Archive for February, 2022

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A Day of Computing

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , on February 3, 2022 by telescoper

Last Semester, Thursday was what I optimistically called a “Research Day” (on the basis that I had no teaching on it). This Semester it’s one of my busiest teaching days, with lecturing in the morning and a lab session in the afternoon, both for Computational Physics.

For most of the last two years I’ve been delivering the lectures and running the lab remotely, but now that we’re back teaching face-to-face I gave the lecture in person and was in the lab with the class for this afternoon’s session. I’ve got about twice as many students this year as last year swill be running two lab sessions (one next Tuesday repeating the material from the Thursday one, and so on throughout the term).

Running the lab remotely worked reasonably well because Python is available to download for free and works on a standard Windows-based PC. In the lab however we use a Linux (Ubuntu) system, which gives the students the chance to try a different operating system (and one which is for many purposes better than Windows).

It’s good to be back running the computing laboratory class in person but I was a bit nervous this morning because since I last did it that way the machines we have in our laboratory have all been upgraded to a new operating system and have a new (and very different) version of Python (3.9 versus the now obsolete 2.7). I’ve been around long enough to realize that things can go wrong in such situations, so I warned the class during this morning’s lecture that there might be teething troubles. Sure enough we had quite a few technical glitches but, to be honest, it it could have been a lot worse. Next Tuesday’s lab should be a bit less stressful as we’ve fixed a few of the things that went wrong.

So, by no means a disaster, but a busy and quite stressful day. Time to go home and relax.

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A Century of Ulysses

Posted in Biographical, Literature with tags , on February 2, 2022 by telescoper

 

When I woke up this morning the radio reminded me that today, 2nd February 2022, is the centenary of the first complete publication of  Ulysses by James Joyce. It had been published in installments before that, but it took a publisher in Paris to bite the bullet and publish the whole thing. The publication date also happened to be the 40th birthday of the author.

I have toyed with the idea of going into Dublin on Bloomsday (16th June, the day on which Ulysses is set) and wandering about some of the locations described in, but what with work and lockdowns I haven’t got round to it.  Maybe this year will be the time!

Or perhaps instead I’ll prepare dinner this evening in a style that Leopold Bloom would enjoy:

He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with breadcrumbs, fried hen cod’s roe. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Or perhaps not.

If you haven’t read Ulysses yet then you definitely should. It’s one of the great works of modern literature. And don’t let people put you off by telling you that it’s a difficult read. It really isn’t. It’s a long read that’s for sure -it’s over 900 pages – but the writing is full of colour and energy and it has a  real sense of place. It’s a wonderful book.

(There’s also quite a lot of sex in it….)

I’ve read Ulysses twice, once when I was a teenager and again when I was in my thirties. I then lent my copy to someone and never got it back. The copy shown above is a new one I bought last year with the intention of reading the novel again now that I live in Ireland but I sadly have not had the time yet. I will, though.

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Back to Electromagnetism

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on February 1, 2022 by telescoper

So today I gave my first lecture of the new Semester, it being a gentle reintroduction to Maxwell’s equations for a 4th-year class on Advanced Electromagnetism. They have seen these equations before but it doesn’t do any harm to spend a bit of time refreshing the memory. In what follows I do some potential theory, applications to electrostatics (method of images, multipole expansions, use of the complex potential, etc), dielectric materials and polarization, magnetostatics, relativistic formalism of electromagnetism, gauge invariance, electromagnetic radiation and energy transport, and (if time) plasma physics (if time).

When I taught this module last year I did it all remotely from home – using the blackboard shown above – but this year until further notice I’ll be doing it in person in an actual lecture theatre, though I will be recording the lectures in case any students wish to look at them again for revision, etc, and webcasting them for any students unable to attend on campus. I know there are differences of opinion on this, but I think recording of lectures should become routine practice – as it is in all UK universities I’m aware of – but that is difficult here in Maynooth because the equipment available is inadequate (by which I mean virtually non-existent). Let’s hope the necessary investment will be made at some point.

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