In this game, you have to be more than just ahead

At around half one on the twelfth of December, I passed somebody in a doorway who gave me the news that there would be a broadcast from CERN the following day, and that there had been “findings”. I emailed my editor almost immediately, requesting to report on those findings, whatever they were.

I got no response.

At just before one on the thirteenth, I sat in the centre of the front row in a seminar room to watch the broadcast. I had my notebook in my arms and my Dictaphone on my lap. I was ready. Nobody was going to take this away from me. I had been ahead of the game.

Physicists: lecturers, researchers and students alike crammed into the tiny room at the University of Liverpool. The screen at the front of the room displays row after row of excited academic faces just like ours. The older members of the audience whisper the names of those they recognise; they are jealous of their position.

The aroma of sandwiches and crisps filled the room. Let it be known that, even when the world stands on the brink of the greatest scientific discovery in decades, lunchtime must be strictly observed.

When the broadcast started, there were early technical difficulties. As it progressed, they became on-going technical difficulties, and by the end of the broadcast, were late technical difficulties.

I ended up moving to another screen, standing in a warm corridor with plenty of other people who had no idea what was going on, holding my Dictaphone above the others’ heads.

I must admit, I knew at the time that what I was doing was futile, that I was resigned to the fact that my editor had ignored my email and that the story would be passed on to the first of my illiterate cowriters to fumble a desperate message on their iPhone.

The eventual response from my editor, when I asked if someone had got in before me was “hiya yer”- Which added quite a bit of insult to my already considerable injury.

Do you know what, though? Sod them. I’m reporting on what CERN found, right here, right now.

Two experiments possibly found something, in roughly the same place, but not quite. It’s all a bit vague. They do, however, agree on the fact that we are a long way off confirming anything and the Higgs Boson will not be announced as a discovery until after more experiments in the following year. I wasn’t disappointed by this, but many of my (mentally) younger colleagues were.

The ATLAS experiment, represented by Fabiola Gianotti, concluded that the Higgs mass is somewhere around 125 GeV. All good scientists should know, however, that a discovery is not a discovery until it has been found to be accurate to something called five-sigma. The Higgs was “found” by ATLAS at 126 GeV at 3.6 sigma. This, incidentally, is a long way off five, and in theory, the readings that scientists are hoping is the Higgs… well, it could just be statistical anomalies.

These are fun in their way, but a massive waste of time and money. As Ms Gianatti put it, “I think it would be really kind for the Higgs Boson to be here.”

After ATLAS concluded their piece, the majority of people left. Only the most advanced particle physicists, many as they were, understood even half of what was going on, and being so advanced, they mostly had better places to be.

I must confess that I too left the corridor and returned to the problem class I was supposed to be in an hour earlier.

I am proud of being there though. I have, on my Dictaphone, a recording of a physicist making a joke. I suffered to get that; I had to trawl through a great deal of tape that was too noisy, or too scientific to use- just for that one sound bite. My arms ached from holding the thing aloft for the best part of an hour.

I was there, though. I stood on the edge of history, all for the distant and evanescent hope that I might one day write it.

Oh, and Merry Christmas. May your dreams be as deep and crisp and even as you want them to be, and may I have the sense to write a festive blog entry next year.

Universally Challenged

I know. I’ve been away. It’s because I’m struggling to express one particular concept. To corrupt a cliché, I have managed to snatch failure from the jaws of success.

Anyone who knows me, or has read this blog before will be mightily aware that I have a certain infatuation with the idea of appearing on University Challenge. The sad fact is, I may be about to miss that train.

I’m the reserve. I’m the cursewording reserve.

Out of the fifty or so who took the test, most were abysmal-let’s face it, most people are at most things. It’s a fact we live with, move on from but still have to put up with at times. There were just six candidates that stood out well above the rest. The team were in that six. I was in that six. One unlucky fellow was also in that six.

I guess I should count my blessings that I’m not him, her, it, zir or em. Another day, different questions, and I might have been. Say, if George hadn’t told me that Niels Bohr had said a particular something, or if I hadn’t looked up the dates of Immanuel Kant that morning. These two facts have now slipped my mind, but they came to my aid when I needed them.

That person is wandering around right now, stunned by the fact that they aren’t as much of a genius as they thought they were. Do they know how close they came?

I hope not. It’s rubbish knowing that you were a whisker from success. It’s rubbish being the reserve. I’m not going to poison the others, break their limbs or anything like that. I can’t pretend I wish them all well though.

They’re my Facebook friends. We went out for drinks last week. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that if anything on Greek Mythology comes up I’m going to be eating my own shoes in the audience, despairing that they don’t know any of it- but I do. I had to sit in the pub with them, knowing that I’m not really one of them, and that if I really want to get onto University Challenge, one of them is going to miss out.

If that happens, will they hate me? I want it to happen. I want one, non-specific member of the team to go down with crushing gastroenteritis an hour before we go to film the first round. I want him to gladly give his place to me. It might be bad for team spirit, but I’d love to save the day, I really would.

So perhaps it’s my calling to be the reserve. My brilliance has been confirmed, so my ego isn’t suffering. I probably won’t get onto the program, but there is still a chance. There is a chance of me being the happiest person alive for just a little bit, as a door that was creaking shut suddenly opens for me.

I want it to happen. I know it won’t. Wish me luck.

Stupidly Clever

These days, I am giddy with anticipation at the fact that I am as close as I have ever been to appearing on University Challenge. This is coupled, however, by the grim reality of the fact that I am far less prepared to do so than I was at this point last year.

I had a class test this week, a lab on Monday, an essay due the same day, a presentation the following week, an assignment due that I am too busy to even think about looking at. What’s more, this has been going on for a year now, and all of the general knowledge I had previously accumulated has been replaced by Physics.

That’s not to say I’m not a formidable quiz opponent. I certainly have the broadest base of knowledge of anyone I know- but is that enough?

On the entry form, I was asked what my specialist area of knowledge was. Baffled by this, I put “all-round”. I have no idea whether this will play to my advantage or not.

Isn’t this how things should be, though? We are human beings; whereas birds can fly and fleas can jump, the one thing we can do is think.

In any case, I have a 100-question exam next Tuesday. I have no idea what format the questions will take. There are no past papers, nor clues as to what form the test will take.

It’s the most exciting, and the most terrifying exam I will ever take. There are no real negative consequences if I fail- aside, that is, from the lack of positive consequences. Still, I do want those positive consequences.

Think about it. What’s your gift, your talent, your ability? What are you good at? Don’t you like it when people realise?

The older I have become, the more the educational system has wanted to limit what I can study, attempting to make my knowledge more and more specific. The fact of the matter is, that I am a jack of all trades and a master of sweet Fanny Adams. I want an opportunity to show what I still know.

I am not some sort of “mad scientist”. I am not a “bookworm”. I’m a well-rounded human being, and, no matter how much my schedule seems to want to make me fail, I am beyond determined to prove myself.

If it goes well, I’ll let you know how it goes. If it doesn’t, I’ll be too busy sulking.

The Comfort of Strangers

Generally, strangers don’t bother me. The way I see it, I’m probably never going to come into contact with them again for as long as I live, so I may as well act as I please. When I say “act as I please”, I don’t mean anything too extreme, just being myself.

This outlook has its upsides; for example, I have no issue asking for refunds or replacements if something doesn’t meet my standards. I also realise that shop assistants are actually there to assist me in the shop. That’s a little too easy to forget, especially when an awful lot of shop assistants pretend that their job is to stand and chat with their colleagues.

My rules with strangers are these:

1. If they have a job, it’s only right to let them earn their pay. You don’t want them to get complacent.

2.  Thank people when and only when they have done something for you, never out of misguided politeness. By allowing them to think they have done a good job, you have done them a disservice. 

3. You can let them think what they want afterwards. What matters is the few seconds you come into contact. It doesn’t matter if you become a funny anecdote or a haunting memory, just as long as you act in a way that you are comfortable with.

These rules have some exceptions. If people look suspicious, for instance. There’s nothing wrong with being suspicious. It’s not prejudice (most of the time), it’s a complex combination of instinct and experience. It could be that you’ve seen the person on Crimewatch, perhaps, or could be that you associate their features with drug or alcohol abuse. Either way, it’s probably best to avoid causing aggression.

The other exception to the rules is public toilets. There is no logical reason for this, only that when I am in a public toilet, I do not want to seem weird. It just doesn’t seem the place for it.

It might be because of how I would respond to unusual behaviour if I encountered it. Just the other day, I was aware of a girl being in the toilet for rather longer than typical, and then exiting without washing her hands. I was outraged. How lucky that girl was that I did not see her face! If I had, the walls of the university would be plastered with photo-fit style drawings of her, accompanied with the details of her misdeed.

I find it difficult to be “normal” in public toilets though, particularly when hand-driers are available. On a cold day, there’s little better than sticking the hand-drier on and just sitting under it. You could let the hot air blow down your sleeves, dry your damp hair under it, or twist the head around and thaw out the icicles forming on your nose.

If anyone should walk into the toilets, however, dive away from the hand-drier as quickly as you possibly can. It’s not worth the shame.

October Round-Up

No posts last weekend, so I thought I'd round everything up from the month of October. This may become a permanent feature; it may not.

9/10 - A review of Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
16/10 - Some helpful advice for anyone on the internet (it's you)
19/10 - The Chronicle of the Supermarket Price Wars, and a review of the best party I have been to in a while
23/10- The trouble with Englishness, whatever that is

I am also pleased to say that my life has once again been a Halloween-free-zone. I can only hope that you were as lucky as I have been.

Nation of Shopkeepers

I am both incredibly proud, and unforgivably ashamed, of being English.

When I say that I am English, I do not mean that I was born in England, or brought up in England, or that my ancestors were English (the majority weren't). It says "British" on my passport. England, having no national anthem, is not really a place any more. It's an idea.

It's not a brilliant idea, mind. It is a collage, a stew, manufactured by the offcuttings of every remark made about the inhabitants of this green and pleasant land. An Englishman cannot be insulted by anything a foreigner has to say; if anything appears to be disparaging, it is dismissed as a humorous misunderstanding, or more frequently, a fault of the foreigner in question.

For example, the Hungarian humourist George Mikes, wrote a book called How To Be An Alien. In the preface to the 24th edition, he complained that the book had been received too kindly- he had hardly annoyed anyone. There was one example of a bank manager reading the book from cover to cover in one sitting and hurling it into the fire for its impertinence, but little else.

Mikes had wanted to stir something in the English, for them to realise that they were being mocked. On the contrary, the Central Office of Information requested that the book be translated into Polish for the benefit of Poles moving to the country.

So that was it. Mikes wrote about the English not as they were, but how they wanted to be seen. And so it was with many other writers- once a nation, the English became a caricature of tea-drinking, island-dwelling, excessively polite cricket fans.

This, in turn, spelt bad news for me. I always read far too much. As a result, I became English.

In particular, I would have to blame the character of Arthur Dent. He scuppered a spaceship for a cup of tea, tried teaching cavemen to play Scrabble, nearly blew up the Universe trying to bowl a cricket ball and, when stranded on an alien planet, made sandwiches. I didn't like him for a long time. Then one day, without warning, I became him.

To prove my point, I will describe something that happened to me just the other day.

I was on a bus, and it was packed. I was standing next to a Frenchwoman and her teenage daughter. Before this story goes any further, I would like to make clear that I have nothing against the French- 1066 was a long time ago and that silliness with Napoleon could have happened to anybody.

In any case, the point of the story was this: I had my hand on a metal bar and the French girl was unashamedly leaning on my hand. With her head. Her hair was on my hand. Fifteen years of education failed to prepare me for that moment.

Arthur Dent, in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish tells a story about how, sat at a table with a stranger in a railway station, he finds himself in an awkward situation. The stranger begins to eat his biscuits. Strangled by English impotence, he can do nothing but eat the biscuits along with the stranger until they part company.

Arthur is relieved to find that his biscuits are hidden under a newspaper, and it is he who has been eating somebody else's all along.

No such relief was available to me. It is most definitely socially unacceptable to rest your head on a stranger in public in England. I do not know about France. It could be that, on a crowded Continental bus, personal space becomes a thing of the past.

Yet there I wasin England, staring into space, pretending someone wasn't leaning on my hand, desperately hoping that the girl's mother would correct her. For twenty minutes, I stood there, wishing I could say something, wishing I could cause a fuss, wishing I wasn't so English. But I wouldn't have it any other way.

Hidden Menaces

As many of you who are on my email contacts list are more than aware, my email was hacked this week. I apologise profusely to you all.

The thing is, how could I have prevented this from happening?

According to the lowlifes down at Hacker9 (don't look them up, I wouldn't want to give them the publicity), it is because I am "noob or [have] very poor knowledge of internet". At least I know that nouns need articles.

One other nugget of grammatically infantile information I managed to unearth from the little toads at Hacker9 is that email hacking can be done in three different ways. The first two I almost certainly did not fall victim to. The third, however, is rather more sinister, and could affect anybody. I'm going to run over all three and how you can prevent them from happening to you.

The first is password guessing. This is something that nobody should fall victim to. If a hacker is a close friend (unlikely), or just a manipulative internet acquaintance, they can have up to a 20 per cent chance of working out your password- by simply guessing. A lot of people use memorable names, dates and places as passwords. What's more, the majority of us use the same password for pretty much everything.

So then, give up on nostalgic passwords for high-importance accounts such as emails. Use a combination of random letters and numbers, preferably more than 8 characters in length. If the website allows it, also use punctuation. The official line for multiple accounts is to use different passwords for each, but this is not always reasonable. My advice, which is in no way endorsed by anyone, is to vary your passwords on a theme. For example, if you have numbers in your passwords (you ought to), increase them by 1 for each new account you open. Or, write the same password backwards. Or half backwards and the rest forwards. The combinations are only as limited as your imagination.

Now, I'm pretty over-the-top when it comes to keeping my password private. I most certainly practice what I preach. If an email comes to me from Paypal, Yahoo or anybody else, saying for security reasons I need to reply to the email with my password, I don't suddenly decide I'm a moron and offer them my bank account details and the keys to my house as well. So I can say with 99.9 per cent certainty that it wasn't this that caught me out.

The second method used by weed-smoking maleducates and opportunist sociopaths alike is Phishing. This is a common beast, and typically wanders round shouting, "I'm really obviously trying to steal from you." Phishing works by asking you politely for your bank account details, email password or similar by promising a lovely juicy worm in return. This worm is usually in the form of a free iPod.

You can avoid the Phishermen (or women) by thinking twice before entering your details online. Do you trust the site? Remember, it is very easy to lie on the internet, because nobody can see your face.

Though I must admit to being a little too trusting sometimes, I almost certainly haven't entered my password into any kind of popup, or badly constructed website offering freebies. So that leaves just one more option, one I hadn't fully realised even existed.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the murky world of keystroke capturing. If you want to avoid this one completely, seal yourself in a box and have your nearest and dearest feed you through a straw for the rest of your life.

It works in one of two sinister ways. The first is by using an actual hardware keylogger, which plugs into the back of the victim's computer and records every single keystroke they make. With an experienced eye, the important passwords are identified and the email accounts accessed. Though this approach seems to target just one person, and be of more interest to private investigators than spammers and scammers, how's this for a thought: what if it was stuck into a public computer? Say, in a library. Or a university.

Here it seems we may have stumbled across our culprit. There is of course, the second, even darker form of keylogging- using a software keylogger. This takes the innocent form of a video of a kitten falling off a chair sent to you by one of your closest friends. Only it's not actually from them, and it's not actually a video of a kitten falling off a chair. No, once you stop watching that kitten, he gets to work.

He makes a note of every keystroke you make, and beams that straight to the internet. On the internet, another kitten (kitten here being a metaphor for piece of software) calculates which of those keystrokes is likely to represent an email password. A third kitten then tries each of these possible combinations until bingo! She cracks it, and suddenly all your friends, family, old work colleagues and former schoolteachers are being offered Viagra.

Or worse. Another little scam running around the interweb presently is the idea that person A is being held hostage, and person B needs to send lots and lots of money to person C to free them. Of course, because the email was sent from Person A's account, Person B thinks it actually is Person A, and sends the dosh. That is, providing Person A typically writes in lowercase Courier New.

Luckily, none of my contacts got this message. They could have done though, and that makes me feel quite apologetic. I must do better. Though I am not noob, and have actually relatively snappy knowledge of internet, the second I let my guard down was the second a criminal tried his luck.

I will no longer write or check emails from public computers. It is terrible to have been reduced to this, but the internet is swarming with armies of kittens working for a plethora of the most diabolical faces you'll never see.

Be careful out there.

The Joys of Working Life

I'm bored. The main reason I am bored is because I have not only finished doing my accounts, I have finished doing a full 12-month budget, planning in everything from the January sales to the inexplicable desire for stationery that seems to set in around mid-November.

As you can tell from the fact I was doing my accounts, I was actually quite bored before that. Another side effect of my boredom is that I have become quite addicted to tea. I can't cope without it. When I have it, I clutch it to my chest like a boiling hot child. When it cools, I drink it. Once I've drunk it, I miss it. Then I wait until nobody's looking, stick the kettle on, and the cycle starts again. The reason I'm waiting until nobody's looking is because it's polite to ask everyone else for a cup of tea. But if I ask everyone if they want a cup of tea eight times a day, they're going to notice that I, unchecked, would drink eight cups of tea a day.

When I'm not drinking tea, I'm looking at the news, but even that's gotten boring. I only noticed after I started Newstastic, but nothing's happening at all. I'm not saying don't read this week's delicious article... oh! I forgot! I haven't told you yet.

Yes! Big News! Sachtastic is no longer alone. Well, I am, but I'm branching out. I've already told you about Newstastic, my Thursdaily news blog, where I do the news as it were. Then there's the Tuesdaily artstastic blog, where I do all my reviews and things. This actually launched on Wednesday with a review of Four Lions, but Tuesday is when it's supposed to happen Finally there's the Wednesdaily Moneytastic, which sees me voice my unqualified opinions on how to save yourself money. With the latter more than anything I'm happy to see people's opinions, so for Pete's sake email me regarding your own thrifty tips or money mistakes.


Even more finally, there's Unitastic, which I won't link you to, because although there is a page, there are no posts. My idea is it's a uni life blog, which considering I'm going to be working my stripy socks off (or 10 denier tights these days), will probably be about other people's uni lives. This will be launching in time for Freshers'. See you then.

Back to Business

A little update on my life.

I have become employed, and as a result, am getting straight back into social media for a number of reasons.

Firstly, and most importantly, as a creative outlet. The job I start in September is in residential marketing and sales. This job involves a lot of hours, a lot of legwork and very little gain. I can cope with that, though. All I need to do is keep my university life, my work life and my home life in perfect balance.

At the moment, I'm working in a lettings agent's, and thoroughly enjoying the intense customer service experience. I'm one step away from answering my own 'phone with "Good Morning, Sacha speaking; how can I help you?", all the while grinning like a fool in the hope my smile somehow makes its way down the line and makes the caller want to buy stuff from me.

I expect, after a fortnight selling door-to-door I will be utterly fluent in salesperson's spiel and, without a blog, utterly incapable of addressing anybody in any other fashion. So the blog returns, to begin with, on an approximately weekly basis.

Secondly, hungry for power and status as I am, I'm looking to do a little networking. Aside from developing my interpersonal skills through the medium of sales and marketing, I'm looking to ultimately move into freelance journalism and possibly the golden grail of published authorship.

As everyone who ever told me to get my head out of the clouds and concentrate on a real career path will know, any kind of media career can be tricky to break into. It takes time, dedication and a fair measure of being in the right place at the right time. However, by successfully networking, and by getting my name out there as much as possible, I hope to be in as many different places as possible at a number of different times, and thus begin to live the dream.

This will be a long journey, however, and I will keep you posted.

Finally, it's because I need an audience. Because of my own vanity, yes, but also because writing for an audience differs so greatly to writing for oneself.

So, I call on you, my audience, to give me the greatest, and most detested gift that can be given to a writer- your criticism.

I'm still looking for an angle to take in my blogs- sideways rambling has served me well up to a point, but with employment and the associated need for direction comes the feeling that this can't last forever.