Biographical | In the Dark

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Break Points

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags Maynooth University, President, Repeat examinations, Staff Climate and Culture Survey on August 11, 2023 by telescoper

Well, that’s one reasonably large set of tasks finished. Today I completed the grading of my repeat examinations. The marks are now checked and uploaded to the system. For good measure, I also checked the marking of a few papers done by other staff. So that’s all done and dusted in time for a meeting of the Examination Board next week at which we’ll peruse the outcomes.

It’s strange to think that this will be the last set of examinations I have to correct until January 2025. I’m away on sabbatical from September 1st 2023 until 31st August 2024 so have no teaching duties until the First Semester of 2024, with examinations coming the following January. Although I realize the assessment of student learning is important, setting and marking examinations is not something that I greatly enjoy so it will be very nice to have a break from it.

Earlier this week the President of Maynooth University sent around a missive to all staff about the news that had leaked out about the proposed merger with Dundalk IT. That email referred twice to the “summer break”. It is ironic that such wording should be used right in the middle of repeat examination period. The last few weeks certainly haven’t felt like a break to me! It’s yet another indication of the gulf between the view that Senior Management have of academic life and the reality.

By the way, the aforementioned Presidential circular promised that staff would be fully updated in the Autumn about the proposed merger. I hope in this new spirit of openness the President will also update staff about the outcomes of the “Staff Climate and Culture Survey” which was carried out in 2022. The promise was made then that results would be published in early 2023. No such results have ever been communicated to staff and all mention of this survey has been wiped off the University’s web pages.

Having finished exam marking duties for the academic year, my attention will now turn to other things to be done before I take off for sabbatical land. Next week I have cleared the decks to complete a paper I’ve been struggling over for a long time. Just before the repeat examinations started I spotted the error that was holding me back, so hopefully it will now all fall quickly into place. I’ll be very happy if I can get that submitted before leaving.

In the mean time, though, it’s time for a wine break. Cheers!

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ITP 2023 at Maynooth

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff on August 9, 2023 by telescoper

I’m a bit preoccupied at the moment with marking repeat examinations but, now that I have three packs done and only one to go, I thought I’d do a quick advertisement for a little meeting that takes place in Maynooth about a month from now. This is the annual Irish Theoretical Physics (ITP) Meeting which takes place in a different location in Ireland each yea. Last year it was at DIAS in Dublin; this year it’s Maynooth’s turn.

In the pat these meetings have been given different names, including Irish Quantum Foundations (IQF) and Irish Quantum Field Theory (IQFT), as well as ITP. For this reason I usually refer to it as ITPQF+…

You can find out more about the meeting here, including instructions on how to register should you wish to do so! The detailed scientific programme will be announced in due course, though there is a rumour that I might be giving a public talk on the first evening.

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Lá Saoire i mí Lúnasa

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags Lá Saoire i mí Lúnasa, Lugh, Lughnasadh, Maynooth University on August 7, 2023 by telescoper

Today, Monday 7th August 2023, being the first Monday in August, is a Bank Holiday in Ireland. This holiday was created by the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 when Ireland was under British rule. While the August Bank holiday was subsequently moved to the end of August in England and Wales, it has remained at the start of August in Ireland. Today is also a Bank Holiday in Scotland, though the Scots have the best of both worlds and have a holiday at the end of August too.

I recently mentioned that 1st August marks the old Celtic festival of Lughnasadh, named after the God Lugh, on which is celebrated the beginning of the harvest season. This coincides with the English Lammas Day one of many Christian festivals with pagan origins. Traditionally this marks the start of the harvest season and is celebrated accordingly, with rites involving the first fruit and bread baked from flour obtained from the first corn. It is also one of the cross-quarter days, lying roughly half-way between the Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox (in the Northern Hemisphere).

In the Northern hemisphere, from an astronomical point of view, the solar year is defined by the two solstices (summer, around June 21st and winter, around December 21st) and the equinoxes (spring, around March 21st, and Autumn, around September 21st). These four events divide the year into four roughly equal parts of about 13 weeks each.

Now, if you divide each of these intervals in two you divide the year into eight pieces of six and a bit weeks each. The dates midway between the astronomical events mentioned above are (roughly) :

1st February: Imbolc (Candlemas)
1st May: Beltane (Mayday)
1st August: Lughnasadh (Lammas)
1st November: Samhain (All Saints Day)

The names I’ve added are taken from the Celtic/neo-Pagan (and Christian terms) for these cross-quarter days. These timings are rough because the dates of the equinoxes and solstices vary from year to year. Imbolc is often taken to be the 2nd of February (Groundhog Day) and Samhain is sometimes taken to be October 31st, Halloween. But hopefully you get the point.

It seems to be a tradition in Maynooth that the Bank Holidays in May and August are are adjacent to examinations. This year the repeat examinations began on 1st August. My first paper (of four) was on Saturday and I have two more on Tuesday (tomorrow). That means by the end of tomorrow I will have three packets of scripts to mark…

There are two ways of looking at the fact that the day before these exams is a holiday. One is that students have an extra day to revise. Another is that the holiday is ruined by having to prepare for examinations.

Anyway, by the time the Solstice arrives I will hopefully away on sabbatical.

An Garda Síochána

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags An Garda Síochána, Leixlip, Maynooth on August 4, 2023 by telescoper

I’m a bit late getting around to posting today as I’ve been busy all day sending off for documents and filling in forms connected with my forthcoming sabbatical. My relocation is a little more complicated than I initially thought as although Ireland is in the European Union, it is not in the Schengen area, so a visit for longer than 90 days requires a bit of paperwork. In fact I am applying for what is called a “non-lucrative residence permit”. It seems to be strange to be applying for non-lucrative status, as that’s what I seem to have had all my life, but there you go.

Anyway, as part of the bureaucratic process I have to acquire a Police Certificate, a document that states that I have no criminal record over the last five years. To get this in Ireland one has to visit a Garda station. There is one in Maynooth, but unfortunately there is rarely anyone staffing it, so I decided to go instead to Leixlip, where the station is open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s also just a short bus trip from Maynooth.

So this morning I downloaded the requisite form from the Garda website, collected the documents listed there, and off I went to Leixlip. I had to wait a little bit of time because there were a couple of people needing things. One was inquiring about a court summons for something he claimed he had paid already but didn’t have a receipt. Eventually he left, though he wasn’t happy about having to attend court. The next chap just had to sign some sort of register. He might have been on probation or had to check in with the Gardaí to fulfil some other conditions.

I always feel a bit sorry for people working at the front desk in a place like a Garda station. They must often be confronted by people who are not having a very good day, and probably have to deal with a bit of aggravation from time to time.

Then it was my turn. The officer at the desk was very friendly but when I explained what I needed he produced a form that stated I needed additional documents not listed on the website, including a copy of my birth certificate, a document explaining what I needed the certificate for, and a stamped addressed envelope to receive the certificate. I was a bit annoyed, but had no alternative but to go back to Maynooth and collect the missing papers. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy and there’s no point letting it get to you.

After returning in due course with the gaps in my documents filled, I found the waiting area at Garda station empty and I was able to hand over my documents which I was assured were now sufficient. I just have to wait a bit to get the certificate in the post.

On the bus home after the second trip to Leixlip it struck me that today was the first time I’ve been in a Garda station, and the second time…

Now that’s out of the way, it’s wine o’clock and the bank holiday weekend beckons.

A Day of Outage

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on August 3, 2023 by telescoper

Today has been a rather eventful day.

This morning at around 7.50am, the power went off in my house in Maynooth. I looked at the ESB network site and it informed me that a large area was affected, extending as far as Celbridge. I could hear burglar alarms ringing all around the estate, evidently triggered by the interruption to the mains supply. I am aware

I had actually just got out of bed when the failure happened but, there being no electricity to make breakfast nor to have a shower, the ESB indicating that it would take until 9am to fix the “outage”, and being unable to function without at least one coffee, I took the obvious course of action and went back to bed. In fact the power came on well before 9am so I had my breakfast and shower, then went around resetting the clocks on various bits of equipment.

It was only when I looked at the burglar alarm that I realized that the power cut had fried its circuits and I could not reset it. I therefore had to search around the internet for someone to come and fix it.

While I was looking on the internet for a company that would deal with the alarm system I have, I checked my work email and discovered that a the new TSI building had no power at around 9.30am. Whether that was connected with the larger problem I don’t know for sure, but it took longer to fix. I don’t know whether any other buildings on campus were affected either. I only received notification that power had been restored just after 11am.

Unfortunately there were a large number of repeat examinations due to take place in the building at 9.30, none of which could go ahead; those papers are now deferred until 10th August. None of the repeat examinations to be taken by students in the Department of Theoretical Physics were scheduled in that slot, so our students were unaffected, but over 300 other students in other Departments were inconvenienced.

P.S. my domestic burglar alarm is now fixed and functioning properly, in case you had any ideas…

Notes to Future Self

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags notebooks, research on July 28, 2023 by telescoper

Yesterday I was tidying up a bit and came across the old notebooks I used when I was a research student. As I suppose is the case with everyone else, there’s quite a lot in them that never went anywhere. If you can read the example above, about 3/4 of the way down the right-hand page I left a note saying “This is a pointless task”. I can’t remember if that referred to that particular integral or my research in general!

Some people who have seen this picture remarked on the size of my integral signs. That’s because I had to do quite a lot of integrals with complicated integrands, so I got into the habit of drawing big integral signs as a prelude to writing down what I assumed would be a horrible formula.

The way I worked in those days (1985-88) was to do a lot of rough scribblings on scrap paper. When I got to something I thought was promising I would write up a “neat” version in the notebook and throw away the workings. I know younger folks these days do most of their work on a screen but, as an old fogey, I still write a lot down on paper or on a blackboard. I didn’t have my own blackboard when I was a PhD student, but I did have plenty of notebooks – most of which I have kept. I think that I’ll always find an essential part of the mathematical thought process involves a pen or piece of chalk in my hand, moving around and guiding my brain.

Looking through these books I remember that I also wrote down ideas for follow-up projects. I managed to do very few of these, but some were done by other people elsewhere independently of me, so at least they were reasonable ideas!

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Dunkirk

Posted in Biographical, Film, History with tags Dunkirk, Operation Dynamo, Winston Churchill on July 17, 2023 by telescoper

On Saturday I watched the 2017 film Dunkirk for the first time. I don’t often watch films on TV but I saw this one in the listings and since it got some very positive reviews I thought I’d watch it. Here’s the trailer.

So what did I think?

First, the positives. There is some wonderful cinematography in this movie, and some realistic action sequences that manage to be disturbing without degenerating into a gorefest. It’s also quite interesting that we don’t really see the enemy at all at any point during the film. In summary, I found the first forty minutes or so very gripping, despite (or perhaps because of) the almost complete lack of dialogue.

After that, though, my interest began to wane. The main negative is that I found it hard to engage with any of the characters. In particular, the film did not convey the stress the troops must have been under. The editing was a bit of a mess too. It’s far too repetitive and I found some of the scenes rather contrived.

(I gather some people found the sound in the cinema version rather oppressively loud, but I watched it on telly at home so just turned down the volume…)

Overall, I found Dunkirk worth watching, but I’ve seen it described as one of the greatest war films of all time and it’s not that.

Three historical points.

First, I think there’s a key ingredient missing from this – and some other – tellings of the Dunkirk story, and that is the crucial role of the rearguard that valiantly defended the perimeter of the town and won enough time for evacuation to proceed. The different units of the rearguard (both French and British) depended entirely on the units either side of them to stand. Had the perimeter been broken anywhere, the defence would have failed. The men involved must have thought that they had no chance of making it back to Britain, but they held their ground and by doing so ensured that many thousands did get home. In fact, it was such a well-organized operation that much of the British rearguard was actually evacuated after a controlled retreat to the beach.

A second point is that most of the over 800 small boats that eventually proved crucial in Operation Dynamo were crewed by naval personnel, rather than their owners. The few exceptions were fishing boats, like the one shown in the film. Many of the smaller ships with a shallow draft were used to ferry men from the beach to destroyers rather than taking them all the way back to England.

Incidentally, the trip from Ramsgate – where the little boats were assembled – to Dunkirk is about 50 miles of open water. That’s quite a journey for a pleasure boat or paddle steamer.

Finally, the film reminded me that Winston Churchill’s famous speech in response to the “miracle” of Dunkirk, with its peroration “We shall fight them on the beaches, etc” was given to the House of Commons. It includes this:

We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted.
Hansard, 4th June 1940

Churchill made that speech on 4th June 1940. I was born on the same day in the same month, a mere 23 years later.

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Maynooth in the News

Posted in Biographical, Euclid, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags IFUT, Maynooth University, Staff Survey on July 12, 2023 by telescoper

I was in a meeting this morning at which it was mentioned that the recent launch of the Euclid satellite has generated quite a lot of publicity in the news media for Maynooth University. There’s a piece in the Sunday Times (Ireland Edition), another in Silicon Republic, and an online feature for RTÉ Brainstorm as well as a radio segment on Morning Ireland and another on NewsTalk.

Maynooth University plugged these items in on the “Maynooth in the News” feed on its main webpage, along with many other items that show the University in a good light.

Conspicuous by its absence from that feed, however, is the biggest story surrounding Maynooth University in recent days, namely the appalling decision by the President to scrap elections to the Governing Authority of the University in favour of having representatives chosen only by the President. This is just one example of the increasingly intransigent and authoritarian management of the University. Can anyone justify the complete disenfranchisement of the staff of the University from the Governance of the university? Or that an Executive body should select the Board to which it is supposed to be accountable?

I know I’m not the only person employed by this University who thinks this decision is a terrible one – my Union, IFUT is strongly opposed- but it has been already been imposed and now we have no say. At least you can read about, e.g. here in the Times Higher.

One story you can’t read about however concerns the outcomes of Maynooth University’s “Staff Climate and Culture Survey” which was carried out in 2022 with the promise made to participants that results would be published in early 2023. No such results were ever communicated to staff and all mention of this survey has been wiped off the University’s web pages. I don’t know why this happened, but I venture to suggest that if the results had been good the Maynooth publicity team would not have hesitated to publish them.

Since the Management of Maynooth University has chosen to close off any internal channels by which academic and other staff can communicate their views, it seems that the only means of communication open to us is via the external media. Perhaps the Times Higher will run a story on the Curious Case of the Missing Staff Survey?

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Covid-19 at NAM

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19 with tags Covid-19, National Astronomy Meeting, SARS-COV-2 on July 9, 2023 by telescoper

Public Service Announcement!

Last week’s UK National Astronomy Meeting in Cardiff was the biggest ever, and it was noticeable that very few people (less than 5%) were wearing face coverings at any point. It’s not surprising therefore that there have been reports of people testing positive for Covid-19. I don’t know how many cases have developed overall, but two people with whom I was in reasonably close contact during the conference have tested positive so, although I have no symptoms, I decided to test myself as a precaution.

Doing a test was more difficult than I thought as antigen test kits are in short supply in Maynooth these days. I tried two supermarkets and a pharmacist to no avail, and then someone in the pharmacist said she’d seen them in Aldi so I bought some there.

The result was negative:

I’ll do another one tomorrow morning just in case.

If you happened to be at NAM I’d encourage you also to get a test. If you have done one already and tested positive I’d encourage you to contact the Local Organizing Committee, who are monitoring the situation, either by email (contact details here) or via the anonymous reporting form here.

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In the Dark

Archive for the Biographical Category

Break Points

ITP 2023 at Maynooth

Lá Saoire i mí Lúnasa

An Garda Síochána

A Day of Outage

Notes to Future Self

Dunkirk

Maynooth in the News

Covid-19 at NAM

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