Ailing* laptop notwithstanding, I’ll shortly be taking the train to Valencia where I’ll be giving a talk tomorrow. The trip is about 350km each way and takes about 2 hours and 50 minutes. That’s a bit slower than the very fast train to Madrid but it looks like it’s all along the coast, so hopefully it will be quite enjoyable.
*I managed to get it to boot up into Windows, but it is running so extremely that I can’t do much on it. I have no idea what the issue is.
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…
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.
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!
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.
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!
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).
In the Dark 