Read on for my speaking notes, or after the broadcast you’ll be able to download the audio as ogg or mp3.

Q: Stargazing! Are you talking about the bid for the new telescope which New Zealand and Australia are doing?

A: We’ll get to that, but what really caught my eye was Neptune.

Q: Neptune?

A: Yes, it’s up at the moment. Now, I’m not a stargazer – I’m impressed by a good starfield as much as the next person, but I’m certainly not an astronomer. And I knew that Neptune is the hardest to see of the planets – quick recap, Neptune is the furthest from the Sun of all the planets which makes it very hard to spot.

Q: What about Pluto?

A: Pluto is further again from the Sun than Neptune, most of the time anyway, but it really doesn’t behave like a regular planet. It goes the wrong way round the Sun, it dives inside Neptune’s orbit sometimes, and it’s very small. A few years ago some august international astronomical body reclassified it as a dwarf plant, whatever that means, so there are only eight regular planets, with Neptune as the furthest.

Q: How did you know Neptune was visible at all?

A: A friend with far better astronomical knowledge than mine pointed it out to me. There’s Jupiter, he said – and I knew that, Jupiter is a bright object low in the North East at the moment – and look, there’s Neptune next to it.

Q: How did you know he was right?

A: I checked it on my phone. I used Stellarium software on my iPhone, which showed me the night sky in the direction I was looking and helpfully labeled all the planets and stars.

Q: That’s an iPhone thing, then

A: Not really. I used to have an entirely different phone called the Palm Treo – the descendent of the Palm Pilot pocket computers people used to have – and that had a star map on it, which knew where you were and what the time was and showed you what you could see. And there are equivalent available for other phones and computers.

Q: So it’s like a Planetarium?

A: Really quite like that. When I was young, growing up near London, I’d occasionally get to the Planetarium at Baker Street. That was spectacular and taught me a lot about stars. It was a really dramatic way of presenting astronomy. Unfortunately its now been completely taken over by the Madam Tussauds gallery next door, which is owned by the Dubai government, and no longer has anything to do with astronomy. The use the dome for showing films about celebrities. Cynics might suggest that all films are about celebrities, by definition.

And in Wellington there always used to be a small planetarium connected tot eh Carter Observatory – actually, I remember it used to be downtown next to the public library but that was demolished in about 1990 and moved up the hill. Anyway, the one up at the Carter in Kelburn is currently closed, waiting for enough donations to refurbish it, or that’s what the website says.

Q: But you can get computer software to do this?

A: You can indeed. It’s not as immersive as projecting onto the inside of a large concrete dome, but it’s still pretty impressive. And if you are lucky enough to live somewhere where you can really see the stars, like the back blocks of New Zealand, and you have a fancy phone which shows you what you can see, you can have a wonderful experience stargazing on a moonless night. Stellarium software, as its called, can let you identify what you are looking at outside your window, or predict what you can see at some other time or place. It can tell you when some object will rise or set.

Q: This is astronomy, not astrology, right?

A: Absolutely. Astrology is about the notion that the stars visible at anyone time have an impact on life on Earth.

Q: Where did that come from?

A: Astrology has actually got a sound foundation. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that horoscopes have any validity – they don’t. But if you want to see how a heavenly body influences life on Earth, just think about the tides for a moment. If you look at each zodiac constellation, it rises at a different time of year depending on where it is in the sky. And the zodiac constellations rise at times when, in the Babylonian era, it was relevant to do certain agricultural things. So, Taurus the bull is the symbol of fertility, who came in the spring. An effect called “precession of the equinoxes” has changed the Earth’s rotation over the years so that the constellations now rise later than the Babylonians would have seen them two and half thousand years ago, but the principle is the same.

Q: So that’s how any of us can look at stars – what about the big telescope that was in the news last week?

A: That’s the SKA, or square kilometre array. That’s a bid rather than a reality, but it will be quite a stunning telescope if gets built. It will comprise a large collection of dishes, many of them in the Western Australia desert, and some in New Zealand. That gives what’s called a baseline of 5,000 kilometres, which means that the telescope will have a very high resolution.

Q: This is a radio telescope, then?

A: Yes. It’s hard to get optical ones much better on the surface of the Earth. You need a huge mirror, and you also need an area as free as possible from air pollution, and of course from light pollution. New Zealand has optical telescopes at Mt John, near Tekapo, and you do get a fine view of the stars from around there on a clear night. There are several really big optical telescopes high up on the big island of Hawaii, where there are virtually no street lights and very clear air. But the really good optical images these days are taken by the Hubble telescope which is in Earth orbit. There are some wonderful images from that online.

A radio telescope uses a different part of the radio spectrum from visible light. The radio waves it uses are generally less prone to interference from the atmosphere than visible light astronomy. And you have the trick of using multiple dishes some distance apart to get a better resolution, that’s called interferometry and it relies on analyzing the differences between what the different dishes are seeing to get a very detailed picture of what they are looking at.

Q: And what do all these telescopes tell us?

A: Wonderful science about the beginning of our universe – where we all come from, ultimately. After all, only hydrogen and perhaps helium were originally formed from the big bang – everything else comes from stars ‘cooking’ those light elements into the ones planets, our atmosphere, and even ourselves are made of. The old song says “we are stardust” – this is literally true!

Links

Farewell the London Planetarium. Let’s hope the Carter Observatory gets back in business soon.

The Zodiac constellations.

Free Stellarium software for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The Square Kilometre Array – the planned new radio telescope

We are stardust.

This is a Lockheed SR71 “Blackbird”, displayed on public view at the air museum in Duxford, England. The Blackbird was a high-altitude supersonic spyplane used in the later part of the cold war. The Americans started using the Blackbird after Gary Powers was shot down over the USSR in his U2 – the SR71 flew higher and faster – but pensioned it off after it became clear that advances in missile technology meant it was at risk of shooting down from the installations it was sent to observe. Now, of course, we all use satellite technology thanks to Google Earth. As a kind of postscript, the U2 is still flying over Iraq and other hot spots, long after the aircraft designed to replace it has gone to the museums.

The Blackbird flew at over Mach 3, at heights of over 75,000 ft. It took off and landed – of course – at sea level, so its engines and airframe needed to be able to deal with low speeds as well as its cruising altitude. The engines would only burn subsonic air, so the inlets of the engines had to be complex and vary in shape to slow the air enough when the plane was going fast. That’s the purpose of the cones pointing forward out of the engines – the cones moved in and out depending on the aircraft speed. Even so, the SR71 would sometimes suffers what the US military quaintly called an “unstart” while at cruising speed and altitude. Both engines would go out, meaning that the aircraft would have to descend and decelerate while trying to restart the engines nearer sea level. That’s not something you would want to have to do over enemy territory!

Even so, not a single Blackbird was lost to enemy action. But 12 out of the 32 that were made crashed in accidents. It’s not technology that you’d want to use in airliners.

But I still think it’s a wonderful, if strange, looking aircraft.

Go on, you know you want to.

I’ve looked at a few other volcanoes before. I’ve stood in the Andes at a height that made me short of breath and gazed at the huge conical peaks towering over me. I’ve peered down into the steaming pit at Ngauruhoe’s summit. I’ve poked around the various thermal fields between Rotorua and Taupo, and marveled at the notion that the whole of Lake Taupo is a volcano. And, on a couple of occasions, I have been to Hawaii and seen the lava from Kilauea rolling down the slopes into the sea.

But White Island is special. It’s a marine volcano, to start with, and it’s continuously active, though generally at a low level of activity, but it erupts quite violently every few years. If it was on the mainland we would have to treat it as a serious hazard. Also, there is history there – men have lived on the island at various times to mine the sulphur that comes from the volcano.

You get to White Island by boat. Well, there are helicopter tours as well, but they cost more than double the boat trip so with a family to pay for the choice was easy. It’s a pleasant enough ride, about an hour and a half each way. I wouldn’t go if the sea was rough, but that’s just me.

The island is the eroded remnant of a single cone, with an active crater just above sea level. The crater is surrounded on three sides and the fourth is where the boat lands. Inside the crater are patches of yellow sulphur, jets of steam and worse from roaring fumaroles, and a deep and hot crater lake. The water on the lake, we were told, is acidic to the point that it has a negative pH value. I didn’t know that was possible. Definitely worth not falling into!

You are guided for all your time on the island. That’s pretty much a necessity for safety reasons. We were all made to sign statements saying that we understood the risks. The guide said that, if the island were not privately owned, it’s dubious whether the public would be allowed access at all, on safety grounds. If some risk-averse public official were to be held responsible, then I expect people wouldn’t get any say in the level risk they are prepared to tolerate and the island would be completely closed.

The tour company gives you a hard hat, which you have to wear all the time, and a gas mask – wearing optional. I wore my gas mask for a few minutes when near a particularly pungent fumarole. There’s also a lecture when you arrive about potential bad things that might happen (it might erupt) and what do (hide behind a mound of rock).

Anyway, I’m very glad to have been. It’s a great New Zealand experience, and one I am glad is open for us to enjoy.

The ship was trying to anchor in a storm and it dragged its anchor along the sea floor. The anchor cut two fibre cables. The result was 75 million people off the Net, with effects felt as far away as Bangladesh. Businesses were paralysed, government were appealing for casual surfers to stay off the Net so businesses could work, there was talk of a hit on the stock market in India.

Now, there are more broken cables in the Persian Gulf, this time. It’s hard to know what too make of this. If they are being cut deliberately, that is a very hostile act. These things are vital to a modern economy and they are not cheap to repair.

The capsule summary here is:

• Having no standards allows companies to charge what they like and kills innovation.
• Having two or more standards is much the same as having none.
• Having one officially-blessed standard means that companies have to compete on the excellence of their products rather than being able to lock their customers in. And it allows magic like the Internet to emerge.

Read on for my speaking notes, and as usual there are some links at the bottom.

Q: You want to talk about standards – are you worried that standards are falling?

A: No, not particularly. I’m more concerned to make sure standards exist – particularly in computers and networking.

Q: I understand why you’d want standards in safety-critical areas like food and clothing, but why is it important for computers and networks?

A: Because it leads to customer choice, which leads to competition, which leads to innovation and value for money. It also leads to connectivity so that, today, most computers in the world can talk to most other computers in one way or another.

Q: OK, those are all good things. But what’s the connection with standards?

A: You can’t get interoperability without them. And interoperability sounds like a ghastly geek buzzword – it is a ghastly geek buzzword – but the concept is important. The word just means working together. Let’s take the Internet – it’s pretty much the classic example of interoperability, or working together. The Internet is not a collection of wires, a bunch of computers – or rather it is those things, but that’s almost irrelevant because they can be replaced, and they are being added to and changed all the time. What the Internet really is, is a collection of recipes for moving information from machine to machine in different ways. Those recipes are standards. And the standards that run the Internet are the Internet, in a very real way.

The Internet was developed as a set of standards. They were new standards – no one had figured out how to make computers talk to each other in such a general way before. And they are still the Internet standards.

Q: Are you saying computers couldn’t talk to each other before the Internet came along?

A: No – some computers could talk to each other. Mostly in corporate environments, using expensive equipment, and in very prescribed ways. But generally only computers from the same manufacturer, and often only computers from within the same range. It’s as though when you got your driving licence, it had the make of car on it – you had only passed to drive Fords, say, or even worse, you had only passed to drive Ford Falcons.

The reason driving licences don’t work that way are simple. The first reason is that we all use the same road rules regardless of the type of vehicle we drive. A bus has to stop at the same red light as a Smart Car, and same give way rules and speed limits apply and so forth. The other reason is that they way you drive each kind of car is the same. Anyone who is used to driving a car can jump into pretty much any other car and the pedals are in the same place, you turn the steering wheel the same way, and you get much the effect you are used to. You could even jump into the driving seat of a bus and you know it’s not going to be completely different. There’s a difference between automatics and manuals, but it’s not fundamental to how you drive. You still press on the right to go faster, turn the wheel clockwise to turn right, and the same road rules apply regardless.

And all this is because there are standards in you drive on the road – they’re called the road rules – and there are standards in how a car driving position is laid out.

Q: OK, but what’s the analogy with computers?

A: The main point here is the road rules. They specify how lots of us use the same resource, the roads, and mostly don’t collide with each other. That’s a safety matter for roads of course, but it’s also necessary for traffic flow. If everybody just ignored road rules not only would there be crashes, no one would get anywhere. Computer networking is like that. You have a lot of computers all trying to send information across a network. Does each one just shout as loud as it can? Of course not, there are some subtle and clever rules describing traffic flow that all computers have to obey, and those rules make it possible for traffic to flow through the network.

Now different computer manufacturers always made their machines so they would talk to each other, although it was usually at an extra cost, but each manufacturer made up its own road rules. So computers from, say, IBM, wouldn’t talk to ones from Unisys. Even worse, IBM mainframes wouldn’t talk to other lines of IBM computers – and I don’t mean to single out IBM, they were all at it. And if you talked to these manufacturers they would all say things like: our computers all use standards to talk to each other, we have very good engineers and they have made us some very good standards. How can you argue with that?

Q: But computers from different companies wouldn’t talk to each other?

A: No. And that mattered so much to the companies that bought computers, because they wanted all their machines to talk – they wanted their accounting system to talk to their payroll and so forth. And computer companies knew that. Typically they would almost give away the computer into a big corporate client, so they could try to hook that client into buying all their machines from the same computer company.

Another non-computer example of this kind of thing is the Australian railway network. Australia was originally a set of British colonies on the coast of a continent they couldn’t cross. All trade and traffic was done by ship. As each colony grew richer and larger, it built a railway. Now railways have to be built to specific standards for the trains to run on them – the most obvious is what is called the gauge, which is the distance between the rails. Locomotives, carriages and wagons all have to be built to run on a specific gauge. And each colony chose the gauge it though would suit it best and you can guess what happened, as the rail networks grew and met each other at state borders, they had different gauges and you couldn’t move trains from one to another. Everything and everybody had to be offloaded from, say, a Victorian train and loaded onto a South Australian one. And this happened despite each colony receiving advice from Mother England to choose the same gauge, each colony thought is knew best and went ahead and did it anyway. England had of course been through the same pain itself as different railway companies built networks on different gauges in the previous century.

Q: So we don’t learn!

A: Quite. Or rather: we let individual interests override the obvious benefits of standardization even when we know it’s a stupid thing to do. And the railway example is a gross over-simplification for the computer networking context which is more like a complex set of road rules. And in the 70s and 80s each company was doing its road rules differently, but the result was that most computers couldn’t talk to each other. And of course, there wasn’t an Internet because there couldn’t be one.

Q: How did we get to where we are today?

A: Computer customers – who were themselves big companies – started pressing for common standards. Each computer company said: we do have standards, they are very good ones – but their customers said, we need you to have the same standard. And we’d like it to be an open standard – that’s one we can all look at and understand. There was massive resistance from computer companies, and there was all kinds of bad behaviour, but eventually customers voted with their feet and only bought machines which obeyed published standards, and of course manufacturers sprang up to make this equipment, and eventually the big manufacturers rather grumpily started to follow suit. And customers began to be able to buy machines that would work with other computers regardless of the manufacturer.

And the Internet has come out of that. The Internet simply would not have been possible without a recognition that a common, open standard pays dividends for everyone, and customers being prepared to show some solidarity and only buy standards-compliant gear. So, when a couple of very clever engineers came up with the original Internet standards and they were shown to work, the culture of buying standardised machines meant that manufacturers were effectively forced to build machines that worked on the Internet.

Q: Do software manufacturers benefit from hardware standards?

A: Yes, very much, because it gives their software a much bigger range of machines to run on and so it gives them a bigger market. Software manufacturers have generally always argued for hardware standards. Of course, commercial software manufacturers don’t necessarily want software standards, though – they’d rather get people to buy all their software from the same place. So they are sometimes in a position of arguing for hardware standards and against software standards – or rather, arguing that there should be several standards instead of just one which is just as bad, as the Australian railway examples shows.

Q: Having lots of standards is bad?

A: When they are for the same thing, yes that’s very bad. What if you wanted to observe the ‘drive on the right’ standard while I use the ‘drive on the left’ one? In computer networking it’s not as obvious as this driving example, but it’s still very harmful because having multiple standards lets computer or software manufacturers trap customers into one product and so reduces competition. It also stops the next wonderful idea like the Internet from getting started. Manufacturers will try every trick in the book on this, often painting the issue as one of choice. I’m sure that’s how it was pushed to the Australian colonies’ railway services and their country was still paying the price generations later!

Q: How do you know what is a real standard?

A: In computer terms – anything with an ISO number is a proper standard, so is anything from the W3C – that’s the world wide web consortium – and so is anything with an Internet RFC number attached to it. So is anything with an IEEE number – they are mostly hardware networking standards. The important point is that just because a computer manufacturer or a software company tells you something is a standard – that doesn’t make it one. There are international standards bodies that bless standards. New Zealand’s link to the global standards bodies is called Standards New Zealand – I’ve linked its web page today. And this Sunday is World Standards Day – again, in the links, there’s a pointer to that as well.

Anyway, the take home message – standards can seem arcane, dull and irrelevant. But they are crucial to our modern world. Don’t ignore them and don’t be talked into ignoring them.

Links

As always, you can discuss this broadcast at it.gen.nz.

A history of Australian railways on Wikipedia.

Standards New Zealand’s web site and a page about international standards day.

The W3C – the World Wide Web consortium.

The Internet standards.

The IEEE standards page.

Q: Now to volcanoes – topical, with Mt Ruapehu doing its thing?

A: Yes – you have to think in geological time, that’s millions or even billions of years when you are dealing with volcanoes and earthquakes. Ruapehu seems to go off every decade or two – that’s pretty much continuously as far as the age of the planet is concerned.

Q: Obviously scientists use technology to monitor volcanos and earthquakes.

A: Yes, there’s a lot to it. They have seismographs which measure rapid ground movements.

Q: They measure earthquakes you mean?

A: Yes, these are machines where a pen draws a line on a rotating drum of paper. They are probably all electronic now – I doubt there is still paper involved – but online they still show you what looks like a pen trace up and down as the earthquake progresses.

Q: And that shows the actual ground movement?

A: It shows the ground acceleration. You can work the movement out from that.

Q: You said these things are online?

A: That’s the beauty of it. Earthquakes and volcanos are monitored in New Zealand by Geological and Nuclear Sciences, which is a Crown Research Institute, one of the descendents of the old DSIR. It lives in the former Avalon TV studios out in Lower Hutt. GNS gathers a huge amount of information that is used by its own scientists and by scientists around the world, and it publishes the lot online for free.

The website that GNS puts all this information up on is called GeoNet and it’s in the links for today’s programme. GeoNet has web cameras for all the volcanos. There was a webcam picture of Ruapehu taken from around the Chateau on the front page of the site yesterday – the picture’s probably still there today. You can see how the top ridge of the mountain is stained dark grey by the volcanic ash. Looking at the picture, you can get a feel for how Ruapehu would have looked thousands of years ago when it was a complete cone like Ngauruhoe is today.

Q: It used to be a cone?

A: Yes, so the scientists tell us, and it does look like the bottom part of one.

Q: So what happened to it?

A: It may have blown its top off, like Mount St Helens did in the US in the 1980s, or perhaps it was just erosion.

On GeoNet you can see monitoring information about all New Zealand volcanoes that are considered live, including Mt Taranaki, Lake Taupo, and Auckland City.

Q: Auckland is live? Which volcano?

A: Oh yes, it’s live alright. Analysing the ages of the volcanic cones there shows that a new one comes up every few centuries. In geological terms it’s a young, active, volcanic field. So there’s no room for smugness in Auckland towards Wellington about our active fault line!

And Lake Taupo’s last eruption is thought to have been the biggest eruption anywhere on the planet in the last five thousand years.

As well as volcanos the GeoNet site also has a lot of information about earthquakes, including a list of all the recent New Zealand shakes. Every time there’s a shake in Wellington the site gets hit with a lot of traffic as everyone logs on to see how big the shake was.

For each earthquake, the site shows you not only how big the earthquake was, but where its epicentre was – that’s the point on the surface of the Earth below which the earthquake occurred, and how deep it was, and it shows a really nifty map which is a vertical cross section of the Earth’s crust under New Zealand. When you look at the pattern of earthquakes on that map you can really see the Pacific plate sliding under the Australian plate and going down below us at about 45 degrees.

Q: So this is the Pacific Ring of Fire in action!

A: Yes, that’s exactly what’s going on. The Earth’s crust is being created under the Pacific Ocean, and it spreads out towards the continents around the Pacific Rim. Oceanic crust is thinner and denser than continental crust, so at the edge of the Pacific the oceanic crust dives down below the continental crust. That’s where you get earthquakes and volcanos as one plate goes down below the other.

Q: What happens to the plate that goes down?

A: I guess it ultimately melts in the heat under the crust and gets recycled, in geological time anyway. There’s some evidence for this kind of thing – there’s a volcano in Africa that erupts white lava that has the same chemical makeup as limestone. Scientists think it is effectively recycling a melted former ocean floor.

Q: So there’s earthquakes and volcanos on the GeoNet website – anything else?

A: Tons of data of interest to scientists around the world. That helps us get a better handle on the way the world works and on volcanos and earthquakes in general. But also the website has material about tsunamis and about landslides. I didn’t know, for instance, that there’s a slow landslide going in Taihape. Apparently land containing over two hundred houses and school is moving, slowly, and has been for years. You can look at the whole thing on the web site.

The Geonet web site is built using free software by some very enthusiastic programmers and scientists in GNS. The whole site has to be sized to handle large loads when everybody checks it after an earthquake, or when Ruapehu has an eruption. It does remarkably well. I think the taxpayer has got excellent value for it.

There are some great resources about volcanos and earthquakes online in overseas sites as well. The US Geological Survey site covers the whole world, although it has a US focus as you’d expect. It’s a site that’s well worth exploring if you have any interest.

Apple Mac users might be interested in a desktop widget – you have to be running OS 10.4 for this – called Tremor Skimmer. Tremor Skimmer gives a list of the latest earthquakes anywhere in the world, and even announces them to you while you are working of that’s what you want. That’s in the links for today’s programme.

And I’ve put up a link to a site about Vesuvius, the volcano that destroyed Pompeii. We know so much about that eruption because it was written about in detail by Roman historian Pliny the Younger, and of course because of the excavations of the destroyed Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Vesuvius is very active still, and there are now two million people living around it.

Q: So what are we meant to do if a volcano goes off more seriously here, say in Auckland?

A: There’s the government’s Get Thru site that its been ballyhooing on TV ads. I checked it out and I have to say I found it devoid of any useful information. Sure, it tells you to have canned food in your house, but that’s about it. The site has only a few PDFs of brochures under its “Resources” heading and when you click “Latest News” you get taken to the Ministry of Civil Defence site. That’s OK, but then clicking on the Ruapehu page takes you to something about the lahar last March! I really think the government ought to be trying a bit harder to provide a sensible site that integrates advice with up to date hazard information.

So, nine and a half out of ten for GeoNet, and no better than four for Get Thru.

Links

As always, you can discuss this broadcast at it.gen.nz.

Saturday 29th is E-Day: recycle those old computers and telephones.

GeoNet, the volcano and earthquake monitoring site from GNS.

The US Geological Survey’s volcano page and its earthquake page.

Tremor Skimmer, a Mac OS widget that displays the latest earthquake anywhere in the world.

A website about Vesuvius, the Italian volcano that destroyed Pompeii. It’s still active, and has about 2 million people living around it.

A fascinating book about the surface of our planet and how it changes over geological time periods.

The Government’s Get Thru website containing useful advice about civil defence.