Archive for January, 2021

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It’s a Sin

Posted in Biographical, History, LGBTQ+, Television with tags , , , , , on January 23, 2021 by telescoper

My Twitter feed was on fire last night with reactions to the first episode of the new Channel 4 drama series It’s a Sin. The title is taken from the 1987 hit of the same name by the Pet Shop Boys.

I didn’t watch it. I told a friend that I would find it impossible to watch. He asked “Why, would the memories be uncomfortable?”. I said “No. I can’t get Channel 4 on my television”.

I only have the minimum Saorview you see.

Now I’ve been informed that it is possible to stream Channel 4 for free in Ireland I will definitely watch it, so consider this a prelude to the inevitable commentary when I’ve actually seen it.

The reason why my friend thought I’d find it uncomfortable is that the story of the first episode is set in 1981 and revolves around five characters who were eighteen years old at that time. As it happens I was also 18 in 1981. On the other hand the story involves the protagonists all moving to London in 1981, which I didn’t. I was living in Newcastle in 1981, doing my A-levels and then taking the entrance exam for Cambridge where I went the following year (1982).

Before going on I’ll just mention that 1981 was – yikes – 40 years ago and – double yikes – is closer in time to the end of World War 2 than to today.

Anyway, a major theme running through the 5-part series is the AIDS epidemic that was only just starting to appear on the horizon in 1981. I recall reading an article in a magazine about GRIDS (Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome), which it was what AIDS was called in the very early days. I remember it only vaguely though and didn’t think much about AIDS during the time I was an undergraduate student, although became terrifyingly relevant when I moved to Sussex in 1985 to start my graduate studies.

Although I had been (secretly) sexually active at school and definitely knew I was gay when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, I wasn’t very open about it except to my closest friends. I also didn’t do much about it either, apart from developing a number of crushes that were doomed to be unrequited.

In my final year at Cambridge I decided that I would try to get a place to do a PhD (or, as it turned out, a DPhil). I applied to a few places around the country, and was very happy to get an offer from Sussex and started my postgraduate studies there in 1985. The reputation of Brighton as being a very `gay’ place to live was definitely part of the decision to go there.

Having been very repressed at Cambridge and mostly unhappy as a consequence I decided that I couldn’t continue to live that way. One of the first things I did during `Freshers Week’ at Sussex was join the GaySoc (as it was called) and I gradually became more involved in it as time went on. To begin with I found it helped to pluck up the nerve to go into gay bars and clubs, which I was a bit scared to do on my own having never really experienced anything like them in Newcastle or Cambridge.

It didn’t take me long to acquire an exciting sex life, picking up guys here and there and having (mostly unprotected) sex with strangers several times a week (or more). I then met an undergraduate student through the GaySoc. Although younger than me he was more experienced and more confident about sex. The relationship I had with him was a real awakening for me. We had a lot of sex. I would often sneak off form my office to his room on campus during the day for a quickie. We never even talked about wearing condoms or avoiding ‘risky’ behaviour. This was in 1986. The infamous government advertising campaign began in 1987.

Then one evening we went together to a GaySoc meeting about AIDS during which a health expert explained what was dangerous and what wasn’t, and exactly how serious AIDS really was. Most of us students were disinclined to follow instructions from the Thatcher government but gradually came round to the idea that it wasn’t the attempt at social control that we suspected but a genuine health crisis. That day my partner and I exchanged sheepish glances all the way through the talk. Afterwards we discussed it and decided that it was probably a good idea for us both to get tested for HIV, though obviously if one of us had it then both of us would.

Having been told what the riskiest sexual practices were, and knowing that I had been engaging very frequently precisely in those behaviours, I just assumed that I would be found HIV+. When I did eventually have a test I was quite shocked to find I was negative, so much so that I had another test to make sure. It was negative again. We were both negative, in fact, so we carried on as before.

It was in the next few years that people I knew started to get HIV, and then AIDS, from which many died. I imagine, therefore, that It’s a Sin will have a considerable personal resonance for me. Even without watching it (yet) a question that often troubles me returned once again to my mind: why am I still alive, when so many people I knew back then are not?

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Delivery Notes

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , on January 22, 2021 by telescoper

I was a bit surprised to see the latest issue of Private Eye was delivered this morning. The Eye is published every fortnight on a Wednesday but, until recently, it normally took about a week to arrive in Ireland. Since the New Year however it has been taking much less time to get here. In fact this one arrived on the nominal issue date (22nd January):

I’m not sure why it’s suddenly got much faster, but I wonder if it might be related to a reduction in other items being sent to Ireland from the UK because of difficulties that kicked in as a result of Boris Johnson’s Trade Reduction Treaty on January 1st? (Perhaps not, though, because my 1st January Physics World still hasn’t arrived and that presumably comes via a similar route…)

Anyway, I’ve been reading quite a lot of stories about the changes that have occurred in receiving goods from the UK: long delays, vastly increased delivery charges, VAT and customs payments due on arrival, and sometimes orders cancelled entirely. I think items only worth a few euro are exempt from these new charges but I know of a few people who have been handed large bills when goods they have ordered over the internet have been delivered. I think it’s going to be very important in future that firms advertising in Ireland make it clear if the goods they are selling are going to be delivered from the UK.

These developments have at least provided some possible explanations of the reasons why so many people voted for Brexit. One might be that they enjoy filling in forms and wrestling with other kinds of red tape. Another, more likely, is “sovereignty” which I interpret as meaning “not having to deal with nasty foreigners”.

As regular readers of this blog will know I voted Remain and now live in the EU as a nasty foreigner. I do however think we nasty foreigners should accept the reality of this situation and respect British sovereignty.

Indeed I have seen many interviews with British business leaders who voted for Brexit complaining about all the difficulties that now exist to trade with nasty foreigners. I think there’s only one way for decent folk to react to this and that is to help these people in their hour of need by saving them the effort of form-filling, the extra expense of delivery, along with all the other headaches, and at the same time fully respecting their sovereignty, by simply not buying goods from them any more. It’s the honorable thing to do.

Fortunately it is increasingly possible for people in Ireland to do what Brexiters want by avoiding buying British goods. There are now 30 weekly sailings from Ireland to France, operated by 4 different companies. From tomorrow there will also be a new route from Dublin to Cherbourg by Stena Line.

But now I’m in a quandary. Am I disrespecting British sovereignty by continuing to subscribe to Private Eye?

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Physics versus Astrophysics

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , on January 21, 2021 by telescoper

I don’t often post memes on here, but I couldn’t resist this one. Credit here.

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NUI Dr Éamon De Valera Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences

Posted in History, mathematics, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on January 21, 2021 by telescoper

I found out yesterday that the National University of Ireland is commemorating the centenary of the election of Éamon de Valera as its Chancellor. To mark this occasion, NUI will offer a special NUI Dr Éamon De Valera Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Mathematical Sciences. This post is in addition to the regular NUI awards, which include a position for Science & Engineering.

Éamon de Valera, photographed sometime during the 1920s.

Éamon de Valera, founder of Fianna Fáil (formerly one of the two largest political parties in Ireland) and architect of the Irish constitution. De Valera (nickname `Dev’) is an enigmatic figure, who was a Commandant in the Irish Republican Army during the 1916 Easter Rising, who subsequently became Taoiseach  and then President of the Irish Republic.

You may or may not know that de Valera was a mathematics graduate, and for a short time (1912-13) he was Head of the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth,  a recognized college of the National University of Ireland. The Department became incorporated in Maynooth University, when it was created in 1997.Mathematical Physics is no longer a part of the Mathematics Department at Maynooth, having become a Department in its own right and it recently changed its name to the Department of Theoretical Physics.

Anyway, the Fellowship will be awarded on the basis of a common competition open to NUI graduates in all branches of the Mathematical Sciences. All branches of the Mathematical Sciences will be deemed as including, but not limited to, all academic disciplines within Applied Mathematics, Pure Mathematics, Mathematical Physics and Statistics and Probability.

You can find more details of the position here. I should say however that it is open to NUI graduates only, though it can be held at any of the constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland. Given the de Valera connection with Maynooth, it would be fitting if it were held here!
The deadline for applications is February 9th.

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On the Colours of Stars

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on January 20, 2021 by telescoper

There’s an interesting paper on the arXiv by Harre & Heller with the title Digital Color Codes of Stars. Here’s the abstract:

Publications in astrophysics are nowadays mainly published and read in digitized formats. Astrophysical publications in both research and in popular outreach often use colorful representations of stars to indicate various stellar types, that is, different spectral types or effective temperatures. Computer generated and computer displayed imagery has become an integral part of stellar astrophysics communication. There is, however, no astrophysically motivated standard color palette for illustrative representations of stars and some stars are actually represented in misleading colors. We use pre-computed PHOENIX and TLUSTY stellar model spectra and convolve them with the three standard color matching functions for human color perception between 360nm and 830nm. The color matching functions represent the three sets of receptors in the eye that respond to red, green, and blue light. For a grid of main sequence stars with effective temperatures between 2300K and 55,000K of different metallicities we present the red-blue-green and hexadecimal color codes that can be used for digitized color representations of stars as if seen from space. We find significant deviations between the color codes of stars computed from stellar spectra and from a black body radiator of the same effective temperature. We illustrate the main sequence in the color wheel and demonstrate that there are no yellow, green, cyan, or purple stars. Red dwarf stars (spectral types M0V – M9V) actually look orange to the human eye. Old white dwarfs such as WD1856+534, host to a newly discovered transiting giant planet candidate, occur pale orange to the human eye, not white. Our freely available software can be used to generate color codes for any input spectrum such as those from planets, galaxies, quasars etc.

This reminded me of a post I wrote in 2011 about why you never see any green stars. They say a picture paints a thousand words so here’s an illustration from the above paper:

This shows that although there are stars in the Main Sequence whose spectra peak at wavelengths corresponding to green light, none of them look green. The paper also claims that there are no yellow stars either. The Sun can look yellow when viewed from Earth but that is to do with scattering in the atmosphere: from space, the Sun looks white.

For another discussion of the use of colour representations in cosmology, see here.

 

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It’s raining…

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, Poetry with tags , , , , , , on January 19, 2021 by telescoper

Taking a short break from examination marking I had a look outside. I’m not sorry to be cooped up indoors given that it’s pouring with rain. In fact it rained all night and morning and is set to continue in the same vein until tomorrow.

While I was waiting for my coffee to brew I was thinking about some idiomatic expressions for heavy rain. The most familiar one in English is Raining Cats and Dogs which, it appears, originated in a poem by Jonathan Swift that ends with the lines:

Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats and turnip tops come tumbling down the flood.

My French teacher at school taught me the memorable if slightly indelicate Il pleut comme vache qui pisse, although there are other French expressions involving, among other things nails, frogs and halberds.

One of my favourites is the Welsh Mae hi’n bwrw hen wragedd a ffyn which means, bizarrely, “It’s raining old ladies and sticks”. There is also Mae hi’n bwrw cyllyll a ffyrc – “It’s raining knives and forks”.

Related idiomatic expressions in Irish are constructed differently. There isn’t a transitive verb meaning “to rain” so there is no grammatical way to say “it rains something”. The way around this is to use a different verb to represent, e.g., throwing. For example Tá sé ag caitheamh sceana gréasaí which means “It’s throwing cobblers’ knives”.

Talking (of) cobblers, I note that in Danish there is Det regner skomagerdrenge – “It’s raining shoemakers’ apprentices” and in Germany Es regnet Schusterjungs – “It’s raining cobblers’ boys”.

Among the other strange expressions in other languages are Está chovendo a barba de sapo (Portuguese for “It’s raining toads’ beards”), Пада киша уби миша (Serbian for “It’s raining and killing mice”),  Det regner trollkjerringer (Norwegian for “It’s raining female trolls”) and Estan lloviendo hasta maridos (Spanish for “It is even raining husbands”).

No sign of any husbands outside right now so I’ll get back to correcting exams.

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Cosmology Talks: Marika Asgari on Kids 1000

Posted in Cardiff, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on January 18, 2021 by telescoper

It’s time I shared another one of those interesting cosmology talks on the Youtube channel curated by Shaun Hotchkiss. This channel features technical talks rather than popular expositions so it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but for those seriously interested in cosmology at a research level they should prove interesting. Since I haven’t posted any of these for a while I’ve got a few to catch up on – this one is from September 2020.

In this talk Marika Asgari tells us about the recent Kilo-Degree Survey (KiDS) cosmological results. These are the first results from KiDS after they have reached a sky coverage of 1000 square degrees. Marika first explains how they know that the results are “statistics dominated” and not “systematics dominated”, meaning that the dominant uncertainty comes from statistical errors, not systematic ones. She then presents the cosmological results, which primarily constrain the clumpiness of matter in the universe, and which therefore constrain Ωm and σ8. In the combined parameter “S8“, which is constrained almost independently from Ωm by their data they see a more than 3σ tension with the equivalent parameter one would infer from Planck.

P. S. The papers that accompany this talk can be found here and here.

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Be My Baby – The Ronettes and Phil Spector

Posted in Music with tags , , , , on January 17, 2021 by telescoper

I heard this afternoon of the death in prison of convicted murderer and music producer Phil Spector. He was 81 years old and was suffering from Covid-19. I have to say I have found a lot of the reporting of his demise has been reprehensible, talking about how his career was “marred” by the fact that he murdered actress Lana Clarkson. I’m surely the family and loved ones of Lana Clarkson have a different opinion about whose lives were “marred” …

Nevertheless, Phil Spector’s legacy as a record producer is undeniably immense. He produced over a hundred hit singles many of them having a trademark sound that others tried and failed to copy.

When Spector started out as a producer a normal recording session involved having the band and vocalists perform together in the studio. Spector adopted the approach of having very large backing groups – often with double or treble instruments and backing vocals – which he recorded separately, adding the lead vocals later. That is the way pop records have been made for a very long time now but it was quite unusual in the early sixties. The arrangements weren’t very complicated: many musicians just played in unison for some or all of the track. When it was all mixed (often with a lot of reverb) the layering effect was to make it difficult identify individual instruments – hence the term “Wall of Sound“. In classic Spector tracks you will find that it’s often in the chorus or when a big key change occurs that the full force of this wall appears. It’s a tremendously effective device, even if you know it’s coming.

Phil Spector came onto the music scene at about the same time as the pioneering British record producer Joe Meek. I’ve heard it said that they influenced each other or even that Spector stole Meek’s ideas. I don’t think that’s true at all. Both were very original but they worked in very different ways and Spector never favoured the distortions that Meek frequently exploited.

When I heard Phil Spector had died two tracks sprang immediately to mind. One was You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling by the Righteous Brothers and the other was this one. I searched for it on Youtube and found this fascinating recording from the session that created it. The track is Be My Baby by the Ronettes. The lead singer Veronica Bennett later married Phil Spector and became Ronnie Spector. They separated in 1972 amid allegations of psychological abuse by her husband.

In this video you can hear several takes of the relatively simple backing track (without backing vocals or lead singer or the string section that appears in the final mix heard right at the end) and there’s some interesting discussion between the producer and drummer (the excellent Hal Blaine). Spector liked to use unusual percussion – tambourines and castanets feature prominently on this track – but he wanted the drums to be simpler to begin with. Later on he asks Blaine to “make me an ending”. He promptly produces lots of great work, most of it sadly doomed to be faded out. If you’re interested the tune is based on two chord progressions: I – ii – V7 and the I – vi – IV – V progression that was ubiquitous in music from the 1950s. The completed track is less than three minutes in duration, but it’s a classic.

You’re probably wondering why I picked this one. Well for one thing it’s almost exactly as old as me! The other reason is that I hadn’t heard it for a while and it struck me very hard just how much of an influence it must have been on Amy Winehouse…

R.I.P. Lana Clarkson (1962-2003).

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For the Birds..

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , , on January 17, 2021 by telescoper

The Giant Robin of Newgrange

I saw the above picture of a robin on Twitter the other day and it reminded me of the one that visits my garden. I’ve never been quick enough to take a picture of him, but he’s every bit as plump as the one in the picture. If he were taller he’d be spherical.

The robin situation in my garden has seen an important development: another robin has arrived. The new one is smaller than the first and the first time I saw it I only noticed it because it was having a squabble with the plump one. I assumed it was a younger rival, but on subsequent days I saw the two of them together quite peacefully. Since male and female robins are virtually indistinguishable I wonder if they might be a husband and wife team? The fact that I saw them having a row lends support to this theory.

Another interesting thing concerned niger seed. I bought some of this a while ago, together with a feeder that purported to be designed for dispensing it. Niger seed is a fine oily seed very good for the smaller birds. Unfortunately the mesh in the feeder is too coarse and the seed just poured out as I filled it. I put the bag of seed away and filled the feeder with other stuff. Last week I remembered the bag of niger seed and decided to try putting some loose in the bird table. In no time a group of four chaffinches were tucking in. These were definitely two males and two females – the females are notably different in colour. Anyway, they love it – as do a number of other birds, including the robin(s) – and I’ve had to replenish the supply twice.

I usually wait until there don’t seem to be any birds present before going out to check the food supply, but this is a waste of time. Even if the garden appears empty, as soon as I go out there’s a whooshing sound and lots of chirps as birds that had secreted themselves in various trees and hedges take to the air to escape the scary human.

The birds provide a welcome distraction when I take a break from exam marking, as does writing a blog, but I guess I should get back to it now.

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Wales from Ireland

Posted in History with tags , on January 16, 2021 by telescoper

Snowdon in North Wales, from Howth, Co Dublin. Picture Credit: Niall O’Carroll

I couldn’t resist sharing this wonderful picture that appeared in yesterday’s Irish Independent. On what must have been an exceptionally clear day it shows the mountains of Wales including Snowdon, which had been snowed on, from Howth in County Dublin. The picture was taken from the Ben of Howth, which is about 171m above sea level, giving a view over local houses across the Irish Sea.

The distance from Howth to Snowdon is about 140 km as the crow flies, so it’s surprising that the mountains appear so clearly. On the other hand a colleague from Dunsink Observatory sent me this:

… the Welsh mountains are distinctly visible, particularly that ridge of hills which runs S. W. to point Braich-y-pwll, and bounds Caernarvon bay …

That quote is from Henry Ussher, founding astronomer of Dunsink Observatory, writing in the first paper of The Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy in 1787.

If you fly into Dublin from the East, the flight path takes you almost directly over Howth with Malahide to your right. It’s a very historic place, well worth a visit if you’re in the Dublin area.

P. S. Thanks to Geraint Jones for this view in the other direction. Looking in the opposite direction from Mynydd Parys: Bethel Hen chapel in Llanrhuddlad, Ynys Môn, with the summit of Kippure (with the transmitter on top), south of Dublin, on the border with Co. Wicklow, 134 km away. Taken from Mynydd Parys.

Picture Credit: Geraint Jones

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