Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Monday, 12 February 2018

Big science with a big telescope

This looks good.

A teeny-tiny caveat : one of the somewhat legitimate criticisms of Green Bank is that the site is actually not that great for the frequency range the telescope, because there's too much humidity in West Virginia. From the science point of view you want a higher, drier site. On the other hands that would a) make it logistically damn difficult to build the thing at all, thus negating any advantage and b) it's not so much impressive how well the telescope does at high frequencies, but that a 100m telescope is able to adjust itself to the precision necessary at all.

Personally, while I think this show can't come soon enough (literally, because reasons), I'd also like a show documenting the goddamn $"*$%ing absurd way in which the NSF is treating its existing big radio facilities. What they're currently doing (and not doing) at Arecibo is beyond a joke. For more than a decade they seem to be ruthlessly determined to break it to deliberately show that it's unsustainable; a sort of delenda est Arecibo, and Green Bank has fared even worse. Put it this way : when I was there we had various managers who were racist, never turning up, micromanaging to the extreme, sending out drunken emails insulting the staff; an unholy triumvirate of three institutions managing a single facility which was pretty much doomed to failure, staff weren't being paid properly which put the facilities at risk, staff who harassed other staff members and no-one wanted to report it, at least one rumoured to have a drug problem, chronic understaffing at almost all levels, a general sense of oafishness at the top of the managerial tree... and that was a particularly good period in recent years. Right now, it seems to be very much worse.

Against this there were plenty of fantastic scientists who are also genuinely wonderful human beings, and one or two managers who were 100% superb. But given the rest, it simply wasn't enough.

I don't blame the people who were hired to work there. I firmly blame the NSF for not having a sodding clue what to do with the place. I really wish I'd recorded some of the meetings there.

Cynical, yet entirely accurate, rant over. You may now enjoy the YouTube clip from one of G+'s best science communicators.

https://youtu.be/KcxeEuNnmAM

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