Luvvy spotting

Back to the 'Swan', just off Queen's Square, last week for a spot of luvvy spotting, to be rewarded by a spotting of Adrian Scarborough, mainly known to me for his portrait of an amateur photographer who took cute - not to say saccharine - pictures of pets in the 'Picture of Innocence' episode of 'Midsomer Murders'. A chap with ordinary clothes and ordinary accents, but he either was the luvvy or his double. I was going to ask him as we left but forgot, possibly because in the meantime I had celebrated with a shot of Johnnie Walker 'Blue Label', spotted on the top shelf. A shot which necessitated the bar maid finding and climbing onto a special stool and my making a special visit to the mulberry. It was fine stuff, the best whisky I had tasted for a while, but not sure about buying a whole bottle.

From there to Conway Hall for another New Scientist lecture, this being the official reason for the outing. A second lecture about the LHC on the Franco-Swiss border, the first being reported at reference 1 and the second being a much better lecture than the one reported at reference 2. We had two lecturers, one a professor of experimental physics at Liverpool and the other a professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge. Both very good, in different ways, at talking to a lay audience - although they both used some complicated gadget to produce the visual aids, which I thought might have been better powerpointed.

But I did like one of the visuals which showed the size of various data sets from the world of big data, a visual which google turned up for me on the third attempt (search?q=data+Youtube+LHC) and which showed that the amount of data coming out of the LHC each of its working days, was roughly equivalent to the amount of data being loaded into YouTube.

The experimental professor was very tiggerish and it would be interesting to see her university lecturing style - she might just be a little tiring if she kept up the tiggering all the way through a tricky bit of leptonery. The theory professor was a bit less tiggerish and had a slight tendency to lapse into matey slang, which I find tiresome, but he did take some questions during his half hour slot, which I like, even if the questions were not particularly apt. That is to say they were mostly big questions, not admitting small answers, more suited to the saloon bar of a public house than a lecture theatre. Maybe what they lost in freshness, they gained in quality when they took the questions in writing at the consciousness day (see reference 4).

All in all, a good show, all going to show that the older brain is taking to second helpings. My only suggestion would be that it would have been good if they had been able to give us more sense of how these various billion pound experiments fit together. So, for example, is the Chinese collider just a bigger and better version of the LHC or is it doing something different?

On the way out, my second sighting of a car being charged up from a pole in the pavement, the rarity saying that there can't be that many people at it.

Bus back to the 'Hole in the Wall', on which we got talking to a lady, who, while not a luvvy herself, at least I don't think she was, did forcefully remind me of Lana Morris in the 'Last Enemy' episode of 'Inspector Morse', the very episode mentioned at reference 3. An old trouper, once a starlet, well known in the sixties, although an old trouper who died relatively young. That apart, I think the lady on the bus might warrant a half point on my luvvy tally. I notice, in passing, that google does not seem to know the difference between a trouper and a trooper - although perhaps I should rather blame all the people putting the wrong tags on their pictures from Star Wars.

Checking the bar man at the 'Hole in the Wall', I found that he was an Israeli, seemingly not too pleased to be asked what sort of Israeli he was - that is to say Polish, Russian, Moroccan or what. I thought European rather than Middle Eastern or African, but he declined to say more than that half his grandparents were Israeli born. But we passed on smoothly enough and he processed my order without hitch.

The only other incident of note was a lady punching the keys on her telephone at a tremendous, not to say scary, speed, while the train to Epsom was moving, a lot faster than I could count and a lot faster than I can punch the keys on a real keyboard.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/hadrons.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/conway-hall.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-riddle-of-third-mile.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/new-scientist.html.