Foreign Perspectives

Much as most people like their summer holidays and many of those expect to be flying to somewhere in Spain, there’s major uncertainty this year thanks to the Icelandic volcano.

So what should you do?

The most reliable approach is to forget about any holidays requiring air travel in the northern hemisphere. In practical terms that will limit the number of places that you can consider quite considerably unless you’re prepared to devote quite a lot of your holiday time to travelling. Typically, from England you wouldn’t be able to go much further south than northern Spain or much further east than Switzerland with two days travelling in each direction, drop that to one day and you’re largely limited to northern France, Belgium, Holland, Ireland, and, of course, somewhere in the UK.

If that doesn’t suit, and you really must go by air then assembling your own holiday by booking your flights and accommodation separately is going to require good holiday insurance that definitely covers volcano problems. Whilst the airlines might be required to be reasonable about paying for accommodation, those laws don’t extend to accommodation and you could easily find yourself paying for accommodation that you can’t get to. Alternatively, if you book a package deal you should be covered for problems. Either way, do bear in mind that a cancellation can leave you either stranded at home (less costly obviously) or at your destination and if it’s the latter you need to budget for a lot of potential extra expenses ie don’t aim to spend down to the last penny on your day of departure.

Of course, the biggest plus of booking a holiday involving flights is that it’s quite likely to be considerably cheaper all-round in that there should be a whole lot fewer people booking such holidays this year which means a lot of surplus accommodation.

Differences in the questions and the interpretations of the answers on websites seems to be increasingly common lately.

At the top of the annoyances list is the bank which, as part of their security set up, asks what is your mother’s first name yet when asking you to confirm your security details asks what was your mother’s maiden name which, of course, is a completely different question and with a different answer.

Even more insidious is Facebook as I’ve just found out. I generally get around to looking at it once every couple of months so just got around to setting up a bit more of my profile on a whim a few weeks ago. One thing I noticed was that you can now say you’re in a relationship with somebody that’s on Facebook. The options under that are extremely limited for the complicated lives that people lead these days and basically look like they’ve been written back in the 1950s. Anyway, the only one that seemed to match up me and Wendy was “in a relationship”. Snag is that at the other end it asked Wendy to confirm that she was my girlfriend which doesn’t really equate to “in a relationship” to me and doesn’t really come close to describing said relationship seeing as James is now 8 and we’ve been together for getting on for 10 years.

Can’t people sort out these two-place questions?

I think I’m due a rest day after the intensive activity yesterday and today!

Somehow I managed to get it into my head that the astronomy assignment was due on the 19th and only found out late yesterday that it was due tomorrow. As it happens, I’ve actually been working on the assignment off and on for a few weeks so had answers to all the hard bits written out which “just” left those to be typed up and the 1600 word report on the solar luminosity experiment.

As it uses lots of symbols, the astronomy takes ages to type up so that pretty much filled the slots available yesterday. Today it was the turn of the report which I’d usually have done over several days but somehow I managed to get it finished in a few hours. Probably not my greatest work but at least it’s done.

What really surprised me was just how accurate the luminosity came out given that the experiment only used stuff that you’d find in your house. Granted it wasn’t nearly as accurate as you’d get with professional gear but when you’re using a normal house bulb, a piece of paper, a drop of oil and a ruler to work it out, it’s pretty amazing to come up with 7 x 10^26 W vs the real figure of just under 4 x 10^26 W.

Anyway, that leaves the way fairly clear for the biology revision. I’m well ahead on the astronomy reading so could drop that for a few weeks, the next astronomy assignment isn’t due ’til July 16th, I’ve almost completed the pre-reading for the biology summer school and I’m fairly rattling through the planetary science course with that assignment not due ’til the end of July. Which seems to rule out excuses for not doing the biology revision!

Looking at course reviews before you’ve started a course seems to be completely different to looking at them once you’ve started on the same course sometimes.

Take the astronomy course that I’m doing at the moment. The key words in the reviews of it could be summed up as “fascinating” and “maths”. Critically, none of them use “challenging” (read: “very difficult”).

Reading those reviews a year ago, the course sounded quite interesting to me. The maths didn’t bother me as I’ve done quite a bit before this although I did slip in the Maths for Science (S151) course just in case my very rusty university maths needed a bit of oiling. So, in effect, it read as a fascinating course overall.

Over half-way through it has a different feel to me. There is quite a lot of maths in it or at least in the cosmology half of the course and I’d say that a glance at that section in advance would put off many a prospective student of the course. However, what I’d not allowed for was the sheer amount of time that it would take up. The course materials are, as usual, very readable but the time needed to do the assignments is far, far beyond anything that I’ve ever needed to take doing an assignment before. Quite why that should be, I’m not quite sure but it seems to be a combination of the time taken to type up all the symbols used (which is substantial, even on a short answer) and the amount of leafing back and forth to find out various facts required to answer the questions. Overall, it seems to equate to something like double or more the amount of time needed for any previous assignments that I’ve done at this level.

I’d also question the “fascinating” aspect that many mention in their comments. Yes, there are lots of pretty pictures and going through the theories as to how the various objects depicted got to be that way is interesting at the start but somehow the long list of theories that seem to build up like a freight train seems to get tedious all too often. So much so that it has me questioning whether I should carry on with physics at all. Yes, it’s that bad sometimes. Oddly, biology which seems to have just as many theories knocking around doesn’t ever seem to get to that building freight train stage and that’s puzzling.

Anyway, must get back to the assignment now… for reasons which escape me, I “knew” that the return date was May 19th but it’s actually May 14th so I need to get a move on!

Despite the last minute wobbles, I suspect that this could prove to be one of the most stable of partnerships.

Why? Well, because for the first time in a very long time it will give the Liberals experience in government. One of the problems that they have had in recent times has been in convincing people that they had the strength to take part in government. It’s all very well standing on the sidelines in opposition and putting forward all kinds of ideas when you know that you will never have to take responsibility for implementing them. Taking an idea from the original concept through to implementation is something quite different and it’ll be interesting how the coalition takes to that.

So, at least in the medium term, there’ll be quite an incentive from the Liberals to make this work. On the other side of the fence, the Conservatives will have the advantage of having intimate access to the Liberal party’s ideas machine which has had the advantage of not having to worry about implementing their ideas and therefore has often came up with good ideas that would have been rejected at early stages by the other two main parties. Not all of those ideas will be workable but many of them may well be.

What will be a problem is the time about three years from now when the lights of the oncoming election will be seen. That pre-election period is going to be “interesting” for both parties and the working of the government generally.