The first two weeks of Semester 1 have been extremely busy. I always find it hard to adjust to teaching after the summer break even when I’m teaching familiar material, but this year we had quite a lot of timetabling issues which required swapping and juggling classes. I think it has now settled down, though, and at least I’m not behind on covering the material in lectures.
Next week will be busy for different reasons. For a start, tomorrow sees the first day of industrial action by the Irish Federation of University Teachers (IFUT). This is relatively gentle introduction, being in the form of a one-hour walk-out from 12-1 to mark World Teachers’ Day. I actually don’t have any teaching then so it won’t be very disruptive for me, but I will be attending the demonstration that will take place during the action. I hope it doesn’t rain. I have a lecture at 2pm and a telecon at 4pm both of which will go ahead as planned.
The strikes proper start with 24-hour stoppages on Wednesday 14th October and Wednesday 21st October, on which days we expect other campus trade unions, SIPTU and UNITE to strike. I expect most staff – especially those who have a long commute to and from work – will stay at home on those days, but since I live in Maynooth I am planning to a short walk to campus stand on the picket lines on both days.
Tuesday sees the announcement of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Physics. I really have no idea who will win it this year, but perhaps 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.
Wednesday will be a normal teaching day, as will Thursday but it will be followed by our Space Week event, at which I will be speaking:
I’ve done quite a few posts recently about the ending of summer – the Autumnal Equinox and the start of a new Academic Year being two examples – but now we really have reached which I regard as the definite conclusion. Today was the last day of the last round of matches in the County Championship.
Here is the Table as it stands at the end of the last round of matches:
I haven’t followed county cricket all that closely since I moved to Ireland almost 9 years ago, but I do check the score now and then to see how Glamorgan are getting on, as I used to live quite close to the ground at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff. Glamorgan were promoted last season, for the first time in 21 years but when I wrote about that at this time last year I said that
I wouldn’t bet against them being relegated straight away, though. Last time they got promoted (in 2004) they played just one season (2005) in the First Division, during which they lost 14 of their 16 matches, and dropped back down.
Happily, as you can see from the Table, that didn’t happen. They did have a poor run of games after the resumption of County Cricket after the dreaded Hundred, but won handsomely at the Oval last week and drew their final match in Cardiff against Essex today. They looked likely to win that game after scoring 505 in their first innings and bowling out Essex for 129. Following on, however, Essex batted with greater resilience and today the weather intervened. The whole morning was lost to rain, and when the players did take the field only 21 balls were bowled before it rained again. At that point, just after 1pm, the umpires abandoned the match as a draw with Essex on 351 for 6. That seemed a bit premature to me as the forecast for late afternoon wasn’t bad, Essex were still behind and, even if only 20 overs or so were possible, Glamorgan might well have forced a win. I assume the rain was so heavy and the ground already saturated that the umpires didn’t think a resumption was a realistic prospect, and it’s their decision not mine!
There’ll be big changes at Glamorgan next year with the retirements of three stalwarts: Billy Root (brother of the England captain), Colin Ingram, and Chris Cooke (wicketkeeper). The latter two are both in their forties, so their retirements were not unexpected, but Billy Root is only 34.
Somerset’s game against Surrey also ended in a draw today, with Somerset posting a mammoth 731 in their first innings in response to 422 by Surrey, but unable to force a win. Some of the matches finished yesterday, including Warwickshire’s innings victory against Leicestershire which made them well-deserved Champions. Last years Champions, Nottinghamshire, faded during the latter stages of the season and finished 4th.
Hapless Hampshire are relegated, but there is still an issue to be resolved about the remaining relegation place. Leicestershire were docked 27 points for a substandard pitch (in their game against Glamorgan). The 27 points comprise an 8-point penalty plus the removal of the points gained for winning that match (19). In fact the penalty for a pitch graded poor is 16 points, and the panel decided to defer 8 points to next season. Leicestershire have appealed that decision, and the points deduction is rescinded in full they will finish on 138 points so Essex will be relegated. It seems to me that the 8+8 point penalty is a direct application of the Pitch Regulations, so I’d be surprised if that part were rescinded, and even if Leicestershire get their other 19 points back they will still be relegated. We’ll have to wait and see.
Durham were runaway champions of Division 2, going the entire season unbeaten. Kent are promoted in second place.
In the end the final day was a bit of an anticlimax but since it’s now all over until next spring it seems appropriate to mark the end of the County Championship with a verse from one of the classic cricket poems, Close of Play, by Thomas Moult:
How shall we live, now that the summer’s ended, And bat and ball (too soon!) are put aside, And all our cricket deeds and dreams have blended — The hit for six, the champion bowled for none, The match we planned to win and never won? … Only in Green-winged memory they abide.
Today is a very busy teaching day, so I just have time to post a quick note to say that the Autumnal Equinox (in the Northern Hemisphere) takes place in the early hours of tomorrow morning, Wednesday 23rd September 2026, at 01:05 Irish Time (00:05 UTC). I don’t intend to be awake then, so I’m posting this now. Of course the Equinox will be later today rather than tomorrow for some of you, depending on your time zone. Of course for those of you in the Southern Hemisphere it will be the Spring (or Vernal) Equinox.
Although the term `equinox’ refers to a situation in which day and night are of equal length, which implies that it’s a day rather than a specific time, the astronomical equinox is more accurately defined by a specific event, i.e. when the plane defined by Earth’s equator passes through the centre of the Sun’s disk (or, if you prefer, when the centre of the Sun passes through the plane defined by Earth’s equator). Day and night are not necessarily exactly equal on the equinox, but they’re the closest they get. From now on days in the Northern hemisphere will be shorter than nights and they’ll get shorter still until the Winter Solstice on Monday 21st December 2026 at 11.50 pm Irish Time.
Many people take the autumnal equinox to be the end of summer. There is a saying in some quarters, however, that `Summer is Summer to Michaelmas Day’ (September 29th), which is not until next week. The weather has indeed been very nice in Maynooth for the first couple of days of term. The temperature reached 23°C yesterday!
It’s been a lovely summery day in Maynooth so far, despite the summer having definitely ended and therefore having to return to teaching at the start of my penultimate academic year as a university teacher. The campus was very full this morning, and I was stopped many times on my walk into the office by new students trying to find their lecture theatres. A common (understandable) mistake for the uninitiated of Maynooth is to think that the Science Lecture Theatre is actually in the Science Building. To add to the excitement there was a fire alarm in Pugin Hall, where I sometimes go for lunch, so the building was evacuated. The kitchen staff and others were taking the opportunity to bask in the sunshine before the alarm ended. I think it was a false alarm. In any case lunch was available as soon as they opened up again, and no harm was done.
It’s hard to believe that it is two full years since I returned from sabbatical, but at least I’m teaching the same modules this semester as I did when I returned in the Autumn of 2024. I still have to get everything sorted out, though, including setting up my Moodle pages and preparing the materials, which is what I’ve been doing today, as well as giving my first lecture of the year, for MP469 Differential Equations and Complex Analysis, this afternoon at 2pm; my second, also MP469, will be at 11am on Tuesday (tomorrow).
The timetable for my Engineering Mathematics (EE206 Differential Equations and Transform Methods) module has not changed, so my first lectures on that (a double session) are not until tomorrow. That means I have three hours of teaching tomorrow and every Tuesday throughout the semester, which will make Tuesday my most tiring day.
Both the modules I am teaching this term are mathematical in nature. As last year, I am concerned about the integrity of the coursework element of these modules in the light of improvements in Generative AI. Only a couple of years ago GenAI could not solve the sort of problems I set for homework, but now it generally can – especially for EE206. I don’t altogether object to people applying artificial intelligence to solve mathematical problems, but the issue is that it does make mistakes. Moreover, instead of saying “sorry I can’t solve that problem” it will generally present a superficially plausible but incorrect solution. Although students will probably use GenAI for problem-solving, I think it is important that they learn to do such problems themselves, otherwise they won’t know whether the solution coughed up by the algorithm is correct or not. That way lies disaster.
The only way to learn mathematics is by doing it. If students get GenAI to do the mathematics for them, then they won’t learn it. In the past we have given marks for coursework (usually 20% of the module mark) mainly to encourage students to do them. Students who don’t bother to do these exercises generally do badly in the final exam (80%).
For these reasons I moved the assessment from weekly homework sheets – which could be tackled with AI – to supervised in-class tests for which students can use notes on paper, but not laptops or phones, just like they would in the final examination. I will of course give examples for the students to have a go at themselves, and I will give feedback on their attempts, but they will not contribute to the module score. Another advantage of this approach is that students won’t have to do so much work against deadlines outside of class. Some students will probably use AI to solve these non-contributory assignments, which is fine by me. It’s like having an extra tutorial. To learn they must actually try the problems, rather than absorb the methods by just watching CoPilot solve them.
I followed this approach last year and it worked quite well so I’m keeping the same basic idea, although with some tweaks. As I described here, this means I have taken a much harder line on assignments than other lecturers and indeed other departments. I allow no assignment to contribute to a module grade unless it is supervised in such a way as to prevent “AI” being used. I believe that this is the only way to maintain the integrity of these assessments and that to do anything else will result in a lowering of academic standards. I believe there should be university-wide regulations to manage it, but there are none…
My attention was drawn yesterday to an article in New Scientist with the following introduction:
You would think I would have known about the fact that men with older brothers are more likely to be gay, but this was news to me. The Fraternal Birth Order Effect does seems to have been well established since its discovery in the 1990s. The explanation proposed at the time attributed the effect to a prenatal biological mechanism, as the association is only present in men with older biological brothers, and not present among men with older step-brothers. Hypothesized to be the result of a maternal immune response to male foetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development, it would leave some regions of the male brain in the ‘female typical’ arrangement – resulting in attraction to males.
The origin of the effect seems plausible to me, though I’m not an expert on such matters. I have no idea why it has taken 30 years to find a similar effect with older sisters. In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that I have an older brother and no other siblings.
My worry with studies like this is not their scientific validity but the use that others may make of the findings. In the wrong hands, this feature of pre-natal development could easily be presented as some sort of defect, leading to all kinds of nasty ideas about how to “correct” it.
This booklet was delivered to my house this week. It is also available to download here. It is from a Department that I didn’t know existed called the Office of Emergency Planning (“An Oifig Pleanála Éigeandála” as Gaeilge). This Goverment does seem to be good at creating emergencies, but I hadn’t realised until now that they were planned.
Here is the intro…
From storms and power cuts to flooding and health emergencies, Ireland can experience a range of emergencies. Planning ahead and taking simple steps can help reduce disruption.
Find out how you and your household can prepare as part of the Be Emergency Ready campaign.
I suppose the advice in it is sensible, as far as it goes, but the sorts of emergency it lists are very difficult to be ready for. For example, under “Food” it says “Keep a supply of non-perishable food on hand”. It doesn’t give examples, incidentally, but presumably a list could include dried pasta, rice, noodles, breakfast cereals, canned goods (soups, tinned tuna, baked beans, etc), preservatives (jam, marmalade, etc) and and tea andcoffee, jam. I suppose you should also have dried milk or UHT milk (if you can stand it), though Oat milk does keep for a long time on the shelf. The problem is that many of these are useless if you don’t have a power supply to your cooker, kettle, microwave or other cooking equipment. I have lost power in my house many times since I moved here, although never for more than 24 hours.
Lack of water might also make cooking tricky. Talking of which, the hosepipe ban in Ireland which began in August has now been lifted. This morning, to celebrate, Uisce Éireann switched off the water supply to my house (which it has done several times over the last month). This is to carry out “essential works” to replace pipes, etc. I understand the need for these, of course. I have signed up to receive SMS alerts when disruption is expected but the actual disruption rarely happens on the date referred to in the alert, which is worse than useless. Today, however, it was on the right day.
Anyway, under “light and heat” it doesn’t mention using candles, a stock of which I do keep in the house. I learned this lesson during the Three-Day Week in 1974.
No power also means no internet access so perhaps I should prepare an emergency blog post to put up in case of emergency? Other than that, following the booklet’s advice to “Make a Plan”, I propose to stay in bed and sleep until the calamity is over, if necessary for weeks, if necessary alone.
Now back to the real emergency: teaching starts on Monday and I can’t get my Moodle page to work!
Today is another anniversary. I just received the following message from WordPress.com reminding me that today is the 18th anniversary of my registration with them, which is when I took my first step into the blogosphere. That was way back on 15th September 2008…
I suppose this means that this blog is an adult now!
I actually wrote my first post on the day I registered but, unfortunately, I didn’t really know what I was doing on my first day at blogging – no change there, then – and I didn’t actually manage to figure out how to publish this earth-shattering piece. It was only after I’d written my second post that I realized that the first one wasn’t actually visible to the general public because I hadn’t pressed the right buttons, so the two appear in the wrong order in my archive. Such was the inauspicious beginning of this “shitty WordPress blog”!
Since then I have published 7,846 blog posts posts (including this one), which have altogether received over 6.1M page views from 2.6M unique visitors. That doesn’t include the 2000+ subscribers who receive posts by email nor those who view the federated version via the fediverse. The largest number of hits I have received in a single day is still 8,864 (in 2014, at the peak of the BICEP2 controversy).
Today is the 40th anniversary of the publication of my first ever scientific paper!
Here is the front page:
This was before the days of arXiv so there isn’t a copy on the preprint server, but you can access the whole article here on NASA/ADS.
All right. I know it’s a shitty little paper. But you have to start somewhere!
I’m particularly sad that, looking back, it reads as if I meant to be very critical of the Kaiser (1984) paper that inspired it. I still think that was a brilliant paper because it was based on a very original idea that proved to be enormously influential. The only point I was really making was that a full calculation of the size of the effect Nick Kaiser had correctly identified was actually quite hard, and his simple approximation was of limited quantitative usefulness. The idea was most definitely right, however.
I was just a year into my PhD DPhil when this paper came out, and it wasn’t actually on what was meant to be the subject of my thesis work (which was the cosmic microwave background), although the material was related.
This paper provides two excellent illustrations of what a good supervisor John Barrow was. I was a bit stuck with the project that John had assigned me and eventually admitted to him that I was having problems getting anywhere. I thought he’d assume I was useless and suggest that someone else should supervise me. But no. He said he realised it was a hard problem and sometimes it’s good to think about something else when you’re stuck. So he asked me to look at cluster clustering for a bit. I told him what I found and he said I should write this up as a paper, which I did. Most importantly however the trick I used in simplifying the calculations in this paper turned out to be applicable to the first problem, hotspots in the cosmic microwave background, which led a success in the project and to my second paper. We were both delighted that everything turned out well with that original project.
My original draft of this first paper had John Barrow’s name on it, but he removed his name from the draft (as well as making a huge number of improvements to the text). At the time I assumed that he took his name off because he didn’t want to be associated with such an insignificant paper, but I later realized he was just being generous. It was very good for me to have a sole-author paper very early on. I’ve taken that lesson to heart and have never insisted on putting my name on my students’ work.
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make and end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
from Little Gidding, Four Quartets, by T.S. Eliot.
The start of teaching for 2026/7 is approaching at an alarming rate. new and continuing students are registering and today we had a staff meeting in the Department of Physics about arrangements for the new term. This all made me think again about retirement.
About three years, while I was in Barcelona on sabbatical , I posted an item about looking forward to retirement. Here is an excerpt from that piece:
The fact of the matter is, though, that I can’t afford to retire yet. I have a mortgage to pay and I’ve only had five full years of pensionable service in the Irish system, so won’t get much of a pension. I have the frozen residue of my UK pension, of course, but that is subject to an actuarial reduction if I take the benefit before I’m 65, which is also the standard retirement age for academic staff in Ireland. I can’t be made to retire here until I’m 70, in fact, but I think I’ll be well beyond my best-before date by then and am not keen to overstay my welcome.
So it looks like I’ll have to stay until I’m 65 at the earliest. In fact I won’t be able to collect the State Pension (SPC) until I’m 66, so I’ll probably have to stay until then. That means that when I get back from sabbatical I will have four or five years left until I can retire.
Since I posted this I made a firm decision that I will retire as soon as I’m able, which should be in June 2028. Having sold my old house in Cardiff some time ago, I have paid off my Maynooth mortgage which makes the financial situation much simpler. I am now quite confident that I can afford to retire before I’m 66.
I know many academics don’t like the idea of retiring. I suppose that’s because they’re afraid they won’t know what to do with their time. I’ve never felt like that. I’ve always had plenty of outside interests, but now there’s another factor. As I alluded to in an earlier post, and contrary to all my expectations of three years ago, there is another person involved. That person, whose name I won’t reveal, graduated this summer from an unnamed university, and is just about to embark on a two-year Masters degree (in a subject not to be disclosed) in a location I won’t tell you about. He will be finishing that course in the summer 2028.
For the next two years things for us will be pretty much as they are now: not living together, but spending as much time in each other’s company as possible at weekends and holidays. That arrangement suits us both very well in the current circumstances but we have already started discussing plans beyond the two-year horizon. Some of these are not at all serious, but amusing to think about. Others would be fantastic if they turned out to be possible. We have the best part of two years to decide what to do. In any event, I find it exciting to be able to think seriously of retirement as a beginning as well as an end.
Today is 11th September 2026 which means it is exactly 25 years since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon which led to the loss of almost three thousand civilian lives (and many more in the longer term). At the risk of contributing to the deluge of (mainly mawkish) reminiscences about the happenings on this day all that time ago, let me just give a brief account of my recollection. The events of 9/11 are, I suspect, etched on many a memory in much the same way as people remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated.
For what it’s worth, I was actually at a conference on that day. It was called A New Era in Cosmology, and was hosted in the fine city of Durham; in fact one of the organizers was a certain Tom Shanks, an occasional commenter on this blog. Above you will see part of the conference poster which I took from a recent Facebook post by him where I also found the text below. I was also reminded that 9/11 was the first day of that meeting and that I gave a talk on the first morning, the last before lunch. Such was the effect of the events that unfolded that day that I had completely forgotten about that.
What I do remember is sitting near the back of the lecture theatre after we returned from lunch, listening to one of the afternoon talks – I can’t remember who it was by – when a dear friend of mine, Manuela, came into the auditorium and walked down the aisle, stopped by me. She tugged my arm, mumbled something about the “Twin Towers” and then ran back up the stairs and out of the lecture theatre. Thinking it was something to do with Wembley Stadium, I followed her out and she explained what had happened. We found a TV set, around which a crowd had already formed. The coverage was, not surprisingly, shambolic and it was not until late afternoon that the scale of what had happened became clearer.
There were rumours of more planes likely to be involved in attacks and discussions about whether the military might have to shoot down civilian aircraft. Fortunately that wasn’t the case. I had a friend visiting New York at the time and was unable to contact her by mobile, so was worried, but I don’t think anyone was able to contact anyone in New York by mobile phone in those hours and it turns out she was fine.
Meanwhile the other participants were informed about the events on the other side of the Atlantic. It was an international conference with many US-based attendees who were understandably worried. The preface to the conference proceedings reveals that discussions were held about whether to cancel the meeting:
I think it was the correct decision to proceed with the conference, including the conference dinner and all that. As it happened all passengers flights were grounded for several days anyway, so nobody could get home who didn’t live in the UK.
The rest of the conference was pretty much business as usual as far as possible, although as the text above explains we did stand in silence in memory of the victims on the Tuesday morning. When the meeting ended on the Friday quite a few people had to stay on in Durham or elsewhere before being able to fly home. It was this event that led to the heightened security measures at airports that we have been living with since.
The loss of human life, though awful, turned out to be much less than had been feared and was subsequently dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands killed in the “War on Terror” set in motion by the events of that day and which seems will never end.
Anyway, my point is not the politics but to invite a bit of audience participation. Would anyone else like to contribute their memories from that fateful day? If so, the comment box awaits your entry…
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