biologists? As so often, this did not occur to me until too late.

The chap next to me was another tourist, rather than a scientist, and it turned out that he worked on customer surveys for investment banks, polling their clients to see if they were getting the service and products they wanted. Not altogether what sort of surveys these were, as the sort of technical issues which used to vex the Government Social Survey in the days when I sat on the floor above them, did not seem to be the sort of thing that vexed his working day.

Passed a big pile of 'City' and 'Country Life' magazines on the way back to the tube, very roughly his and hers magazines for the waiting room of a fancy dentist or the lounge of a fancy hotel. The former was rather brash and included a lot of advertisements for expensive toys and for expensive property. I learned that you can, for example, spend as much on a large flat in docklands as on a small country house in the outer home counties. Say a small number of millions. The latter was more genteel, with the riches not quite so obviously nouveaux.

Tried the aeroplane game at Clapham Junction, more or less under the flight path, but was more or less defeated by low flying cloud. Managed a lowly one in a hole in the cloud before my train came - the trouble with holes in the cloud being that you had to be looking right at them when the plane went over, and this being the first time I had played the Junction for a while, I did not know where to look.

Champion snorer in the compartment next to me, otherwise full of a French family. Several of us wondered whether to wake him at Epsom but did not, partly in my case because the last time I did such a thing, the sleeper concerned was going to the end of the line at Dorking, I used to find that some sort of internal clock usually woke one up at the right place, but perhaps commuters who wish to sleep after after work beverages should be encouraged to hang a luggage label around their necks so that concerned passers-by know whether to wake them up or not. Perhaps one day I shall fake it to see what happens; if nothing else it would make a change from the aeroplane game.

Reference 1: http://robinsonweb.chem.ox.ac.uk/. Despite which it seems that Dame Carol is actually a professor at Cambridge.

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Higher thoughts

Moved to higher thoughts yesterday by being reminded about cellular automata, in particular about the way that you can generate very complicated behaviour out of very simple rules, in a visually appealing framework. One example being the game of life, invented at about the time I was an undergraduate, but which I thought was little more than a toy. Nothing very higher about it at all.

Now of course I know better, having just read a little about it in a very fat book written by Stephen Wolfram (see reference 1), whom I suspect of having made a lot more money out of being a mathematician than John Conway (illustrated), the chap who invented the game in the first place. So I now know, for example, that the game of life has the power of Turing machine and can compute anything that one of those can - which is to say, a great deal.

Musing further this morning, I suppose that Mandelbrot sets are another example of the same thing - fairly simple rules generating pictures of breathtaking complexity. And then, there are all the elementary mathematical structures like natural numbers and groups, mostly capable of great complexity from great simplicity.

All this complexity and structure emerging, as it were, from thin air. An act of primal creation, not needing any human creative input at all.

I dare say there is a philosophical point lurking here somewhere, but I suspect that a drop of something alcoholic is needed to bring it to the surface.

From where I associate to the thought that I vaguely recall there being something you can pour on the ground to bring the worms to the surface. Clearly time to move on.

Reference 1: http://www.stephenwolfram.com/.

Reference 2: for pictures of cellular automata, goto https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cellular+automata and ask for images.

Tuesday 2 February 2016

More moaning - episode 1

A few days ago I had a moan (at reference 1) about the standard of debate about our health service. Today it is the turn of all those migrants making a living out of our benefit system. Episode 1 as the matter is a complicated one to which I ought to return when better informed than I am now.

My first thought is a fairly crude one. Rich people like migrants because cheap migrant labour in their factories makes for good profits. Cheap migrant help around the home is useful too. Poor people don't like migrants because they pull wages down. So where does that leave the politicians who count rich people among their friends but who depend on poor people for their votes?

My second thought is that for all the sound and fury in the press and from Leader David, there is very little in the way of numbers. How much benefit are the migrants and refugees claiming? How much tax do they pay? What proportion of the health and care industry workforce is migrant or refugee? How much benefit is being claimed elsewhere by UK nationals?

So this morning I take a quick look at google, to find, as I should have guessed, that the statistics are tricky and abusable - with there having been quite a row last November about what was perceived as inappropriate use of statistics by Leader David. Part of the trouble seems to be that the statistics about migrant benefit are actually statistics about households claiming benefit which contain at least one person who was not a  national at the time they acquired their National Insurance number, statistics which could well the the subject of many technical notes.

But I did turn up what looked to be solid (if not very penetrable) statistics from the House of Commons, and to these I shall now turn. See reference 2 if you want to have a go yourself. Illustrated above.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/morning-moan.html.

Reference 2: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/SN06955.pdf.

Monday 1 February 2016

Chessington

Having done Wisley fairly recently, we thought it was time to take a swing around Chessington (reference 1). We also had the excuse that stocks of lawn sand were already quite low after just two sessions of perforation.

So off down Christchurch Road, which gave us an opportunity to survey the traffic on the new cycle way. I am pleased to report that, for the first time, we saw a cyclist actually on the cycle way - although in fairness I should say that there were about a dozen who were not. Also that, walking back later, I noticed that the cycle way was not being swept and was littered with a fair amount of possibly tyre-damaging litter from neighbouring bushes and trees. Not sure that I would use it if I was cycling that way.

Arrived at Chessington, to find that they were just putting the finished touches to the removal of Christmas stock and decoration, with the centre piece illustrated above. I was quite struck by the creativity of whoever it was who dreamed up the idea of smokey barbecue flavoured rock salt. Even, perhaps, starting to muscle in on the foodie territory claimed for its own by the sea salt people. Regarding the illustration, the careful reader will be able to spot BH, or at least some of her hair - and we were indeed able to find something which will come in useful later in the year.

Moving into the store proper, I was very much reminded of T. K. Maxx, perhaps a T. K. Maxx with a large restaurant operation stuck in the middle. Very much the same sort of mixture of tat and poshly wrapped tat, leavened with a dash of real posh.

Having loaded up the lawn sand, I decided to walk home and take another look at the housing estate on the site of West Park Hospital. Which turned out to be rather smart, with the houses that I saw not looking at all cheap, neither starter homes nor affordables - but I thought they had done quite a good job of blending the old and the new.

The water tower conversion was approaching completion, but I did not think that asking the chaps doing the outside paving was going to be very profitable and relied on google to tell me what was going on. A reliance which turned out to be quite misplaced, so I still don't know what the tower has been converted into - or how much of the available space has been soaked up with stairs and lift. Presumably somebody would have insisted on there being both. No sign of the peregrines. A before-snap of the tower at reference 2.

Quite a lot of leaf sprouting on the sunny side of the hedge along the western side of Horton Lane.

A load of garden rubbish dumped on the grass along Longmead Road. Did the person who got his hedge trimmed on the cheap give any thought to where the trimmings might end up? Will he or she write stroppy letters to the council about the rubbish on the roads?

PS: I have just learned that for some reason I know not, T. K. Maxx is known as T. J. Maxx in its native North America. See reference 3 for the full story.

Reference 1: http://www.chessingtongardencentre.co.uk/. Not to be confused with the world of adventure next door, a world which sports a much bigger car park and a Holiday Inn.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/water-tower.html.

Reference 3: http://www.tjx.com/index.html.

Stop tweet

Just tweeted the first in-garden redwing of the year, well, in garden in the sense of being just over the fence in the next door garden, behind our garage.

Not the first redwing of the year, as I have seen them somewhere else, perhaps in the road somewhere, but I cannot now recall and there does not seem to be any record.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/stop-tweet.html.