I hadn’t seen Maynooth University Library Cat for a while, so it was nice to see him today, on post, as large as life. Approaching him I saw him receive a number of back scratches. It seems he enjoyed them and continued to present his back to passers-by in the hope of getting more.
It is 1st February 2026, which means that today is Imbolc (or Imbolg in modern Irish), an ancient Gaelic festival marking the point halfway between the winter solstice and vernal equinox. In the old pagan calendar, this day is regarded as the first day of spring, as it is roughly the time when the first spring lambs are born, daffodils etc start to appear, and the days get noticeably longer. The name Imbolg may be derived from “i mbolg” meaning “in the belly”, referring to the pregnancy of ewes. This time corresponds to the Welsh Gŵyl Fair y Canhwyllau and is also sometimes called, rather beautifully, The Quickening of the Year. It’s a time for rebirth and renewal after the darkness of winter.
Incidentally, in spoken Irish it is common to place an unstressed vowel sound – often schwa – between certain pairs of consonants, e.g. the name “Colm” is pronounced “Collum”. This extends to Hiberno-English: e.g. many Irish people say “fillum” for “film”. Imbolg is therefore pronounced something like “Imbollig”. In phonology this is called anaptyxis.
In Ireland Imbolc is usually often referred to a Lá Fhéile Bríde, St Brigid’s Day, after St Brigid of Kildare, whose feast day is today 1st February. There are events going on in Maynooth, which is in Couny Kildare, but I am not in Maynooth today so I don’t know what is going on. Incidentally, the Celts counted each day starting from sunset, so the Imbolc/St Brigid’s Day celebrations in County Kildare started last night, 31st January, but I didn’t see any of them either.
In the Northern hemisphere, in astronomical terms, 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.
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 the cross-quarter days, of which Imbolc is one. They are:
The names I’ve added in italics are taken from the Celtic/neo-Pagan and, in parenthesis the Christian terms, for the 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 that although the Pagan festivals have been appropriated by the Christian church, they have much older origins. The status of St Brigid herself is particular obscure; it is not known for sure whether she was a real person or Christian appropriation of a Celtic deity, or some amalgamation of those.
Until recently there was an anomaly in that the first of these was the only one not associated with a Bank Holiday. That was changed in 2022 and tomorrow, Monday 2nd February, will be the St Brigid’s Day holiday. It would have been the first of teaching in Semester 2 had it not been a holiday; we return to teaching on Tuesday. As you may have surmised, I’ve taken the opportunity of the long weekend for a bit of a break and a trip elsewhere.
P.S. As it also happens, today is also the 8th anniversary of the very first lecture I gave in Maynooth, on Computational Physics, on 1st February 2018. I”ll be giving pretty much the same lecture again on Thursday 5th February.
Following on from my post earlier today, I was sent a copy of a letter (below) instructing those people who run its social media accounts to desist from posting on X/Twitter.:
It stops short of deactivating accounts, but that is probably just to prevent someone else taking over the username/handle and using it for nefarious purposes. It’s a pity they don’t recommend Mastodon as well as BlueSky, as I think that is better for disseminating research-based news than BlueSky, but this is positive news and I’ll count it as a win.
The Irish news today has been dominated by the arrival of Storm Chandra on these shores, accompanied by strong winds, heavy rain and widespread flooding. The whole country has been under a yellow alert, which will last until 11pm today.
The fact that it had been raining very heavily for days before the storm must have saturated the ground, which would have contributed to the flooding. Unusually, the worst has been on the East Coast, with Counties Wexford, Wicklow, Carlow, and Dublin badly hit. Usually it’s the West of Ireland that bears the brunt of storms which typically come from across the Atlantic.
It’s been a strange day in Maynooth because, despite the storm, the weather hasn’t been too bad at all. There was a long window this morning during which it was actually quite sunny and pleasantly mild, though a bit breezy. The picture on the left shows the situation in mid-morning when the prevailing wind was southerly.
The main mass of raincloud to the North had passed over us by then, and the small but intense strip off the Louth/Dublin coast missed Maynooth entirely. You can see a big gap. Rain was heading towards us from the South, and did reach us in the afternoon, though it wasn’t particularly severe. It remained reasonably warm throughout the day, though it is much colder now (I’m writing this at about 7.30pm).
Dublin is only about 25km from Maynooth and it was a surprise to see major flooding, with parts of the M50 flooded for a time while we experienced nothing particularly severe. Not that I’m complaining!
For more about Storm Chandra, including animations of its progress can be found here. It seems that Great Britain had a lot of weather to contend with!
There’s just a week to go before the next Semester at Maynooth University so I’ve been looking at my calendar for the weeks ahead. Actually, I won’t start teaching again until Tuesday 3rd February, because Monday 2nd February is a national holiday. As it turns out, however, I don’t have any lectures, labs or tutorials on Mondays anyway so I won’t be missing a session either on February 2nd or on May 4th, another holiday. I will have to miss one on Friday 3rd April (Good Friday), though.
The Timetable has given me two 9 o’clock lectures a week for the forthcoming Semester, one on Tuesdays and the other on Thursdays. I don’t think the students like 9am lectures very much, but I don’t mind them at all. I find it quite agreeable to have accomplished something concrete by 10am, which I don’t always do. This schedule might mean that I defer publishing papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics on those days. I usually do this before breakfast, but I might not have time if I have to be on campus and ready to teach for 9am.
As usual, Semester 2 is a stop-start affair. We have six weeks until the Study Break, which includes the St Patrick’s Day holiday, then we’re back for two weeks (minus Good Friday) before another week off for Easter. We return on Monday April 13th to complete the Semester; the last lectures are on Friday 8th May and exams start a week later. This arrangement creates no problems for lecture-based teaching, but it takes some planning to organize labs and project deadlines around the breaks. I’ll have to think about that for my Computational Physics module.
A more serious issue for Computational Physics is how to deal with the use of Generative AI. I’ve written about this before, in general terms, but now it’s time to write down some specific rules for a specific module. A default position favoured by some in the Department is that students should not use GenAI at all. I think that would be silly. Graduates will definitely be using CoPilot or equivalent if they write code in the world outside university so we should teach them how to use it properly and effectively.
In particular, such methods usually produce a plausible answer, but how can a student be sure it is correct? It seems to me that we should place an emphasis on what steps a student has taken to check an answer, which of course they should do whether they used GenAI or did it themselves. If it’s a piece of code to do a numerical integration of a differential equation, for example, the student should test it using known analytic solutions to check it gets them right. If it’s the answer to a mathematical problem, one can check whether it does indeed solve the original equation (with the appropriate boundary conditions).
If anyone out there reading this blog has any advice to share, or even a link to their own Department’s policy on the use of GenAI in computational physics for me to copy adapt for use in Maynooth, I’d be very grateful!
(My backup plan is to ask ChatGPT to generate an appropriate policy…)
Meanwhile, back in the world of research, I see that Maynooth University has issued a news item about a new paper by colleagues in the Department of Physics, Daxal H. Mehta, John A. Regan and Lewis Prole. The story has also been picked up by the Irish media, e.g. here.
You may find the paper behind a paywall, as it is published in Nature Astronomy, in which case you will just have to make do with the abstract:
And here’s a pretty picture from one of the simulations used in the paper:
In these turbulent times I think it’s a good idea to stay grounded and pay attention to the small things in life that can make a positive difference. On that note I thought I’d share a picture of the new accessible footbridge and lifts at Maynooth railway station:
These works took over a year to complete and were finished before Christmas, but I only just got round to taking a picture. The previous footbridge was rather rickety and had quite steep steps which made it difficult to get across between the platforms. It was also uncovered; the new one provides shelter from the elements. Moreover, without any lifts any person in a wheelchair would have to leave the station, go all the way up to the Mullen Bridge on one side of the track, cross the bridge, go all the way back down and enter the station again on the other side of the tracks.
Usually the trains heading to Dublin leave from the platform on the right (Platform 1) and those from Dublin arrive on the left (Platform 2), but this isn’t always the case. In fact when I’m travelling back on the late train from a concert in Dublin it seems to be random whether it arrives at Platform 1 or 2. It doesn’t make much of a difference for me getting home, though. Platform 2 is marginally closer to my house but the station is only 5 minutes’ walk anyway.
The new bridge took such a long time to construct because foundations needed to be laid for the towers containing the lifts and the station itself widened to accommodate them. Lifts are quite expensive to maintain and one quite often sees on the electronic signs in the station warnings that lifts in various places are out of order. I hope it’s a long time before we see a sign that the lifts at Maynooth aren’t working!
Update: Friday 23rd January, just three days after this post, the lifts at Maynooth station were not working.
The new bridge was built next to the old one, on the side towards the viewer in the photo above, but when the new one was finished the old one was dismantled. I for one am not sorry it has gone. Anyway, the new bridge is a welcome improvement for Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) users. Unfortunately Irish Rail persists in making its only service announcementd via Xitter, for which I can see no justification. Thanks, Irish Rail, for the Accessibility Upgrade at Maynooth, but you need to get off X. Now!
Well, that wasn’t too painful. I’ve completed my marking duties. The fact that it has been pouring with rain most of the day made it easy to concentrate on this task. I was going to have a break for lunch, but I decided to keep on going until I was finished, though I did have to take a break for a telecon this afternoon. I also had to dash out to the shops, primarily to replenish my stock of food for the garden birds but also to get some groceries for myself. Having skipped lunch I bought myself something nice for supper.
Looking at the departmental database I see that I appear to be the first member of staff to have finished and uploaded all their Semester 1 examination marking. Normally I’m just happy if I’m not the last!
It feels good to have finished this task. It’s definitely a weight off my mind. I wouldn’t want to leave any loose ends when Trumpageddon comes.
I can’t say anything about the results of course but the change I made to continuous assessment, from take-home assignments to class tests, does not seem to have had a negative effect on either group of students I have been teaching. The opposite may indeed have been the case, as the class tests perhaps provide better preparation for the final assessment than the previous method. I think some other lecturers might make a similar switch in future. Anyway, I definitely plan to do something similar for my Semester 2 module on Particle Physics.
Now I have a couple of weeks before teaching resumes so I can get on with other things. For the rest of this week my priority is to finish revising a paper that I hoped to do before Christmas. I’ll see how that goes before deciding what to do next.
I’ll also have to prepare teaching for Semester 2. That shouldn’t be too difficult, as I’ve taught both modules before, but I do have to give some thought as to precisely how I’m going to word the instructions on the use of AI for my Computational Physics module. That can wait a little while, though, as it mainly affects the mini-project to be done towards the end of the Semester. In the meantime I’ll be thinking about other things…
I posted a couple of weeks ago about why you and your institution should leave X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). A few days ago the Royal Irish Academy used its BlueSky account to remind users that it issued the following statement last year – even before the launch of Grok’s child pornography engine:
Last year, we made the decision to step away from X.
The Royal Irish Academy is committed to creating, convening, and sharing knowledge for the public good and as an organisation we value Independence; Integrity; Curiosity; Openness and Rigour.
In our view, X no longer aligns with these values
This is a correct decision by the RIA, and although I’m no longer a Fellow of either the Royal Astronomical Society or the Institute of Physics, I am glad they came to the same conclusion. On the other hand, the Royal Society (of which the Royal Irish Academy is the Irish equivalent) continues to endorse X and its machineries of abuse; this is unsurprising because Elon Musk, who owns X and actively promotes the generation of images of child sexual abuse, is a member of that particular club.
All academic institutions should close their accounts on X. There is no acceptable justification to contribute to a network that promotes racism, transphobia, misogyny and the manufacture and distribution of child pornography. I would have thought this was obvious, but it seems not to be. My employer, Maynooth University, has not yet made any statement about the situation with X, and continues to post there.
As I wrote in a recent post
If you don’t leave a social media platform when you find out that it endorses and encourages abusive exploitation of children then you are supporting that behaviour and helping to promote it. There is no grey area here in this. If you don’t draw the line here, where will you draw it? Staying on X is morally indefensible. It is the Epstein Island of social media.
I should also point out that Grok is breaking the law in Ireland (which is where the EU operations of Twitter are based). Even that doesn’t seem to matter to those who continue to use the platform.
On Maynooth University’s Equality and Diversity page you will find this:
The Maynooth University Equality and Diversity Policy has been developed therefore, to realise these core values of equality, inclusiveness, social justice, dignity and respect.
I’d like to know how remaining on X aligns with these core values, and by what process Maynooth University came to a different conclusion on this than the Royal Irish Academy and other organizations mentioned above. One might well be tempted to infer that the above statement, like so many others produced by University Management, is mere bullshit. Perhaps “The Leadership” is waiting to see what other higher education institutions do before making a decision. But that wouldn’t be leadership at all, would it?
By way of a postscript to this let me share this petition which aims to discourage the sharing of content on X and replacement with Mastodon.
https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/take-x-icons-off-websites-and-emails-and-replace-with-mastodon-icons
I make no apology for encouraging the use of Mastodon. BlueSky is better than X but Mastodon is much better than BlueSky in terms of both its functionality and its governance. It doesn’t have as much reach as other platforms, though, which is why I want to promote it. If I had my way, Maynooth would set up its own Mastodon instance, as the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies has done, for example.
I removed the X icons from this blog some time ago. I can’t stop people sharing content from this blog on X, but I certainly don’t want to encourage it.
The last day of a week dominated by examination marking found me briefly back on campus to return the batch of scripts I have finished corrrecting and collect the next set (which, happily, is much smaller):
There are 14 scripts in the pile for my second paper, for my 4th year Mathematical Physics module on Differential Equations and Complex Analysis, around one-third of those for my Engineering Mathematics module Differentiaol Equations and Transform Methods. Based on the total number of examinations I have to mark I am therefore now 50% complete, but based on the number of scripts I’m about 75% through. I should be able to finish the latest batch in a day, but there’s no desperate rush so I’ll do them on Monday. I’m not going to start them now as I am off a concert – my first of 2026 – this evening and I prefer not to work at weekends unless I absolutely have to.
I finished the first set of marking yesterday, and spent most of this morning uploading and checking the scores and the conflation of exam marks with coursework scores. Satisfied that all is OK, I returned the scripts to the office for storage until our Examination Board meeting in about 10 days. I wasn’t on campus long, but there was a fire alarm in the Science Building while I was there. As usual, it turned out to be a false alarm.
Anyway, I should be finished with examination matters by Monday evening, which gives me four days next week to get on with other things. I’m looking forward to the change.
In the Dark 