Current mood:

infuriated

...with a bad bad day.
Firstly, today we buried my great aunt Mollie... who I was actually pretty damn fond of. Not a good start to the day.

Secondly, I get back to Brighton after driving from Mum's to Worcester (1.5 hrs) and back again (1.5hrs) and then back to Brighton (2hrs-ish if I am lucky) in one day... to read about This.

By the way, my PhD is funded by the STFC. The PhDs of many of my friends and colleagues are funded by the STFC, the facilities we use and the staff researchers who guide us and make use of those facilities are funded by the STFC...

So as to not fly off the handle I actually read the "Delivery Plan" (big business trying to make science decisions) for the next couple years. It included the innocuous little line :

"We will cease all support for ground-based solar-terrestrial physics facilities."

That is my job dead, my field dead, right there.

WOOHOO! Time to emigrate, boys and girls!

I am actually being serious about this. Solar-Terrestrial (ST) Physics is haemorrhaging people, and not because they want to go. These people, talented, trained, skilled, useful people are going because they have to. They are jumping, or being pushed... but this boat is sinking.

The science minister Ian Pearson seems to have had the unalloyed gall to say "The science budget is actually going up over the next three years,". To my knowledge, he is wrong. Utterly wrong. The "science" budget isn't increasing. The "commercial science" budget is increasing. If they can get money out right now then they will fund it. Blue Sky Research? The search for Understanding instead of just Products? Dead. This isn't Science, ladies and gents, this is an Argos Catalog.

...It incenses me... and scares the hell out of me at the same time...

I have wondered for a while now if "My Kind" were welcome in this country anymore...

...now I know.