Today is Thursday 14th February so it sees the first of another three consecutive days of strike action by members of the University and College UCU across the UK over pay, pensions and working conditions. Although I no longer work in the UK I’d like to send this message of support to my former colleagues there who will be out on the picket lines today. There will be another three days of strikes next week, and four days the week after that.
As a fully paid-up member of the Campaign for the Rejection of Acronymic Practices I was pleased to see the top brass in the Euclid Consortium issue instructions that encourage authors to limit their use of acronyms in official technical documents. Acronyms are widely used in the names of astronomical instruments and surveys. Take BOOMERanG (Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation And Geophysics) and HIPPARCOS (HIgh Precision PARallax COllecting Satellite) to name just two. A much longer list can be found here.
I’m very pleased that the name of the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission is not an acronym. It is actually named after Euclid the Greek mathematician widely regarded as the father of geometry. Quite a few people who have asked me have been surprised that Euclid is not an acronym so I thought it might be fun to challenge my readers – both of them – to construct an appropriate backronym i.e. an acronym formed by expanding the name Euclid into the words of a phrase describing the Euclid mission. The best I’ve seen so far is:
Exploring the Universe with Cosmic Lensing to Identify Dark energy
But Euclid doesn’t just use Cosmic Lensing so I don’t think it’s entirely satisfactory. Anyway, your suggestions are welcome via the box below.
While you’re thinking, here is the best poetic description I have found (from Edna St Vincent Millay):
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere
In shapes of shifting lineage...
This is a copy of a blog post I put up in the Open Journal of Astrophysics website at the weekend.
The Research Organization Registry (ROR) is a community-led database that aims to provide a persistent identifier for every research organization in the world. In other words, it aims to do for institutions what ORCID does for individual researchers.
Scholastica has recently introduced a facility to allow authors to include an ROR tag for authors when they submit a paper. We encourage authors of papers submitted to the Open Journal of Astrophysics to do this. Institutions and organizations may require this in due course, as some do with ORCID, so it would be good to get into practice!
For example the ROR entry for NUI Maynooth is:
You can find your institutions ROR identifier here.
Not all corresponding authors of papers to OJAp supply details of institutional affiliations when they submit papers to us., presumably because it takes a while enter the relevant data. We can only supply the metadata to Crossref that authors supply to us. The more authors include the better, of course, but the ROR tag supplies a unique persistent identifier that is sufficient to pinpoint the relevant organization, so it is undoubtedly useful. Obviously, however, we can only pass this information on if authors supply it to us.
I forgot to mention in this morning’s post that I walked past the above bus on the way to last night’s concert. It is evidently the official transport of the French rugby team who played Ireland today in the Six Nations this afternoon. I didn’t spot any of the French players at the concert, although I did help a couple of friendly France supporters with directions en route.
As expected, it was a cracking match between two excellent teams, a real heavyweight contest, with no quarter asked and non given. But, in the end, Ireland ran out convincing winners by 32-19 despite the absence of a number of first choice players. It was a very impressive performance from Ireland and the best game of rugby I’ve seen for a very long time.
Last night’s concert by the National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall in Dublin was one that I’d been looking forward to for a long time. It didn’t disappoint! Congratulations to the National Symphony for yet another excellent concert, this time under the direction of guest conductor Case Scaglione.
The first half of the programme consisted of The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with soloist Federico Colli. That’s an interesting juxtaposition, made even more interesting by the Beethoven piece was played directly after the Ives without a break for applause. I wondered what was up when Case Scaglione walked on stage with Federico Colli who took his seat at the piano at the start of the concert. There is no piano part in The Unanswered Question, so Colli sat quietly until the end of that piece and then went straight into the opening piano statement of the Beethoven. I wasn’t expecting this before the performance but it worked very well. The only problem is that I didn’t get the chance to applaud at the end of The Unanswered Question.
The Unanswered Question is one of my favourite works by Charles Ives (along with Three Places in New England), a composer whom I admire greatly. I wrote a piece about him some years ago, actually. The Unanswered Question, was completed in 1908 (although it was revised later) and is subtitled “A Cosmic Landscape”. It’s a sort of meditation on the philosophical problem of existence. It comprises three different voices: muted strings playing notes from a G-Major triad (a rather “churchy” key, giving the flavour of a simple hymn). Then, played (in this performance) from the balcony behind the conductor, a solo trumpet poses the Question: a five note figure that is repeated with almost imperceptible variations several times during the work. The reply to the Question comes from the woodwinds, whose dissonant response is at first plaintive but then increasingly agitated and frustrated. Then the Question comes again without an answer, but the strings carry on quietly in G Major until everything goes quiet.
The Piano Concerto No. 4 by Ludwig van Beethoven is in G Major, so there is a continuity between the two pieces in terms of tonality, although of course the musical language is very different. It was composed in 1805/6, a hundred years before the Ives. It’s an audacious piece right from the start as it opens with unaccompanied piano. The second movement is a kind of dialogue between the orchestra and the piano, which at times sounds more like an argument as the orchestra makes a series of rather harsh statements with somewhat conciliatory responses from the piano. The last movement is a more conventional and jovial Rondo, by which time the solo trumpeter from the Ives piece had found her way back to the stage from the balcony. I’ve heard this movement several times played on its own on the radio.
Federico Colli cut a dashing figure in a grey suit and waistcoat with a high collar and a voluminous white cravat. He was well up to the demands of the piece, playing very expressively, tenderly at times and with virtuosic brilliance when called for.
After the wine break we returned for the majestic Symphony No. 1 by Jean Sibelius. This is one of the great symphonies and another favourite of mine – I have several different recordings of it and have heard it on the radio many times – but I had never heard it performed live in person before last night. The First Movement (initially Andante) opens with a theme played by solo clarinet. It then moves into allegro energico which was played very briskly in this performance (in contrast to some famous recordings which slow it down). The motif played by the clarinet at the start permeates the whole work, returning in different guises and endowing the composition with a strong sense of unity. It’s all shot through with great romantic tunes and has wonderful dynamics. In short, it’s a masterpiece. Not bad for a First Symphony!
I came across an interesting document concerning Diamond Open Access journals and thought I’d share it here. These are journals of the good sort that charge neither authors nor readers. In particular they do not charge exorbitant Article Processing Charges, like Open Access journals of the bad sort do. The Open Journal of Astrophysics is a “diamond journal“.
The document describes an initiative (“Action Plan”) that aims for a scholarly publishing infrastructure that is equitable, community-driven, academic-led and -owned. This will enable the global research community to take charge of a scholarly communication system by and for research communities. It therefore welcomes all researchers, organisations, disciplines, and journals who share its vision and ethos to endorse it.
You can download the document as a PDF file here.
You might also want to endorse the plan, or persuade your organization/university/research lab to do so. You can do that here.
Endorsing the Action Plan does not entail any financial commitment, but makes you part of the Diamond Open Access community and engages you in the creation of conditions that will strengthen the sector. An overview of endorsing persons and organisations will be publicly available.
Perusing the list of endorsing institutes, I see Cardiff University is in there, but sadly not Maynooth (yet…)
Very sad to hear today of the death at the age of 94 of the great songwriter Burt Bacharach. By way of a little tribute I thought I’d reblog this post from a few years ago. R.I.P. Burt Bacharach (1928-2023).
I’ve always been a not-so-secret admirer of American songwriter and record producer Burt Bacharach, but when someone told me the other day that there’s an album called Blue Note Plays Burt Bacharach I assumed it was a wind up because Blue Note Records has for many years been an uncompromising voice at the cutting edge of modern jazz rather than the lighter and more popular form of music exemplified my Mr B.
There’s no reason why two forms of excellence can’t exist together, however, and the album is definitely real and is a very nice compilation of Bacharach numbers from Blue Note albums featuring various musicians over the years. Here’s an example featuring Stanley Turrentine on tenor sax, with McCoy Tyner on piano, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Micky Roker on drums. The tune is What The World Needs Now Is Love. Doesn’t it just?
Today is Thursday 9th February so it sees the first of another two consecutive days of strike action by members of the University and College UCU across the UK. Although I no longer work in the UK I’d like to send this message of support to my former colleagues there who will be out on the picket lines tomorrow and on subsequent days. There will be further escalation of strike action next week, with three days of strikes.
This industrial action arises from a dispute over pensions, pay, and working conditions. The strikes will affect 2.5 million students but are necessary to safeguard not only the livelihoods of academic staff against increased casualisation and salary cuts but the UK university system itself, which is being ruined by incompetent management. Regrettably, the strikes will cause considerable disruption but, frankly, there is no point in a strike that doesn’t do that.
This fascinating video surfaced recently after having been lost for decades. It’s an interview with Georges Lemaître who, along with Alexander Friedmann, is regarded as one of the originators of the Big Bang theory. Lemaître first derived the “Hubble’s law”, now officially called the Hubble–Lemaître law after a vote by members of the International Astronomical Union in 2018, by the IAU and published the first estimation of the Hubble constant in 1927, two years before Hubble’s article on the subject.
Lemaître is such an important figure in the development of modern cosmology that he was given his own Google Doodle in 2018:
The interview was recorded in 1964, just a couple of years before Lemaître’s death in 1966. It was broadcast by Belgische Radio- en Televisieomroep (BRT), the then name of the national public-service broadcaster for the Flemish Community of Belgium (now VRT). Lemaître speaks in French, with Flemish subtitles (which I didn’t find helpful), but I found I could get most of what he is saying using my schoolboy French. Anyway, it’s a fascinating document as it is I think the only existing recording of a long interview with this undoubtedly important figure in the history of cosmology.
As you can see, if you want to watch the video you have to click through to YouTube:
UPDATE: A transcript of this interview in French along with a translation into English can be found here.
In the Dark 