Happy Birthday BBC News Website

The BBC news website is 10 years old this week. I know I and many others would not know how to live in a world where this invaluable time sink did not exist, partly I know this from the cool graph they have produced showing the growth in traffic to the site over time, you can see it reproduced below, click for big.


There are several interesting things about this graph, one of which is simply the number of page loads a month, right now there are over 1.3 Billion page loads per month and there is no sign of the increase in traffic slowing. Although I am probably responsible for about 1% of those, I still find it a huge number and wonder how they will cope in the future.

The second thing I like is the subtle implicatons about peoples behaviour you can see in the data, you may note for example that there are several dips in the traffic towards the end of a year, most obviously in recent years. My guess that this is the effect of Christmas holidays, when people are forced to go home, and no longer bother to check the news every five minutes as they do when chained to their desks. This of course also tends to imply that much of the traffic is still coming from the western world.

Then there is something I don't really understand unless it is simply a artifact of how they have graphed the data, but it appears that traffic had been increasing rapidly in the days leading up to September 11th 2001, before the attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon. My guess is that they have simply plotted monthly totals which have tended to make it look like there was a rise in traffic pre September-11th, I would imagine that if you plotted daily totals you would see fairly smoothly increasing traffic until September 10th, then traffic would spike dramatically on the 11th before tailing off over the next few weeks, with a few superimposed bumps and wiggles related to events such as the opening of attacks in Afghanistan or new information regarding the attacks becoming available.

I'd love to see the daily totals for this period, I think this could really be useful in determining the most important events in modern history, especially when coupled with information on the most popular stories, though I rather fear that various celebrity scandals would dominate the events.

The History Of Astronomy - Part 1

Science nowadays is all about the big, the biggest this, the largest that, all discovered using some humongous new instrument. Astronomy is and always has been a leader in this respect, many of the largest scientific instruments ever built have been telescopes of one sort or another, from the stone circles like Stonehenge, which probably acted as primitive astronomical observatories, through the Uraniborg, built by Tycho Brahe the last of the great naked eye astronomers, to the first truly huge telescope the 72" leviathan of Parsonstown and on up to the modern age of optical telescopes of around 10m in diameter (Keck, Gemini, the VLT etc). Of course for large astronomical equipment you only have to look at the enormous radio telescopes available today, such as the VLA or Arecibo.

The primary mirror of the Gemini North telescope, and yes that is a person in the middle.

The question is what next? The consensus in the US and Europe seems to be to continue a triple pronged approach of larger space based instruments across a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum (especially those regions blocked by the atmosphere), even larger ground based optical telescopes and vastly larger arrays of radio telescopes. The question tax payers are interested in is unsurprisingly, why? These things cost a lot of money, why do we really need them?

A possible next step in optical astronomy: the European Extremely large telescope, with diameter 42m. Car and two people for scale to the bottom left.

Well lets just ignore the philosophical reasoning of whether most of us are interested in exploring the origins of the Universe, and finding our place within it, we'll assume that everyone is sufficiently interested to want to do astronomy. Why do we need to build such large telescopes? This question was raised to me by a student at a school I was giving a talk at and it got me thinking and I think provides a nice way of explaining how the science of astronomy has developed hand in hand with the advances in technology, in fact often driving many of them. In this short series of posts I hope to explain the development of optical astronomy (the bit I'm familiar with), though I should point out that this is not meant to be an exhaustive description I hope it will cover the basics as I see them.

Durham: Echoes Of Power

Rich has a post on his blog about a map of London made just after the great fire of 1666, the map itself is pretty cool as you'll find if you follow the link above, but I came across something much more interesting (for those of us with a connection to Durham) whilst wandering around the British Library archives online.

Click for link to a mini site on Durham: Echoes Of Power, the site has a selection of pictures and manuscripts from the last thousand years of Durhams history. My favourite is a picture (which unfortunately it won't let me link directly so click here) of the New Inn pub as it was in the second half of the 18th century. For those of you not in the know, the New Inn is a pub that its practically possible to spit on from the roof of the Physics department. To me its also rather misnamed as it is now around 250 years old.

Other cool sections detail the politics of the region in the early part of the last Millennium, in particular in the powers and intrigues of the Prince Bishops that used to rule the North with powers almost equal to the King himself. There are also many pictures made throughout the last Millennium of Durhams most famous building, its spectacular Norman Cathedral (seen above).