Archive for the Barcelona Category

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Back from the Dead!

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags , , on June 21, 2024 by telescoper

As I reported a couple of days ago, my laptop (which is about 6 years old) failed to restart when I got back to Barcelona from Rome.

I couldn’t attempt a reply until I got a key from IT Services in Maynooth. The 48 digits duly arrived yesterday.  I tried a number of times to repair the disk but it kept failing. Last night I left a disk scan running when I went to bed, as it advised that several hours would be needed. When I got up this morning I found it had failed again.

I decided to try one more time, started the recovery process again and went out shopping. It was still running when I got back. I had all but given up at this point and had stopped paying attention to the screen. When I finally went to check again I saw to my amazement that it had restarted as far as the Windows login.

I logged in with fingers crossed. It took an eternity to start up and is still running very slowly. It’s probably quite ill, perhaps more undead than alive, but at least I could retrieve my files onto the hard disk I brought with me.

I have to travel to Valencia next week to give a talk and was wondering how I would manage without having access to my slides let alone a laptop to present them from…

Anyway, I’m nervous about what might happen if I have to restart again, so I’ll leave it on while I celebrate with a glass or several of wine. The Resurrection of the Laptop may well prove to be temporary but I’ll make the most of it while it lasts…

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The Summer Solstice 2024

Posted in Barcelona with tags , , on June 20, 2024 by telescoper

With all the excitement I almost forgot that Summer Solstice in the Northern hemisphere takes place later today, Thursday 20th June 2024, at 21.51 Irish Time (20.51 UTC) or 22.51 local time here in Barcelona.

Among other things, this means that today is the longest day of the year around these parts. Sunrise in Barcelona this morning was 06:17 and sunset at 21:28.  The length of the day – the interval between sunrise and sunset – today is 15:10:13. Compare this with Dublin (sunrise 04:56, sunset 21:56, and day length 17:00:12).

This Sunday (23rd June)  sees the Feast Day of St John (Sant Joan),  which is celebrated in Barcelona with fireworks and bonfires, and people partying all night long on the beach. Monday is a holiday, presumably to allow people to recover. I am, of course, far too old, for that sort of thing.

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Chaos in Rome and Barcelona

Posted in Barcelona, Euclid, Mental Health with tags , , , , , , on June 19, 2024 by telescoper

What I thought would be a straightforward trip back from Rome to Barcelona turned into nothing of the sort.

I arrived at Roma Termini station and got on a train for Fiumicino Airport. The train didn’t move, however, and eventually we passengers were told that we should get off and take a bus or a taxi because of “a problem on the line” which would take an indefinite time to fix.

I went to see if I could get a bus, but the queue was predictably enormous. Same story for taxis. After waiting over an hour I had all but given up hope of catching my flight when suddenly it was announced that the track problem was fixed and I got back on the train. It reached the airport in good time and I passed a very long queue of people waiting to travel in the opposite direction; trains into Roma Termini from Fiumicino had also been cancelled:

I still thought I would miss the flight, but I thought that once in the airport I could perhaps book another. Helped by the fact that I had already checked in online and only had hand luggage, however, I made it through security and to the gate just  in time to board.

So, all seemed well. I’ve travelled enough in Italy to have learnt how to cope with a fair amount of chaos.

I got back to Barcelona – which is somewhat cooler than Rome – just about on time and took the Aerobus as usual. Unfortunately, I had forgotten that today was the day that roads in the area around my flat were closed for a Formula 1 “Road Show”. The bus stopped at the edge of the sealed off area and passengers – many heavily laden with luggage – were left to make their way through the dense crowds. Whoever decided it was a good idea to block some of the busiest roads in Barcelona during the evening rush hour has a lot of questions to answer. The crush around Plaza de Catalunya was absurd and potentially dangerous, and not only for people like me who find such situations very difficult.

When I eventually got to my flat, I saw a protest against this stupid event had let to standoff in the street with some sinister-looking cops.

At home, and after a relaxing shower, I thought the day’s tribulations were over until I switched on my laptop and found it wouldn’t start:

Automatic Repair didn’t work so I logged a ticket with Maynooth IT Services. If they can’t fix it, it looks like I’ll be unable to work until I get a new machine…

…and blogging using my phone like this!

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Bloomsday Barcelona

Posted in Barcelona, LGBTQ+, Literature with tags , , , , , , on June 16, 2024 by telescoper

So it’s June 16th which means it is Bloomsday. I looked around for ways to celebrate this day in Barcelona and found that there is a Irish bar on La Rambla called Bloomsday. When I went there, though, I was disappointed to find it not only closed, but apparently abandoned:

Barcelona gets a mention – just one – in James Joyce’s Ulysses:

Noon slumbers. Kevin Egan rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with printer’s ink, sipping his green fairy as Patrice his white. About us gobblers fork spiced beans down their gullets. Un demi sétier! A jet of coffee steam from the burnished caldron. She serves me at his beck. Il est irlandais. Hollandais? Non fromage. Deux irlandais, nous, Irlande, vous savez ah, oui! She thought you wanted a cheese hollandais. Your postprandial, do you know that word? Postprandial. There was a fellow I knew once in Barcelona, queer fellow, used to call it his postprandial. Well: slainte! 

I can confirm that there is no shortage of queer fellows here, but I’ll have to have my lunch before I can have a postprandial but slainte! to you too.

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What a difference a day makes…

Posted in Barcelona on June 13, 2024 by telescoper

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Back to Barcelona Again

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , on June 12, 2024 by telescoper

Last night I arrived back in a very rainy Barcelona. Although I got a bit damp on the way back to my flat from the bus stop, the journey was otherwise uneventful. The one thing worthy of note is that although the approach to Barcelona Airport was a little bumpy owing to bad weather, the pilot managed to perform one of the softest of soft landings I’ve ever experienced. It was so well done that there was a spontaneous round of applause from the passengers. Clapping when the plane lands used to be fairly common, but nowadays is a rarity reserved for occasions such as this.

The end of my stint in Barcelona is now in sight so I plan to see the sights I haven’t yet seen, or at least as many of them as I can manage. Next week I have to travel to Rome for the 2024 Euclid Consortium Meeting, at which I’m doing a plenary talk on the first morning. The week after that I have to travel to Valencia to give a seminar, so it will be a busy second half of the month.

Talking of the Euclid Consortium, my term as Chair of the Euclid Consortium Diversity Committee (ECDC) closes at the end of June 2024, at which point I will also be leaving the Committee after 4 years on it. Hopefully I will find a bit more time to do research in the last two months of my sabbatical; I’ve spent about 50% of it so far on ECDC matters, and progress on writing papers has consequently been slower than I’d have liked. I hadn’t anticipated such a big increase in papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics, either but fortunately I’ve managed to get the most time-consuming aspects of that automated and since that it hasn’t taken up that much of my time.

As it happens, yesterday was the day of the Departmental Examination Board for the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth. I haven’t been teaching this year, so wasn’t involved. I do know quite a few students who will be graduating this summer, though, and am a little sad I won’t be around to congratulate them. I might see some of them at their conferring ceremonies in September though.

And then there’s next academic year to look forward to. What will I be teaching, I wonder? I’m not going to think about that until I have to…

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Something in the Air..

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical with tags , , , on May 26, 2024 by telescoper

It’s been a warm and rather humid weekend in Barcelona. Yesterday was particularly stifling, with the heat and lack of breeze making things rather uncomfortable. The Air Quality indicator  reached “Poor” largely due to high levels of NO2, no doubt from vehicle exhaust fumes. It surprises me that so many people sit out at the pavement tables outside  restaurants having meals when it’s hot and the air is thick with nasty stuff. Al Fresco is supposed to mean “in the fresh air”! I much prefer to dine indoors, unless it’s very late at night.

Today was a little better except that there was resurfacing work going on  outside my flat on RambladeCatalunya. I knew it was coming, as they’ve been doing other nearby roads over the past few weekends. It was a little noisy, even on the 6th floor, but that didn’t bother me as much as the tar fumes!

Anyway, all this has made me decide not to attempt to extend my stay here beyond my current lease, which expires at the end of June. I’ll take the last two months of my sabbatical somewhere a bit cooler!

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Euclid Paper Day!

Posted in Barcelona, Euclid, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , , , , on May 24, 2024 by telescoper

This morning’s arXiv update brought the expected deluge of preprints from Euclid. You can find details of all fifteen of the new articles here. Ten of them relate to the Early Release Observations of which five were announced yesterday and five last November. These are essentially byproducts of the testing and calibration phase of the Euclid mission rather than the main cosmological survey. ESA is making a series of short videos about these results which I will share on here from time to time.

Of more direct relevance to cosmologists such as myself are the following five reference papers:

The overview paper, led by Yannick Mellier (Euclid Consortium Lead), giving a general description of the mission capabilities and science goals, will be the main reference paper and just about every active member of the Euclid Consortium is on the author list (including myself). That’s over a thousand people, not quite at the level of the Large Hadron Collider but getting there. I do think we need to find a better way of giving credit to work in large collaborations than through authorship, but until someone comes up with a workable scheme, and people responsible for hiring researchers adopt it, we’re stuck with what we’ve got. At least I can say that I’ve read that paper (which is 94 pages long, including the author list)

Papers II-IV are technical articles relating to Euclid’s instruments and their calibration, which will also be important references for the survey part of the Euclid mission. Paper V is about the Flagship simulations and the mock catalogues produced therefrom; I discussed these a while ago here. It is led by Francisco Castander of Institut de Ciencies de l’Espai, who organized the meeting I attended recently here in Barcelona.

These papers now now be peer-reviewed and, assuming they are accepted, published in a special issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A).

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The Week(s) Ahead

Posted in Barcelona, Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth with tags , , , , on May 20, 2024 by telescoper

Today is a public holiday in Spain, as it is in much of Europe (including France, Germany, The Netherlands and Denmark). The occasion for the day off is Pentecost (or Whitsuntide as it is known in the UK) which, if I understand correctly, is when the Holy Spirit went down on the Apostles. Actually Pentecost (Whit Sunday) was yesterday, exactly 7 weeks after Easter Sunday, which was quite early this year which is why Pentecost Monday (20th May) is earlier than the fixed Bank Holidays used to mark it in the UK (the last Monday in May, 27th, next Monday) and Ireland (the first Monday of June, 3rd, in two weeks’ time). Could I perhaps take all three off?

Today’s holiday notwithstanding, this is going to be a busy week. On Wednesday and Thursday there is to be an event at the European Space Agency coincident with which, on Thursday 23rd May, there will be a significant press event relating to Euclid. I’m not at liberty to say any more at this point, as everything is strictly embargoed until 12 noon CEST on that day, but I have been writing a piece for RTÉ Brainstorm to come out as soon as the embargo is lifted. Hopefully the Communications team at Maynooth University will get involved in the press activity. Watch this space.

Remarkably for me, I filed the RTÉ Brainstorm piece ahead of the deadline but it’s no time to rest on my laurels because I have another paper to finish this week by a different deadline.

And next week will be busy too. I have to make a short trip to not-Barcelona to do a PhD examination in Newcastle upon Tyne and give a lecture in Oxford, where (so I’m told) there is a University of some sort. Then I have to pass through Maynooth to vote in the Local and European Elections before returning to Barcelona. Having another two Whit Monday holidays is looking like a good plan…

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Examination Time in Maynooth

Posted in Barcelona, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on May 17, 2024 by telescoper

Today ( Friday 17th May) is the first day of the Summer Examination Period in Maynooth. Although I’m not there right now I thought I’d take the opportunity to wish all students the best for their examinations:

You shouldn’t really be relying on luck of course, so here are some tips for the examination period (especially for physics students, but applicable elsewhere).

  1. Try to get a good night’s sleep before the examination and arrive in plenty of time before the start. Spending all night cramming is unlikely to help you do well.
  2. Prepare well in advance so you’re relaxed when the time comes.
  3. Read the entire paper before starting to answer any questions. In particular, make sure you are aware of any supplementary information, formulae, etc, given in the rubric or at the end.
  4. Start off by tackling the question you are most confident about answering, even if it’s not Question 1. This will help settle any nerves. You’re under no obligation to answer the questions in the order they are asked.
  5. Don’t rush! Students often lose marks by making careless errors. In particular, check all your numerical results on your calculator at least twice
  6. Please remember the units!
  7. Don’t panic! You’re not expected to answer everything perfectly. A first-class mark is anything over 70%, so don’t worry if there are bits you can’t do. If you get stuck on a part of a question, don’t waste too much time on it (especially if it’s just a few marks). Just leave it and move on. You can always come back to it later if you have time.

Meanwhile, in Barcelona, Monday is a public holiday (Pentecost) so I am faced with the prospect of having to endure a long weekend break. Such is life…

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