They were absolutely lovely, and also they like Galaxy Zoo. It was really nice to meet them . . .

Coffee is zooite fuel!

Sadly I didn't get the job. I'm very down about this as it was *exactly* what I wanted to do - and there are very few around that look nice like that one did.

Get well soon!

Paul, have you heard that it's generally accepted that Uranus and Neptune swapped places during the early evolution of the Solar System? I think you'd like the "Extrasolar Planets and Astrophysical Disks" course I did last year - I failed it because it was mostly maths I'd never seen before and there was no help on, but here's the web page if you'd like to read the notes!

I'll ask our Solar Systems lecturer, who's also my dissertation supervisor (and who discovered two of Saturn's moons!). There are so many papers out trying to prove Bode's Law that some journals just won't take them any more. He himself as a teenager analysed Jupiter and Saturn's moons trying to see if Bode's Law applied there. I don't think he found anything conclusive or he would have told me!

What interests me is that in our Solar System, Bode's Law breaks down exactly where resonance begins - i.e. at Neptune and Pluto (which are in a 3:2 resonance)

I like those suggestions for topics. I prefer to go with basic stuff, though, rather than science philosophies - for one thing, most of my audience are beginners and like things rather than complex systems; for another, I once did a talk about relativity and black holes, and that's the only talk to which an, er, established science sceptic turned up. Nothing I or a physicist in the audience said satisfied him and he got my e-mail address to start e-mailing me many thousand word essays explaining why!

Generally, "crackpot" theories are proved correct (very rarely!) when new evidence comes to light that makes them obvious - although there is the rather ominous saying that it's when their opponents die!! For example, the expansion of the Universe was discovered by Hubble in the 1920s - but believed by very few. Not just because they were all stubborn stick-in-the-muds back then, but because Hubble's figures suggested that the Earth was twice as old as the Universe. It turned out he had measured the wrong sort of Cepheid variable stars!

Found: G type dwarf star, approx 5 billion years old, 8 planets, proton-proton chain dominated. We hope no one claims it, because we'd like to keep it

Wish me luck everyone, I have a job interview on Thursday! (Sadly that means I have to head back home a few days earlier than planned, but that seems worth it - also means I'm likelier to get on with my studying!)

New bread and home-made marmalade here!