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Chalk and Talk

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , on October 22, 2021 by telescoper

Today is the last day of teaching ahead of next week’s mid-term break. As it happens I did two consecutive lectures from 11-1 today instead of the usual one from 12-1 because of a rearrangement necessitated by a staff absence. I don’t mind admitting that I’m looking forward to a bit of a pause during Study Week, before embarking on the remaining 7 teaching weeks of the Semester.

The room I give my 12-1 lecture in has a chalkboard but the one for the 11-12 slot only has a whiteboard. The downside of the whiteboard is that it is almost impossible to make a lecture recording because the contrast is too low. I was happy to move to the usual room for the second one, which isn’t great either but at least has a decent blackboard.

A still from one of last year’s Engineering Maths lectures from home…

I know people think I am very old fashioned in persistently using a chalkboard. They also find it quite amusing that I bought one especially so I could do lectures from home using it. It’s far easier to get a decent contrast than using a whiteboard and I find that standing up and walking around allows me to communicate more effectively, at a decent pace and with a reasonable amount of energy. Most importantly of all I think it’s important for the students to see a process unfolding.

It’s proving much more difficult to provide decent quality lecture recordings on campus than at home because of the lack of decent camera facilities, but I’m doing the best I can.

Anyway, I was pleased to find a recent article about why Mathematics professors at Stanford University still use chalkboards. I agree with everything in it and will continue to use chalk and talk as long as I can. The way things are going with Covid-19 I may even be using the one at home again before too long…

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The Irish Svarabhakti

Posted in Biographical, History with tags , , , , on October 21, 2021 by telescoper

One of the things I’ve picked up about Hiberno-English pronunciation is that Irish people tend to pronounce the English word “film” as something like “fillum”. I always thought this was just a sort of mannerism, but it turns out to be quite a bit more interesting than that.

The general term for the addition of an extra sound to the pronunciation of a word is epenthesis and it is a fairly common feature of many languages. The extra sound can be added at the beginning, at the end or in the middle. The latter case is specifically called anaptyxis or sometimes svarabhakti, which is a Sanskrit word specifically for the insertion of a vowel after the letter l or r before another consonant.

In most cases these extra vowel sounds are inserted to aid pronunciation, If you think about it the mouth and tongue have to do something quite complicated to get from l to m and a nice easy “uh” sound makes the transition simpler.

The Celtic group of languages was the first wave of Indo-European languages, to sweep across Europe. I blogged about this here. It seems the idiosyncratic pronunciation of “film” as “fillum” (which, I’m told, is also in widespread use in India) is a relic of the Irish language’s distant origins in Sanskrit, having no doubt crossed into Hiberno-English at a time when Irish was more widely spoken than it is now.

Another topical example is the name Colm (as in Colm Tóibín), which is pronounced “Collum” (or, depending on dialect, something more like “Cullum”).

Anaptyxis isn’t restricted to Irish, of course. There are examples in English. Who could forget the form favoured by football supporters? Engerland! Engerland! Engerland! (I don’t remember the rest of the lyrics to that song…)

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Windows, Bugs and Updates

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth with tags , , on October 13, 2021 by telescoper

While having breakfast at home this morning I noticed that my laptop was asking for a restart to complete Windows update. Since this machine was set up by my employer’s IT services, it has BitLocker installed which means I have to be present to type in a PIN every time it restarts. It is therefore not possible to schedule updates overnight, as a sensible system would allow. In fact I can’t adjust very much at all about the update policy. All of this explanation is meant as an excuse for why I made the rookie error of restarting it before going to work.

Three restarts later, at 10am, I finally decided to go into work. I should have waited until then before starting the updates because my desktop machine works on Linux and is immune from Windows update nonsense so I would have been able to get on with other stuff while my laptop was starting and restarting.

Anyway, when I did arrive in the office, the laptop wanted to do yet another restart. That’s four altogether (so far); the latest one having taken much longer than the others. Had I been at home and relying on my laptop I would have wasted an entire morning.

I did think that perhaps the updates manager on my laptop had gone berserk and this plethora of starts and restarts was some kind of bug. It turns out though that it wasn’t: since yesterday, Microsoft has been flooding the internet with huge updates and patches of various kinds, mainly to fix “vulnerabilities” of various kinds. There’s been quite a lot of comment on social media about this from people (including myself) fed up with the state of their computers.

One of the vulnerabilities I know about concerns the print spool Windows er, which apparently was in a state that allowed it to be easily hacked. The solution chosen by my employer’s IT Services team was to disable all printing by shutting down the print spooler on University machines. After sending an inquiry to the system support people they recommended that if I wanted to print something I should manually restart the spooler, print the document, then manually terminate the spooler again. If I wanted to print several documents I should do this for each one…

Yeah, right.

I have no idea how many person-hours are being wasted by these vulnerabilities nor how much bandwidth is being used up worldwide to fix these Windows bugs. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s possible for organizations to sue Microsoft for lost productivity…

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Del or Nabla?

Posted in Biographical, mathematics with tags , , on October 12, 2021 by telescoper

I am today preoccupied with vector calculus so, following on from yesterday’s notational rant, I am wondering about the relative frequency of usage of names for this symbol, commonly used in math to represent the gradient of a function ∇f:

To write this in Tex or Latex you use “\nabla” which is, or so I am told, so called because the symbol looks like a harp and the Greek word for the Hebrew or Egyptian form of a harp is “nabla”:

When I was being taught vector calculus many moons ago, however, the name always used was “del”. That may be a British – or even a Cambridge – thing. Here is an example of that usage a century ago.

Anyway, I am interested to know the relative frequency of the usage of “nabla” and “del” so here’s a poll.

There may be other terms, of course. Please enlighten me through the comments box if you know of any…

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Weekend Jobs

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on October 10, 2021 by telescoper

If I ever used to feel guilty about not working at weekends I don’t anymore. I may have a big backlog of things to do but I’ve come to accept that life is too short to work every day of the week.

I’ve explained many times on this blog that we’re very short-staffed in the Department of Theoretical Physics. That is no fault of mine or any of the other staff so I’m not going to work myself into the ground. I did enough unpaid overtime during the lockdown and I’m not going to allow stress and overwork to become the new normal.

So, despite toying with the idea of finishing a paper this weekend, I settled for domestic chores. That doesn’t make for a very exciting blog post but there you are.

The main task I accomplished was to deal with the ivy that is growing in profusion on the outside of my house. It was in danger of getting into the loft space so I got my flat-bladed chisel out and went at it. It’s nearly all cleared now, but my garden waste bin is full so I’ll have to do the rest when I have space to put the bits and pieces.

It being October now I’ve also resumed food service for the birds. I put out one feeder last week and it was emptied in a matter of hours. I saw mainly blue tits attacking it. I haven’t seen any of those for a while. I forgot to buy peanuts but I’ll try to do that in the week so I can deploy the mesh feeders; the seed I’ve already put out is too fine for those.

Another exciting job I did was clean out my coffee maker. I have a nice espresso machine that requires regular de-scaling. That takes quite a while to do as one has to send a whole tank full of solution through the works, then rinse it out with water afterwards.

I also put a few pictures up, having rescued my Black-and-Decker from the shed. I still have more to do, largely because I’m very indecisive about where to put my artwork. I still have to hang my big blackboard too. I might be needing it for online lectures again. Who knows?

Other than the highlight of the weekend was Saturday night dinner, which was roast confit of duck with braised red cabbage, roast Romanesco with garlic and lemon, and new potatoes. It was delicious, especially when accompanied by a very nice Barolo. I even enjoyed shopping for some of the ingredients.

Anyway, week four begins tomorrow. That’s a third of the way into term for the returning students. I don’t think I’ve ever started counting the days to the end of term this early before.

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Three Weeks In…

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on October 8, 2021 by telescoper

Today marks the end of the third week of the Autumn Semester in Maynooth, which is also the end of the third week of teaching for returning students and the end of the second week of teaching for new arrivals. I was talking to some friends from Cardiff yesterday and expressed relief that the daily number of new cases seemed to be falling despite the return of students to campus.

Today, however, the number of positive test results reported was 2002, which is a big increase on recent days. Last Friday’s figure was 1059 and the intervening numbers have been hovering around the 1000 mark. I was quite shocked when I saw the latest number.

The latest data for students testing positive in Maynooth are for the week ending October 3rd, during which there were only 7 cases. I’d be interested to see whether those numbers have risen significantly.

The latest increase doesn’t look much on the 7-day average, and it might just be a blip. After all, we’ve had plenty of those over the last 18 months! I was just starting to relax because of the falling curve but now I am very worried.

I have to say that the students have behaved impeccably in my classes. If there has been an increase in transmission associated with the return to campus it seems more likely to me that it is associated with social activities, or travelling on crowded public transport.

The reason I am so concerned is partly that I really don’t want to have to switch everything back online again like we did last year, but more immediately that we are so short-staffed this year that if any lecturer or tutor falls ill we have no spare effort available to provide cover. We still have one lecturer without a visa having to give lectures remotely. Our increased student numbers this year make this an especially bad time to be short of teaching staff.

Well just have to wait and see how things develop over the next few days and weeks, but I could do without this stress!

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Nobel Prize for Physics Speculation

Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , on October 4, 2021 by telescoper

Just  to mention that tomorrow morning (October 5th 2021) will see the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. I must remember to make sure my phone is fully charged…

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 15 years the chocolate is now inedible, but it serves as a souvenir of a very nice weekend in Stockholm!

I have a spectacular bad track record at predicting the Physics Nobel Prize winner. Most pundits have, actually. I certainly didn’t see the last two coming. I couldn’t resist having a go again however.

It’s been a good few years for cosmology and astrophysics, with Jim Peebles (2019), Roger Penrose, Andrea Ghez & Reinhard Genzel (2020) following on from Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss and Barry Barish (2017) for the detection of gravitational waves.  Although I said so last year only to be proved wrong, I think it’s very unlikely that it will be in this area again. I have no idea who will win but if I had to take a punt I would suggest  Alain Aspect, Anton Zeilinger and John Clauser for their Bell’s inequality experiments and contributions to the understanding of quantum phenomena, including entanglement. I’m probably wrong though.

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) tomorrow morning. I’ll update tomorrow when the wavefunction has collapsed.

Anyway, for the record, I’ll reiterate my opinion that while the Nobel Prize is flawed in many ways, particularly because it no longer really reflects how physics research is done, it does at least have the effect of getting people talking about physics. Surely that at least is a good thing?

UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, I was wrong again. The 2021 Nobel Prize for Physics goes to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann (1/4 each) and Giorgio Parisi (1/2). Manabe and Hasselmann were cited for their work in “the physical modeling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming”. The second half of the prize was awarded to Parisi for “the discovery of the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems from atomic to planetary scales.” Congratulations to them all!

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A New Regime

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on September 30, 2021 by telescoper

With the departure of Professor Philip Nolan (whose last day at Maynooth is today) there will soon be a new regime in place at the University. Nobody knows what changes will take place, but there will undoubtedly be some and there are reasons for being nervous about what they will bring to STEM disciplines.

On a more personal note some things will change less than I originally planned. Back in July, exhausted after a difficult academic year, I wrote this:

I was appointed as Head of Department for three years, but last week I asked the University to let me step down from my role as Head of Department of Theoretical Physics from the end of September 2021, a year early. I’ll carry on as a Professor, hopefully with some time to do research, although my teaching duties will undoubtedly remain heavy.

Part of the thinking behind that decision was that a major reorganization of Physics at Maynooth University was on the cards and I thought the position of Head of Department would no longer really exist from the end of September. It is now clear, however, that the reorganization is not imminent. Don’t ask me whether or when it will happen now. That will be up to the new President. It certainly won’t be in effect from 1st October, though. We also have serious staffing issues this year due to the retirement of one colleague, the departure of another to a position in Germany, and another taking a sabbatical for the year. These positions are currently replaced by temporary lectureships, the holder of one of which is still yet to arrive in Ireland and is doing his lectures remotely from abroad.

The current state of the Department is not such as to make the position of Head attractive so, after discussions with my colleagues in the Department earlier this month I agreed to carry on for another year, until the end of my original term. Hopefully by this time next year we will be back to a full complement of permanent staff and the position concerning the reorganization will be clearer – or indeed the reorganization might have actually happened – so that would be a far better time for someone to take over if the position still exists.

I do therefore have another year of heavy teaching and administration in front of me, except that my colleagues have agreed to help me out considerably by taking some of the administrative burden on their own shoulders and teaching will hopefully be in person for the whole year and not online, which makes it far less onerous.

On the other hand, there are two silver linings. One is that after three years as Head of Department I get an automatic sabbatical – if I can find another institution who wants to host me! The other is that this Semester I have no teaching on Thursdays. That is more by luck than good judgement but I decided to seize the opportunity to make it my “research day”. For the rest of the Semester I will be working from home on Thursdays, as I am indeed doing now (although actually not working at the moment but taking a tea break and writing this post).

As it happens Thursday is also the day of my newly organized veggie box delivery, so here’s a picture of the enormous Savoy cabbage that arrived this morning (along with various other items such as leeks, rainbow chard and beetroot):

One final aspect of the new regime is that being at home today I’ve finally surrendered to the colder weather and put the central heating on…

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Astrophysics & Cosmology Masterclass at Maynooth!

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 28, 2021 by telescoper

Regular readers of the blog – both of them – may remember that, after a couple of postponements due to Covid-19,  we presented a Masterclass in Astrophysics & Cosmology in Maynooth on March 25th 2021. Well, owing to popular demand we’ve decided to do a re-run of the event on Friday 12th November 2021 ahead of next year’s CAO cycle.

This will be a half-day virtual event via Zoom. It’s meant for school students in their 5th or 6th year of the Irish system. There might be a few of them or their teachers who see this blog so I thought I’d share the news here. You can find more information, including instructions on how to book a place, here.

Here is the updated official poster and the programme:

I’ll be talking about cosmology early on, while John Regan will talk about black holes. After the coffee break one of our PhD students will talk about why they wanted to study astrophysics. Then I’ll say something about our degree programmes for those students who might be interested in studying astrophysics and/or cosmology as part of a science course. We’ll finish with questions either about the science or the study!

(And at 12 noon I don’t turn into a pumpkin but do have to run off to give a lecture on vector calculus..)

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The Autumnal Equinox 2021

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on September 22, 2021 by telescoper

So here we are then. The Autumnal Equinox (in the Northern hemisphere) takes place this evening (Wednesday 22nd September)  at 20.21 Irish Time (19.21 UT).

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.

Many people take the autumnal equinox to be the end of summer. There is a saying around these parts, however, that `Summer is Summer to Michaelmas Day’ (September 29th), which is not until next week. I must say, though,  though it doesn’t feel very summery today.

Anyway, this is Welcome Week in Maynooth and, barring any sudden changes of plan, we’re due to start teaching first year students on Monday 27th September. Returning students commenced on Monday 20th. I gave my first lecture on Vector Calculus yesterday. That was the first in-person lecture I’ve done for over a year. It was strange because I taught the same students online last year, but obviously never actually saw or heard them, as students generally mute their video and sound when attending lectures. Today was an improvement on that but everyone in the class was wearing a mask so I still haven’t really seen them! At lest this means that all the students were observing the necessary protocol, which is a relief, and the masks didn’t interfere with them responding to questions of mine or asking questions of their own.

We are still one lecturer short as the visa office in Dublin has been sitting on the application from our new member of staff since June 23rd. On top of my own things to do I’ve been setting up lectures for him so the students can view them in the lecture hall remotely. I’m not sure how long that will go on for, although it’s out of my hands.

Other than that I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to iron out problems with the timetable – of which there are unfortunately many – as well as preparing my own lectures. I want to record my lectures from the classrooms but unfortunately the University has chosen not to install decent video equipment so I’ve had to improvise. I recorded yesterday’s lecture using a webcam attached to the stand for my tenor saxophone. It seemed to work out reasonably well.

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