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A Time to Confer

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth on October 27, 2021 by telescoper

Booklet Cover

This morning I braved the inclement weather to attend a Conferring Ceremony at Maynooth University. This was the first Conferring Ceremony to be held in person since for about two years and the first ever featuring the new President of Maynooth University, Prof. Eeva Leinonen, presiding.

There were only four students from Theoretical Physics graduating this morning, and two of them graduated in absentia but I did get to see two students get their Master of Science by Research awards. If you’re interested their theses are available online here and here.

I wouldn’t say the ceremony went off without any hitches. There were quite a few late arrivals among the graduands. I think the bad weather elsewhere in Ireland caused some delays which led to some people being late for the ceremony (which was due to start at 10am, but didn’t get going until about 10.30). Then there were some last minute changes of order which led to one or two students initially getting the wrong scroll. I remember how nerve-wracking it was when that sort of reshuffling happened when I was involved in similar ceremonies at Sussex. It’s bad enough stressing over the correct pronunciation of the names! Anyway I was glad that these days all I have to do is sit there.

The last conferring ceremony I attended in person was on October 31st 2019. It was while I was en route to give a talk at DIAS that evening after the ceremony that I heard that my Mam had passed away. So much has happened between then and now that it is hard to accept that was only two years ago…

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Bank Holiday Break

Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on October 23, 2021 by telescoper

So here we are then, five weeks of teaching over, we have reached the mid-term break. I actually thought it was quite unusual to reach study week after 5/12 of the Semester rather than half, but it seems it happened as recently as two years ago. The pandemic has played havoc with my powers of recollection as well as other things. Anyway, this Monday (25th October) is a Bank Holiday in Ireland. The last Monday of October (Lá Saoire i mí Dheireadh Fómhair), or the Halloween Holiday (Lá Saoire Oíche Shamhna), is always a national holiday here, although Halloween itself isn’t until next Sunday.

I’ve got a big backlog of work things to do, but I can’t face it right now so I’m going to take the long weekend off and use Tuesday to Friday to try to tackle the to-do list (apart from Wednesday, when I have to attend a Conferring Ceremony).

In the meantime I will be doing nothing more strenuous than a bit of gentle gardening, including clearing away the leaves and tackling the last bit of ivy threatening to invade my house.

On the subject of gardening, I’ve noticed that I’ve got a fine crop of toadstools on the back lawn. I don’t know enough about fungi to know whether they are toxic, edible or even hallucinogenic, though I think if they were edible the birds would have a go at them. Any experts who can identify the type shown please feel free to let me know!

It’s always puzzled me how many people thing that there must be something wrong with their garden if there are toadstools in it. As far as I’m concerned they are part of the natural ecosystem so I just let them grow. I find them quite fascinating. They only live a few weeks so will disappear in due course without any intervention from me.

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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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