It’s not quite here yet where I am, but 2019 has already started happening elsewhere in the world, so let me just wish everyone* reading this a very happy new year!
*Apart from my annoyingly persistent homophobic troll David Hine, who can fuck off.
Follow @telescoperThe New Year Honours List for 2019 has been published and I find that once again I have been denied the opportunity to turn down an award.
I find more than adequate compensation, however, in the award of Beard of the Year 2018. I was presented with the Certificate in Tiny Rebel Cardiff by Beard Liberation Front organiser and spokesbeing Keith Flett (left; picture by Megan Davies)
The certificate mentions a joint award but I am yet to receive the joint.
Anyway here is the certificate in close up.
Although I saw I was doing well in the popular vote, I was surprised be a winner as I thought it would be given to someone with a higher public profile than me. Happily, for me anyway, the Electoral College decided in my favour.
We bumped into two members of the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University in Tiny Rebel (both of whom, I must say, appeared to be rather the worse for drink). A short discussion arose as to whether Beard of the Year could be submitted as evidence of ‘impact’ for the forthcoming Research Excellence Framework. I was working at Cardiff for about half the period covered by the award, you see. I’ll leave that as a matter for the relevant authorities to decide.
Follow @telescoperWell, I won Beard of the Year 2018 (jointly). Thanks to all who voted for me!
Beard Liberation Front
Media Release 27th December
Contact Keith Flett 07803 16726
Scientists win People’s Vote for Beard of the Year for first time
The Beard Liberation Front the informal network of beard wearers, has said that after a record vote for the Beard of the Year 2018 the Electoral College has determined that two scientists are the winners. TV doctor Xand Van Tulleken and cosmologist Peter Coles currently at Maynooth University in Ireland shared the Award.
The campaigners say that both the winners had an enthusiastic voting constituency and taking into account the public impact of their beards it was felt a shared title was appropriate this year.
Moreover the fact that both have a scientific background for the first time reflects the growing reach of beard wearing.
Manchester brewer Al Wall of leading craft brewery Cloudwater was runner up with last year’s winner Jeremy Corbyn third.
The 8…
View original post 244 more words
We’re into the last few hours of voting for Beard of the Year 2018 and I’m still in contention!
Beard Liberation Front
Media Release 24th December
Contact Keith Flett 07803 16726
People’s Vote for the Beard of the Year 2018 closes at midnight on Xmas Eve.
The Beard Liberation Front the informal network of beard wearers, has said voting for the Beard of the Year 2018 will close at midnight on 24th December in what is the ultimate People’s Vote of the year
The top 6 beard wearers will then head into the Beard of the Year Electoral College.
The College will look at the positive public impact that the beard wearer has had during the year and allocate the remainder of the 40% of the possible votes to allow the winner or winners of Beard of the Year to be named on 28th December
The 6 names currently set to enter the Electoral College are:
Peter Coles
Xand van Tulleken
Al Wall
Philip Glanville
Jeremy Corbyn
View original post 249 more words
Welcome, sweet Christmas, blest be the morn
That Christ our Saviour was born!
Earth’s Redeemer, to save us from all danger,
And, as the Holy Record tells, born in a manger.
Then ring, ring, Christmas bells,
Till your sweet music o’er the kingdom swells,
To warn the people to respect the morn
That Christ their Saviour was born.
The snow was on the ground when Christ was born,
And the Virgin Mary His mother felt very forlorn
As she lay in a horse’s stall at a roadside inn,
Till Christ our Saviour was born to free us from sin.
Oh! think of the Virgin Mary as she lay
In a lowly stable on a bed of hay,
And angels watching O’er her till Christ was born,
Therefore all the people should respect Christmas morn.
The way to respect Christmas time
Is not by drinking whisky or wine,
But to sing praises to God on Christmas morn,
The time that Jesus Christ His Son was born;
Whom He sent into the world to save sinners from hell
And by believing in Him in heaven we’ll dwell;
Then blest be the morn that Christ was born,
Who can save us from hell, death, and scorn.
Then he warned, and respect the Saviour dear,
And treat with less respect the New Year,
And respect always the blessed morn
That Christ our Saviour was born.
For each new morn to the Christian is dear,
As well as the morn of the New Year,
And he thanks God for the light of each new morn.
Especially the morn that Christ was born.
Therefore, good people, be warned in time,
And on Christmas morn don’t get drunk with wine
But praise God above on Christmas morn,
Who sent His Son to save us from hell and scorn.
There the heavenly babe He lay
In a stall among a lot of hay,
While the Angel Host by Bethlehem
Sang a beautiful and heavenly anthem.
Christmas time ought to be held most dear,
Much more so than the New Year,
Because that’s the time that Christ was born,
Therefore respect Christmas morn.
And let the rich be kind to the poor,
And think of the hardships they do endure,
Who are neither clothed nor fed,
And Many without a blanket to their bed.
by William Topaz McGonagall (1825-1902)
Follow @telescoperSo here I am, then half past seven in the morning and I’m in Dublin Airport waiting for a flight. I managed to drag myself out of bed in time for the 6am Airport Hopper and now I’m ready to fly.
I expected the airport to be very busy this morning with people departing for Christmas. The Hopper bus was certainly much busier than usual for a Saturday morning. The Airport, however, is nowhere near as bad as I’d expected so I managed to get through security and the rest in much less time than I thought.
I think my blogging is going to be at best intermittent over the next two weeks so I’ll take the opportunity afforded by the free airport wifi to wish you all a very merry Christmas (in Irish).
I got home from work this evening to hear that flights to and from Gatwick Airport suspended again because of drones being sighted in the vicinity.
I feel very sorry for the people whose travel plans have been so badly disrupted, but having seen the picture below on the BBC website I’m baffled as to why the security services have been unable to locate the man responsible. Surely a man of that size should be easy to find?
The winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere happens today, Friday 21st December 2018, at 22.23 Irish Time (22.23 UTC). Among other things, this means that today is the shortest day of the year. Days will get longer from now until the Summer Solstice next June. In fact, the interval between sunrise and sunset tomorrow will be a whole second longer tomorrow than it is today. Yippee!
This does not mean that sunrise will happen earlier tomorrow than it did this morning, however. Actually, sunrise will carry on getting later until the new year. This is because there is a difference between mean solar time (measured by clocks) and apparent solar time (defined by the position of the Sun in the sky), so that a solar day does not always last exactly 24 hours. A description of apparent and mean time was given by Nevil Maskelyne in the Nautical Almanac for 1767:
Apparent Time is that deduced immediately from the Sun, whether from the Observation of his passing the Meridian, or from his observed Rising or Setting. This Time is different from that shewn by Clocks and Watches well regulated at Land, which is called equated or mean Time.
The discrepancy between mean time and apparent time arises because of the Earth’s axial tilt and the fact that it travels around the Sun in an elliptical orbit in which its orbital speed varies with time of year (being faster at perihelion than at aphelion).
In fact if you plot the position of the Sun in the sky at a fixed time each day from a fixed location on the Earth you get a thing called an analemma, which is a sort of figure-of-eight shape whose shape depends on the observer’s latitude. Here’s a photographic version taken in Edmonton, with photographs of the Sun’s position taken from the same position at the same time on different days over the course of a year:
The winter solstice is the lowermost point on this curve and the summer solstice is at the top. The north–south component of the analemma is the Sun’s declination, and the east–west component is the so-called equation of time which quantifies the difference between mean solar time and apparent solar time. This curve can be used to calculate the earliest and/or latest sunrise and/or sunset.
Using a more rapid calculational tool (Google), I found a table of the local mean times of sunrise and sunset for Dublin around the 2018 winter solstice. This shows that today is indeed the shortest day (with a time between sunrise and sunset of 7 hours 29 minutes and 59 seconds). The table also shows that sunset already started occurring later in the day before the winter solstice, and sunrise will continue to happen later for a few days after the solstice, notwithstanding the fact that the interval between sunrise and sunset gets longer from today onwards.
I hope this clarifies the situation.
Follow @telescoper
As term staggers to its close tomorrow, two things this morning reminded me that I should post a final update for the The Open Journal of Astrophysics. I’ve been regularly boring all my readers with a stream of stuff about the Open Journal of Astrophysics, but if it’s all new to you, try reading the short post about the background to the Open Journal project that you can find here.
The first item was a little piece in the latest edition of University News (which was delivered this morning) about the launch event for the journal here at Maynooth University way back in October.
I didn’t make it into the picture above as I had to leave the event before the end in order to give an undergraduate lecture, but the appearance of this piece reminds me to express once more my gratitude to Maynooth for providing such excellent support for this project.
The other event this morning was an email notification that the OJA has received yet another submission. We now have a number of papers in the pipeline, and interest seems to be picking up. I can’t say how many submissions will actually be published, but the papers we have received are working their way through the peer-review system and we’ll see what transpires.
On a related point, a few people have asked me why the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The answer to that is simply that DOAJ requires a minimum of five papers published in a calendar year and because we had a long hiatus before the re-launch we don’t yet qualify. The way things are going we should meet the threshold for 2019 pretty quickly.
Though I stress that the Editorial Board of OJA is not going to compromise standards just to get listed on DOAJ.
we are hoping to increase the number of submissions with time (in a manageable way). As it happens, we do have funds available to promote the OJA as I think quite a large number of members of the astrophysics community still haven’t heard of it. This also makes it a little difficult to enlist referees who perhaps jump to the conclusion that this is a dodgy or predatory journal. There are many of these about, sadly, but I hope we can establish relatively easily the fact that we’re not of that ilk.
I would like here to repeat a small request I posted a while ago. Do any of you have any ideas for promoting The Open Journal of Astrophysics? We could advertise directly in journals of course, but I’m wondering if anyone out there in the interwebs has any more imaginative ideas? If you do please let me know through the comments box below.
Follow @telescoperThere’s an interesting news item in the Education section of the Irish times about the appointment of Prof Séamus Davis to positions at both the University of Oxford and University College Cork, under a Science Foundation Ireland scheme intended to capitalize on Brexit (and the imminent loss of EU funding it implies) and the unhappy situation for science in the USA. This is the first appointment to one of the new Research Professorships, which allow the holders to be paid up to €250K.
While I support any investment in Irish science, and wish Prof. Davis every success in his new role, my reaction to the SFI scheme is very similar to my view of the Sêr Cymru (“Star Wales”) project which began a few years ago when I was working in Cardiff, with the aim of attracting `research leaders’ to Wales.
I am very skeptical about the likely success of `top-down’ moves like this. What Ireland really needs (and currently does not have) is a sustainable research base, so at very least I’d like to complementary `bottom-up’ projects nurturing researchers at PhD and PDRA level, perhaps through a greatly expanded system of national fellowships. The trouble in Ireland is that there are so few opportunities for early career researchers that many have to go abroad to further their careers. There’s nothing wrong with Irish researchers choosing to work in another country, of course, but in an ideal world they would choose rather than be forced to do so by lack of opportunity and their loss would be offset by a other nationals choosing to come into Ireland. Unless this problem is fixed Ireland might end up with some leaders but nobody around to follow them.
The question I ask myself is, if one had to choose, what would be better in the long run for Irish science, one Professor on a salary of €250,000 or eight new postdoctoral fellowships (at roughly the same cost)?
Of course the idea of bringing in `research leaders’ is that they will manage to bring in funds from elsewhere, especially the European Union. This may indeed happen and indeed some may already have money in the bag when they move in. The problem with the strategy, though, is that it’s not very easy to persuade such leaders to leave their current institutions, especially in experimental sciences, if they’ve already spend years acquiring the funding needed to equip their laboratories. This is not just a question of moving people, which is relatively easy, but can involve trying to replace lots of expensive and delicate equipment. The financial inducements needed to fund the relocation of a major research group and fight off counter-offers from its present host are likely to be so expensive that the benefit gained from doing this takes years to accrue, even they succeed. And EU grants are exceptionally competitive..
It’s a big shame that Ireland does not take research funding as seriously as it should, especially in fundamental science. Brexit could well turn out to be very damaging for the Irish economy, but science is one area where in which there are enormous opportunities if only there was the political will to seize them.
In the Dark 