In the Dark

It’s December 19th 2022 and my 2023 RAS Diary has arrived in Ireland, this time with an added Brexit bonus of a customs declaration!

The diary part of the RAS diary, being I suppose intended for academics, actually runs from October to December the following year. In previous years it has arrived in time to use it for Semester 1 but for the last three years it hasn’t arrived in the post until December, meaning that I couldn’t use the first three months in the new diary. The heavy delay of the diary is matched by that of the RAS house journal Astronomy & Geophysics which usually takes a couple of months to reach Ireland. I notice that this year’s wasn’t even sent out from Burlington House until 7th December…

Apparently about a quarter of all Fellows of the Royal Astronomical Society (including myself) are located “overseas”. Those in far-flung places presumably get everything even later than I do here in Ireland.

This year’s diary is a much brighter orange colour than the picture suggests. I’ve included a picture here along with various others from over the years.

Although many of my colleagues seem not to use them, I like old-fashioned diaries like the one above. I do run an electronic calendar for work-related events, meetings etc, but I use the paper one to scribble down extra-curricular activities such as concerts and sporting fixtures, as I find the smartphone version of my electronic calendar a bit fiddly.

I know quite a few people these days are asking what Mastodon is. Fortunately, I see in the latest Private Eye that some leading experts have given their opinion on the matter:

I hope this clarifies the situation.

Once upon a time, there was a public house called The Bird Cage.

As pubs go, it was very big and very popular. At times it was quite rowdy, and sometimes nasty people came in just to annoy the customers. The landlord, however, appreciated the regular customers and, from time to time, threw out the worst troublemakers and banned them. He also put bouncers on the door to stop them coming back. Some annoying people remained but the pub was big enough that nice people could ignore them.

Then it came to pass that a rich man, Mr Musk, having grown tired of trying to persuade his camels to go through the eye of a needle, decided to buy The Bird Cage. Why he decided to do this is not clear, as he had made all his money from selling exploding cars and kneweth not of the business of public houses, but many said he was lonely after splitting up with his young partner, Darren Grimes, and thought being a landlord would make him popular. Perhaps he even thought the customers might laugh at his jokes.

After buying the pub for a price that even he couldn’t really afford, Mr Musk the new Landlord put all the prices up and sacked all the bar staff to save money. He kept the bouncers but instructed them that from now on they should throw customers in rather than out. And all the people who had been banned by the previous Management were allowed back in to annoy the nice people.

There was much wailing and gnashing of tweets teeth.

One by one the nice people all left to go to smaller but nicer pubs such as The Beehive or The Elephant. Moreover the nasty people discovered they didn’t like annoying each other as much as annoying nice people so they left too. Soon there was nobody left in the pub except Mr Musk and his bots friends.

Eventually the The Bird Cage lost so much money that Mr Musk was forced to close it down. The nasty people were sore vexed but the nice people couldn’t give a toss.

Here Endeth The Lesson.

Just got back from a lecture to hear the heartbreaking news that Carolina Ödman-Govender has passed away after a long battle with cancer. I first met Carolina when she was a PhD student at the University of Cambridge about 20 years ago. I think that was at a conference in Erice. She was a lovely human being who was held in the highest esteem by everyone who met her. It is devastating that such an inspirational figure is no longer with us. I send heartfelt condolences to husband Kevin, her family, friends and colleagues at this terrible time.

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I just finished writing my notes for next week’s lectures and checked the blog statistics to discover that there have now been over 5,000,000 visits to this website. It’s been just over 14 years since I started blogging so that is about 360,000 hits per year on average, or just under 1000 a day. The actual daily figure varies considerably of course. It’s also worth mentioning that the number of distinct visitors is somewhat lower (just under 2 million). That means on average visitors come here about 2.5 times. On the other hand the visitor statistic probably overcounts because people may use different devices to access this site. Such details may matter to people who want to sell advertising, etc, but not to me.

I’m sure there are many blogs that get much more traffic than this one but I’m glad so many people have found things of interest here over the years, so thank you all for coming!

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I thought I’d share a picture of my conference badge from INAM 2022, complete with pronouns, for the benefit of those who are triggered by such things.

If you are one of those people triggered by pronouns, just wait until you find out about adjectives!

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