Storm season has arrived in Ireland!
Storm Ashley has been battering the West of the country today. It’s not been as bad here in the sheltered environs of Maynooth, though we have had gusts up to 80 km/h which has left my garden in disarray with leaves and twigs all over the place.
We’re now publishing papers at a steady rate at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This is probably not obvious to outsiders, but our platform actually consists of two different sites, one handling submissions and the other dealing with publishing those papers accepted. Although we have a large (and still expanding) team of volunteer Editors to deal with the former, as Managing Editor I am the only person with the keys to the publishing side of things. This part of the process has been simplified enormously after the automation introduced earlier this year but it still takes some time to do, as I have to check the overlay and metadata before pressing the button to deposit everything with Crossref and make the overlay live. I also announce each paper on social media. This usually takes around 15 minutes per paper, give or take.
Now that I’ve returned to full teaching duties at Maynooth University, I’ve developed a routine to deal with this activity. During workdays I usually wake around 7am, make some coffee, and then check the day’s arXiv mailing to see if any of our accepted papers have been announced. If any have, I do the honours while I have my coffee, and then proceed to shower and breakfast (including Coffee no. 2); if none have, I go straight to shower and breakfast. I’ve been following this routine for quite a while now.
In the last couple of weeks, however, I have noticed quite often when I try to look up newly-announced papers on arXiv that the connection times out with a message saying ‘rate exceeded’. If that happens I just wait a while and try again. It’s not a very serious issue but it does slow down the process.
Well, today I found out the reason via a message on Mastodon. The loading errors at arXiv are caused by people doing many simultaneous downloads in attempts to scrape all the content from arXiv as soon as it is announced. This is almost certainly to provide material for Large Language Models, such as ChatGPT, which are essentially Automated Plagiarism Engines. I propose the acronym APE for the kind of person who engages in this sort of activity.
This is a very tedious development and I hope arXiv can find a way of putting a stop to it without inconveniencing its authentic users. I suggest that the people managing arXiv identify the culprits and send the boys round.
Yesterday afternoon I had my eyes examined, it being two years since my last test. I went with some trepidation because for the past several visits to the optometrist have resulted in a new prescription and the consequent need to fork out a not inconsiderable amount of dosh on new spectacles. I wear varifocals as I have both astigmatism (which primarily affects long-distance vision) and the usual problem at close range for people of my age. Varifocal lenses are rather expensive but do work pretty well for me. Since I’m now a member of the Over-Sixties Club I just assumed there would be steady deterioration from now on.
Every time I go to the opticians they seem to have different kit and a different procedure, but this time – to my surprise – the result was the same as last time: no change in prescription and therefore no need to buy new glasses. It was good to learn that my vision is relatively stable. I’m set for the next two years, unless I lose or break my specs and need to replace them.
Before the eye test itself I had a retinal exam which involved taking a picture of the back of my eye. This wasn’t carried out by the optometrist but by an assistant, but the resulting photographs were delivered magically onto the optometrist’s computer screen and shown to me. It turns out my eyes are reasonably healthy. Indeed the picture of my retina has hardly changed since the one from two years ago…
Last week was the third week of the semester at Maynooth University and teaching activity has ramped up to its full level: tutorials have begun; assignments handed in, corrected and returned; projects allocated; and so on. With a quarter of the term now over, and two new modules to teach, I’m relieved that apart from a batch of assignments to correct (which I’ll do this afternoon), I haven’t fallen behind schedule.
The addition of our Space Week event made this an extra busy week, as did a few personal matters that have been dragging on for ages and weighing on my mind, but which are now at last resolved; the last stage completed on Friday.
To add to all this I had to interrupt work to make two extra trips from my office and back. On Wednesday I went early to my office on campus planning to write my Space Week talk in the afternoon, after a lunchtime tutorial. Unfortunately when I got there I realized I had left the power supply for my laptop at home. A sensible person would have bought two adapters, one for work and one for home, but I didn’t do that so had to go home to retrieve it. It’s only about a 20-minute walk home from my office but I was annoyed at having to waste 40 minutes there and back, not to mention a bit tired.
In the pub after the evening event, one of our technicians told me that he keeps a collection of spare power supplies in his office, so I needn’t have bothered. Sigh.
The following morning I was in the office again when I got a phone call from one of my neighbours who told me the burglar alarm in my house was ringing. I could hear it over the phone actually. It’s very loud. I had time to get there and back before my lecture so I set off home once again. By the time I got back to the house, the alarm had switched off but when I checked the control panel it explained “REAR WINDOW. GROSS EVENT.” I did wonder what “GROSS” meant in this context, however. Had something particular disgusting happened? Or had 144 people tried to break in?
There was no sign of any break-in and all windows including those at the rear were intact so all was well. I then checked the instructions for the alarm to see what “GROSS” was meant to indicate. It turns out to mean one large thump on the window, as opposed to “PULSE” which refers to a series of short impacts. There was no certainly no sign of anything gross. Although there was no supporting evidence, my best guess is that a bird flew into the window.
Anyway, I reset the alarm and waited for 15 minutes to see if it went off again in case there was a fault and when it didn’t I went back to work. It hasn’t happened again.
I had a very busy day yesterday culminating in the Space Week event I blogged about a few weeks ago. There was a good attendance – lots of young kids as well as adults – and the lecture room was very full. We could probably have filled a much bigger room, actually, but had been moved to a smaller venue and had to close registrations very early to avoid having too many people. I’d guess we had about 350. My talk was the last one, and didn’t finish until 8.30 by which time I was definitely ready for a pint.
You can find the slides I used for my presentation, The Universe according to Euclid, here.
There was an official photographer there who took quite a few pictures but I haven’t seen any of them yet. I’ll post a selection if and when I get them.
Just to mention that that Tuesday (October 8th 2024) will see the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. I must remember to make sure my mobile phone is fully charged so I can be easily reached.
The announcement of the Nobel Prize for Physics is preceded tomorrow (Monday) by the announcement of the Prize for Applications of Physics to Physiology or Medicine, and on Wednesday by the Prize for Applications of Physics to Chemistry. You can find links to all the announcements here.
I do, of course, already have a Nobel Prize Medal of my own already, dating from 2006, when I was lucky enough to attend the prize-giving ceremony and banquet.
I was, however, a guest of the Nobel Foundation rather than a prizewinner, so my medal is made of chocolate rather than gold. I think after 17 years the chocolate is now inedible, but it serves as a souvenir of a very nice weekend in Stockholm!
Regular readers of this blog may recall that I called it correctly in 2022 when Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger won the Nobel Prize for Physics that year. I had, however, predicted them every year for many years until they won, and they won’t win it again. I really have no idea who will win it this year, but I’ll suggest that there’s still an outside chance for Michael Berry and Yakir Aharonov for their work on the geometric phase, although if they were going to win they probably would have done so by now.
Feel free to make your predictions through the comments box below!
To find out you’ll have to wait for the announcement, around about 10.45 (UK/Irish time) on Tuesday morning. I’ll update this post when the wavefunction has collapsed.
P.S. My own claim for the 2023 Physics Nobel Prize is based on the discovery of the Coles Law.
P.P.S. I’ve just realized this was my 7000th blog post.
UPDATE: The 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics goes to was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks”. Odd. Not really physics, IMHO.
It’s Friday afternoon at the end of Week 2 here at Maynooth so I’ve now completed the 4th lecture of my 4th-year module Differential Equations and Complex Analysis. We’ve now in the section of Sturm-Liouville Theory. I’ve never taught this module before and, as always, teaching a new thing reminds me of all the things I had forgotten since I was a student. In this particular case, I still have the notes I took when I was studying this topic as an undergraduate. It’s scary to think the notes shown above were written by me 40 years ago!
Anyway, as I like to know something about the people behind the names, Sturm-Liouville Theory is named after Jacques Charles François Sturm (1803–1855)* and Joseph Liouville (1809–1882). Contrary to what I’d always assumed, Sturm was not German but was born in Geneva, which is now in Switzerland but which had been annexed by revolutionary France in 1798 so technically speaking he was born in France. Liouville was born in Saint-Omer, near Calais, which to my knowledge has never been part of Switzerland but has been part of the Spanish Netherlands.
*Given the dates, Sturm must have collaborated with Liouville after his earlier work with Drang…
There has been a lot of comment on social media about a recent article in Nature about the mental health of graduate students and the numbers looking for treatment. There are many sources of stress that can have a negative effect on mental health, including financial pressures and poor accommodation to name but two. These aren’t really specific to graduate studies. One that is is the pressure to produce results. That actually continues throughout an academic career – burnout is a very real phenomenon – but it’s probably worse during the “apprenticeship” phase when one is inexperienced and still learning the trade.
“Productivity” is indeed important but should not be interpreted as having to work ridiculously long hours. I remember many years ago commenting on an article that claimed 80-100 hours a week was not unusual. There are people who can sit at their desks for 12 hours a day without producing anything very much at all. It’s not the hours that matter, but what you do with them. In no way will indulging your outside interests (sporting, cultural, political, or “other”…), or simply relaxing, detract from your ability to do research. As a matter of fact, I think such diversions actually improve your work, as well as (of course) your general well-being.
I think it is fair to say that you have to work hard to do a PhD. I worked hard on mine back in the day. But don’t think that means it has to be a grim slog. I can only speak for myself, but I greatly enjoyed my time as a graduate student. I think this was at least in part because when I was doing my PhD I had plenty of outside interests (including music, sport and (ahem) “nightlife”) and took time out regularly to indulge them. I did experience mental health problems later during my PhD, but these were not caused by being a research student.
I can think of many times during my graduate studies when I was completely stuck on a problem – to the extent that it was seriously bothering me. On such occasions I learned to take a break. I often found that going for a walk, doing a crossword, or just trying to think about something else for a while, allowed me to return to the problem fresher and with new ideas. I think the brain gets into a rut if you try to make it work in one mode all the time.
There were indeed many times during my time as a research student – and have been since – that I worked extremely long hours – all night sometimes. I wouldn’t say exactly that was because I “enjoyed” it, but that I wanted to know an answer and couldn’t get the problem out of my head. I’ve stayed up into the early hours of the morning trying to finish a crossword too. Not because I had to, but because I couldn’t put it down unfinished. I know that makes me a saddo in many minds, but I think that’s the sort of obsessiveness and tenacity a researcher needs: becoming so absorbed by the task in hand that you don’t notice the passage of time.
I don’t think anyone should try to infer too much from these personal reflections, but I do think there’s one important point that I try to point to every graduate student I advise and that is to look after your mental health. Perhaps the Nature article has a positive side, in that at least graduate students are seeking help. Recognizing that you might have a problem is a very important first step.
Last night found me once again at the National Concert Hall in Dublin for a concert by the National Symphony Orchestra conducted this time by Leonard Slatkin, who has a long association with the NSO and who was 80 years old on 1st September. I must say he looked very sprightly for a man eighty years of age!
To start the programme we had the world premiere of a piece by Leonard Slatkin’s son, Daniel. Voyager 130 was inspired by the Voyager space mission, and especially by the Golden Records carried by the Voyager probes. Among the pieces of music included on those records is the exquisite Cavatina from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 (Opus 130) from which the composer borrows thematic material for this piece. Daniel Slatkin was actually in the audience for this – in fact he was sitting just two rows in front of me – and went up on stage after the very enjoyable performance.
After that, and some rearranging on stage, we had a performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with Dublin-born soloist Hugh Tinney. Although for its time it was very unconventional in structure, this is now a very familiar piece in the concert hall. For the most part it was played very well but I did think the orchestra were a bit stiff and lacking in expression in places. The performance was warmly received by the NCH audience, and Hugh Tinney received a standing ovation at the end.
After the wine break we had another familiar work, the Symphony No. 3 by Johannes Brahms, which Leonard Slatkin conducted without a score. I’m persevering with Brahms. I still don’t find that he moves me as much as many other composers and so many people rave about him that I think I must be missing something. The 3rd Symphony is a very fine work, offering lots of variety across its four movements while maintaining a strong sense of coherence and remaining relatively concise – it lasts about 33 minutes in performance. I’m no expert on Brahms but it seems to me that the 3rd Symphony is where he really found his voice as a symphonic composer and stepped out from the shadow of Beethoven.
Apart from the first piece, it was a very conventional programme but I enjoyed it as did the audience. It’s a pity there weren’t more people there, though. I’d guess that the NCH was about 2/3 full at most.
P.S. Last night Leinster rugby were playing a match at Landsdowne Road (beating the Dragons 34-6) and Shelbourne were playing Sligo Rovers at home in the League of Ireland (a 0-0 draw) so the train home was a bit busier than last time but still uneventful. When I got home later I decided to listen to a recording of the Beethoven Strong Quartet No. 13 before bed…
I had two teaching sessions today, on two different modules, both of which I’m teaching for the first time, and also had to prepare the first assignments for both sets of students, so I thought it might be a difficult challenge, metaphorically speaking, to keep my head above water. What I hadn’t expected, however, was that the rain would be bucketing down all day, making it almost literally difficult to keep above water. Now that I’ve done what I planned to do at work I have to make my way home through the deluge. At least I remembered to bring a brolly…
In the Dark 
