Don’t worry about what this is, I’m just testing to see what the video rendering looks like. If you want to know, it’s an attempt to run the collapse of a spherical over-density backwards in time!
Archive for October, 2023
The Rain in Spain
Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags Barcelona, Eduroam on October 16, 2023 by telescoperIt started raining yesterday and has carried on today. Yes, water is falling from the sky. It’s not raining heavily, but it has noticeably reduced the number of pedestrians visible. It’s a lot cooler today, too. Not exactly cold, at 21°C, but there’s definitely been a change. Whenever it’s been overcast previously in my stay here it has been very humid but not cooler, especially overnight when the cloud cover keeps the temperature high. Now it’s actually rather refreshing. We’re in for a bit more rain over the next few days too. Nice.
It seems more than a little overdue:
Today hasn’t been a great day so far. I was thinking of doing this morning’s scheduled Zoom call from home using the Wifi connection there. Unfortunately, there was quite a bit of construction noise from elsewhere in the building so I decided to come into the Department and do it here instead. When I got here Eduroam decided not to work for me, so I had no internet connection and consequently had to postpone the Zoom call altogether. I may have to miss a telecon this afternoon for the same reason.
Now there are intolerable levels of construction noise outside my office window too. Sigh.
On top of all that, my phone is refusing to send SMS messages. “Error 0” it says. I’m not sure how to fix that, so I’ll probably just wait for it to fix itself. My mobile data connection is working fine, so I have no idea what the problem is. I shall adopt my usual strategy in such situations of waiting for the issue to correct itself.
Annoying, though. It never rains but it pours…
Come in, Barcelona…
Posted in Architecture, Barcelona, Biographical, Books with tags Barcelona, Books, Casa Milà, Come In on October 14, 2023 by telescoperI think I’ve settled in pretty well now. I went for a longish walk this morning and didn’t once have to use Google Maps to find out where I was! It’s a bit cooler today (although still 25°C) so a bit more comfortable walking around. Temperatures are forecast to drop to about 21°C tomorrow, and there’s even a forecast for rain. I might even change out of my shorts!
I’ve been here almost three weeks now, and in my apartment for one. It does feel like I’ve been here longer, actually, but I suppose that’s because so many nice and interesting things have happened.
Anyway, on my way around I dropped in at Come In, a very good English-language bookshop. You can see how good it is by the quality of the books it sells…
It has a very wide range: new books and classics, fiction and non-fiction, and books for children. I suspect quite a few of its sales are to students of English, as well as tourists and migrants such as myself. It’s definitely worth a visit if you’re here. The staff are very friendly and helpful too. I bought a couple of items there, of which more anon.
Oh, and I also passed by La Casa Milà, which is quite close to my place of residence…
Random Bits of Dancing from Día de la Hispanidad
Posted in Barcelona with tags Barcelona, Día de la Hispanidad on October 13, 2023 by telescoper
P.S. This is what’s called a “story” post and I’ve just discovered that I can now do such with videos. I’ll have to be careful what I upload…
The Land of Inadequate Research Stipends
Posted in Education with tags ANID—IUA scholarship, Chile, PhD, Stipends on October 13, 2023 by telescoperI noticed yesterday that the Irish Government has announced that the stipend for PhD research supported by Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the Irish Research Coucil (IRC) will increase by €3,000 a year. The increase will bring the rate of stipend to €22,000 a year for doctoral researchers from January 2024. While this is €3,000 less than the €25,000 recommended by a report published earlier this year, and the Government itself has already tacitly admitted that a level of €28,000 is needed to attract the best students, this is at least a step in the right direction.
Current levels of funding for research students are simply exploitative, forcing research students to take on extra work – often low-paid teaching duties – in order to make enough money to make ends meet. That is, unless they are students from affluent backgrounds. The discriminatory aspect of this policy is plain for all to see: should a career in research only be possible for the wealthy?
Of course this applies only to PhD students funded by SFI and IRC. It remains to be seen whether other funders – particularly Universities themselves – will match this increase. If they don’t, it will create an unhealthy division between students doing similar work but receiving vastly different levels of remuneration.
In related news I notice the Irish Universities Association has proudly announced a new agreement to fund Chilean students undertaking PhD and Research Masters courses in Ireland. Sounds great, I thought when I saw the announcement, astronomy being a likely area for research projects involving Chilean students.
Strangely (?) the website advertising this scheme doesn’t mention the level of stipend offered, but I found out independently that it is $15,000 per annum. That’s about €14,250, completely inadequate for a research student in Ireland, especially in the Dublin area, and especially for one who has travelled halfway round the world to get to Ireland. I certainly won’t be encouraging any students to apply for this scheme unless and until the miserly bursary is increased to the same level as SFI/IRC.
The IUA, of course, knows full well that this stipend is insupportable, so it is reprehensible for it to have agreed to these terms, the only possible outcome of them being to create an underclass within an underclass.
I had my university education for free, without tuition fees and with a full maintenance grant. The stipend I received for my PhD, although by no means luxurious, was adequate too. At times like this I wonder yet again why my generation spends so much time shitting on the young?
LiteBIRD Update
Posted in Cardiff, The Universe and Stuff with tags B-mode, Cardiff, ISAS, JAXA, Litebird, Primordial Gravitational Waves on October 12, 2023 by telescoper
It was more than four years ago that I passed on the news that the space mission LiteBIRD had been selected as the next major mission by the Japanese Space Agency JAXA and Institute for Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS).
LiteBIRD (which stands for `Lite (Light) satellite for the studies of B-mode polarization and Inflation from cosmic background Radiation Detection’) is a planned space observatory that aims to detect the footprint of the primordial gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) in a form of a B-mode polarization pattern. This is the signal that BICEP2 claimed to have detected nine years ago to muc excitement, but was later shown to be a caused by galactic dust.
At the time, I said that this was great news for a lot of CMB people all round the world that this mission had been selected – include some old friends from Cardiff University. Well, I’ve just seen a news item announcing a grant to Cardiff astrophysicists who will lead the UK involvement and develop the optical design.
The launch date has slipped into the 2030s (no doubt partly because of the pandemic) so I’ll be long retired before it happens, but the mission will last three years and will, like Euclid, be at Earth-Sun Lagrange point known as L2. It will be a very difficult task to extract the B-mode signal from foregrounds and instrumental artifacts but I wish LiteBIRD every success!
Día de la Hispanidad
Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags Día de la Hispanidad, National Holiday, Spain on October 12, 2023 by telescoperToday (12th October) is a national holiday in Spain, Hispanic Day (Día de la Hispanidad) or National Day (Fiesta Nacional de España). The date commemorates when Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas in 1492, and its colonial overtones make it a bit controversial. I only found out about this holiday yesterday so I had to do a quick dash to the shops last night because the vast majority are closed today (as they are every Sunday, incidentally).
The Department being closed today, I pottered around the apartment this morning. Late on in the morning I heard an unusual amount of beeping of car horns from the street and, when I looked out, there was quite a bit of traffic congestion going. The Gran Via de les Cortes Catalanes is a busy main road but usually the traffic keeps moving. Looking more closely I noticed that there was no traffic at all going along the Gran Via and all the congestion was in the orthogonal direction. I surmised that some diversion was in place.
I went out for a walk and established that I was correct. A very large parade was heading towards Plaça de Catalunya a few blocks down and the Gran Via was closed there to allow it to pass. The congestion was caused by cars trying to find alternative routes.
Anyway, I walked down towards Plaça de Catalunya and found the parade. I only caught a small part of it, but it was fun. Lots of different groups from different Latin American countries dressed in colourful traditional costumes were dancing their way through the city. My favourites, from Bolivia, are featured in the last two pictures. They had brought their own brass band along, which made a change from the recorded music accompanying most of the other sections of the parade, and made it feel much more authentic.
Anyway, it is another warm day (27° C) so after walking around for a couple of hours, I beat a retreat to my flat to cool off and have a short siesta. Bona tarda!
On Budgets
Posted in Education, Finance, Maynooth, Politics with tags IFUT on October 11, 2023 by telescoperYesterday was Budget Day in Ireland, when the Irish Government had to decide how to deal with an unprecedented fiscal surplus. Would it use the available funds to help the homeless and those in poverty? Would it provide much-needed investment in public services and infrastructure? Or would it use the funds to buy the next General Election? As far as I see it, the decision was mainly to go with the third option, paying only lip service to the other two. That’s not surprising, as it’s the sort of thing the sort of people in the current Government have tended to do over the years. Short-termism is the order of the day.
When it comes to third level education, there was some good news for students. Tuition fees currently €3K will be cut by €1K but, disappointingly, the reduction is for one year only. As far as I can understand the news, extra Government funding to universities will replace the loss of fee income, but not provide the general uplift that was hoped for.
A couple of weeks ago, the Leaderene President of Maynooth University sent around a letter written by the Irish Universities Association (IUA) to the Taoiseach. You can find the PDF here. The Government must have been unconvinced by the arguments presented therein, because despite having more than enough dosh to pay for the requested increase in funding, no such largesse was forthcoming.
Despite this setback, Maynooth University’s Management hiring frenzy continues unabated. The latest new position to be advertised is a Director of International Recruitment and Conversion. No, I have no idea what it means either. Perhaps someone in Government looked at how much money Maynooth has burned recently on so many new positions and decided that third level institutions must have plenty of cash already?
In reality of course, the horde of new managers have been funded by diverting funds away from teaching and research. Maynooth already has the highest student-staff ratio of the eight comparable universities, a situation which will only get worse. As funding for teaching gets squeezed to pay for ballooning bureaucracy, departments have no alternative but to employ casual staff instead of permanent academics. As a report produced by the union IFUT makes clear, precarity is endemic in the Irish third level system,as it overwork and job-related stress.
I hope this interpretation is wrong but, the way I see it, none of this is accidental. During the pandemic, University bosses saw teaching staff take on greatly increased workloads that enabled their institutions to generate large surpluses. Having established just how much they could exploit their workforce, the way ahead will be more of the same. The deliberate policy of understaffing, overwork, and casualization will only accelerate. The Irish University system is heading for a crisis on the same scale as that in the United Kingdom, and lack of public funding is only part of the reason…
In the Dark 
