Eightsome Reels Again

Posted in Crosswords with tags , , on June 19, 2022 by telescoper

I haven’t blogged about crosswords for a while so I thought I’d mention this week’s Azed puzzle (No. 2610) which is of ‘Eightsome Reels’ type, as explained in the picture above. I mentioned a similar one years and years ago (Azed No. 1921) so I thought I’d make a few comments on this one. I won’t give the full solution though because that would spoil the competition but I will give a hint or two.

The solutions are obviously all 8 letters long and they have to be fitted in the squares surrounding the corresponding number. The trouble is that you’re not told which square to start from, or whether the letters are to be entered clockwise or anticlockwise.

The only way I know to start one of these puzzles is to solve several adjacent clues without entering them in the diagram and then see if I can find a way to fit them together on a bit of scrap paper. The structure of the diagram guarantees many checked letters (i.e. overlaps) between neighbouring answers so once you have a few then the subsequent ones get easier to fit in. These puzzles are usually difficult to start though.

In this particular case I managed to solve about half the clues before entering anything on the grid. But how to write them in so they fit together?

For me the solution was to get the three answers in the corner at the bottom right corner (35, 36 and 30). I think 35 is a nice clue:

35. Erica, breaking rule? – ‘a thing of shreds and patches’

Think American novelist following by an anagram; the reference to Gilbert & Sullivan gives you JONGLEUR (a wandering minstrel). The following clue is the easiest of the lot

36. How corpse ends in morgue’s awfully … so?

This is clearly GRUESOME (end of corpse, i.e. E in anagram of MORGUES).

Now you see that EUR and RUE are common to the two answers so they must fit in the three lights running vertically upwards between 35 and 36 and the two words must be ordered differently so that one is clockwise and the other anti-clockwise. If you write RUE upwards here (so GRUESOME is clockwise), then the three letters in the corner will be MEG. If on the other hand you write them downwards (so GRUESOME is anticlockwise) then the three letters in the corner are SOM. The rubric states that the unchecked letters in the corners can be arranged to form LESS FINE POEM which does not contain a G. Thus the first possibility is excluded. The answer to 36 must therefore be written anticlockwise and the answer to 35 clockwise to mesh with it.

To check this is right you can solve 30, the answer to which has three letters in common with GRUESOME and must be written clockwise.

The symmetry having thus been broken, all you have to do is solve the other clues and fit them in accordingly…

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Picture Joke

Posted in Uncategorized on June 19, 2022 by telescoper

I put this picture up on Twitter last week with the caption Geddit? and it got as close to going viral as anything I’ve ever tweeted. Since I’m too lazy to post anything substantial today I thought I’d put it up here.

In the words of Roy Walker: “Say what you see..” though you will probably have to be a physicist who’s studied general relativity.

Some of those who did get the joke asked me where they could buy such an item. In fact I just wrote the Greek letters on with a whiteboard marker…

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The Perfect Afters

Posted in Irish Language with tags , on June 18, 2022 by telescoper

When I first arrived in Ireland, one thing I noticed about the way Irish people use the English language is a construction using the word “after” and the present participle of a verb. I first heard it in the context of a football match on the television, actually, during which the commentator said “the ball is after going out for a corner” or words to that effect.

This construction is basically an alternative way of constructing what is called in Latin called (past) perfect tense of a verb, indicating an action which is now completed. In Latin this would be formed by a particular ending of the verb but when translated into English it would either be a simple past verb form (usually ending in -ed) or using the auxiliary verb “to have”. For instance, in the football example above you would interpret the meaning as “the ball has gone out for a corner” or the “the ball went out for a corner”.

(Now I’m regretting using the irregular verb “to go” in the football example but I hope you catch my drift…)

The “after” construction is not just an alternative way of writing the past tense, however, as it can (and usually does) specifically imply an action that has been completed in the very recent past, something you might express in English by inserting the word “just”. This is sometimes called the immediate perfective. It can also be used to form the pluperfect tense (expressing an action already completed at some time in the past) by using the past of the verb “to be”, though in modern Irish it seems to be more-or-less exclusively used for actions only recently completed.

Examples include:

  • He is after writing a letter – He has (just) written a letter
  • I’m only after getting here – I’ve just got here
  • He was after walking the dog – He had walked the dog
  • I’m after reading James Joyce’s Ulysses for the second time – I have just read James Joyce’s Ulysses for the second time…

In the book English As We Speak It In Ireland, the author P.W. Joyce writes that no such form ‘would be understood by an Englishman, although they are universal in Ireland, even among the higher and educated classes’.

It’s certainly the case that I didn’t really understand it when I first heard it, but I have heard it used on countless occasions by friends and neighbours since then. I think I was initially confused because “he is after..” can appear in English. phrases such “he is after a new job” expressing something like “looking for” (i.e. with intent) but that is not suggested in the examples above.

I think poll my readers on this, which will probably demonstrate how few Irish readers I have. If someone were to say “I’m after getting a cup of tea” would this mean:

It’s reasonable to wonder how this construction came about. The answer is that in Irish the verb “to be” is very peculiar, existing in two distinct forms, and there is no direct equivalent of the verb “to have” as it is used in the formation of verb tenses in English. There is a simple past in Irish that basically works like the English equivalent but tenses involving “have” or “had” as an auxiliary verb are impossible to render word for word. For example, translating I have just done it into Irish could give you  Tá mé tar éis é a dhéanamh or Tá mé i ndiaidh é a dhéanamh, both of which literally mean I am after doing it. (Tá mé means “I am” and the underlined phrases essentially mean after).

I suppose you can think of this interesting construction as being a relic of the Irish language surviving after the imposition of English on the population. Whatever its origins, though, I’m after concluding that this construction, although not standard in British English, is perfectly sound from a grammatical point of view.

Finally, and incidentally, the lack of an appropriate verb “to have” causes some other interesting expressions in Irish. One of my favourites is exemplified by the phrase “I have a cold” which, translated into Irish is “Tá slaghdán orm” which means, literally, “A cold is on me”…

Anyway, I’m after finishing.

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Euclid Launch Delay

Posted in Euclid, Science Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on June 17, 2022 by telescoper

Until relatively recently we al thought the European Space Agency’s  Euclid mission would take place later this year (2022). For various reasons that date subsequently slipped to the first quarter of 2023.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine which, because Euclid was intended to be launched on a Russian Soyuz vehicle a further delay seemed likely (see here). The subsequent decision by the Russians to remove all their personnel from the launch site at Kourou (see here) made these even more likely as an alternative launch vehicle would have to be used.

There was an update about the situation at the recent Euclid Consortium meeting in Oslo which I could not attend but which I referred to here. The basic problem is that Plan B involves launching Euclid on an Ariane 6 rocket (which comes in two varieties, Ariane62 and Ariane64, with two and four boosters respectively). The problems are (a) that Ariane 6 is that it hasn’t yet had its first flight and (b) Euclid isn’t the only spacecraft now having to find an alternative launcher. The competition from commercial and military satellites may mean a lengthy delay to the Euclid Launch unless lobbying succeeds at a political level.

It has now emerged that earliest feasible date for launch on an Ariane 6 rocket is the 3rd quarter of 2024 and it may well be later than that, the uncertainty exacerbating the effects of the delay itself.

This is all very unfortunate. Euclid is now fully built and ready so a lengthy delay would be very damaging to morale. More concretely, many researchers employed to work on Euclid are on fixed-term contracts which will now expire before they can complete their work. This will have a very serious effect on younger researchers. To keep everything going while the spacecraft waits for a launch will be extremely expensive: the Euclid Consortium Board estimates a cost of about €50M for every year of delay and it is by no means clear where those funds would come from.

It seems to me that the best hope for a resolution of this problem would be for ESA to permit the launch of Euclid using something other than Ariane 6, which means using a vehicle supplied by an independent commercial operator. I sincerely hope ESA is able to come up with an imaginative solution to this very serious problem.

P.S. With this update, the odds on me retiring before Euclid is launched have just shortened considerably…

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A 25th Birthday Celebration

Posted in History, Maynooth with tags , , , on June 16, 2022 by telescoper

Today saw a celebratory barbecue on campus to commemorate 25 years of the creation of the National University of Ireland Maynooth now known as Maynooth University, my current employer, as an independent university. The institution was set up as the result of the Universities Act 1997 which was signed into law in May 1997 and came into operation on 16th June 1997 – i.e. 25 years ago today – as a result of the subsequent Commencement Order.

I was unable to attend the event on campus today to celebrate this anniversary because of pressure of work. With a €13.2 million surplus to spend on it, the party was probably very good, but I know I’m not alone among my colleagues in finding little to celebrate in our present predicament of inadequate resources, staff shortages and overwork.

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Bloomsday 2022

Posted in Biographical, Literature with tags , , , , on June 16, 2022 by telescoper

So it’s 16th June, a very special day in Ireland – and especially Dublin – because 16th June 1904 is the date on which the story takes place of Ulysses by James Joyce. Bloomsday – named after the character Leopold Bloom – is an annual celebration not only of all things Joycean but also of Ireland’s wider cultural and literary heritage. This year the Bloomsday Festival marks the centenary of the first publication of the complete Ulysses in Paris; it had been published in instalments before that but 2022 was when the full novel was published.

Here is a little video produced by the Irish Foreign Ministry spreading the impact of Bloomsday around the world:

This is also the first time for a few years that Bloomsday events have been held in person. I was toying with the idea of going into Dublin and wandering about some of the locations described in Ulysses, but I have too much work to do. One day I should try to write a paraody of Ulysses about a day in the life of a man who doesn’t go anywhere or do anything except spend the whole day on Microsoft Teams while real life passes him by.

If time permits, however, I will go out and buy the ingredients for a Gorgonzola and mustard sandwich, although unfortunately I shall have to forego the glass of Burgundy that Mr Bloom had with his.

Update: I tried the Gorgonzola and mustard sandwich. It’s an interesting (!) taste, but I don’t think I want to taste it again.

If you haven’t read Ulysses yet then you definitely should. It’s one of the great works of modern literature. And don’t let people put you off by telling you that it’s a difficult read. It really isn’t. It’s a long read that’s for sure -it’s over 900 pages – but the writing is full of colour and energy and it has a real sense of place. It’s a wonderful book.

(There’s also quite a lot of sex in it….)

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Planning Research

Posted in Education, Maynooth on June 15, 2022 by telescoper

This summer I have two undergraduate students doing research projects with me funded under Maynooth University’s Summer Programme for Undergraduate Research (SPUR). They’re actually making Monte Carlo simulations of galaxy clustering and using them to test various statistical analysis tools. The Department of Theoretical Physics actually has five students on three different projects, which is quite a lot for a small Department. The University as a whole has 57 SPUR students so we have almost ten percent of the total!

The SPUR students are paid for the projects, which last for (usually) six weeks but can be extended. I wish we could offer these projects to every student who wanted one, actually, but we just can’t afford to do that. I don’t agree with unpaid internships as these can only be taken up by students who have access to enough income to cover living expenses over the summer, so are discriminatory. We select students based on an application and their academic performance.

Anyway, at the start of the SPUR programme students attend a briefing session (which was last Wednesday) and they have to do various tasks along the way and, at the end, construct a poster. At the beginning they have to complete an agreement and “work plan”.

I was very amused to see the following template for a research plan in the pack given to students:

I’m at a loss to understand how any of this relates to how research is actually done in theoretical physics. The many amused reactions from colleagues when I posted this on Twitter yesterday suggest I’m not the only one. As a matter of fact, I don’t understand what many of the buzzphrases even mean. What for example are “As-is process flows”?

Obviously this template is intended for students doing business management courses in which they presumably learn to speak this language. Fortunately this is Template 3 and Template 1 just consists of a list of tasks to be done with key “deliverables” of the sort you need to complete when applying for a research grant, so my students used that.

I find it uncomfortable making detailed plans because to me the whole point of doing research is that you find things out that you didn’t expect and alter your strategy accordingly. If everything were predictable it would be a very dull project. Indeed I would say that if the outcomes were entirely predictable it wouldn’t even deserve the name “research”. Much theoretical research is accordingly rather open-ended, unlike say engineering or product design. On the other hand “give me the money and I hope to discover something interesting” is unlikely to go down well with funding panels. So you have to find a middle ground between convincing the panel that you know what you’re doing and allowing yourself space to adapt in the light of new developments. I think grant bodies in science largely understand that. Or at least I hope they do.

I had better end there as it is time for me to GO-LIVE (sic).

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Old School, Old Home

Posted in Biographical, History, Television with tags , , , , , on June 14, 2022 by telescoper

I’ve posted a few times posted about Benwell,  the part of Newcastle in which I grew up. For example I’ve posted about the little house where my first memories live here, and there’s an old photograph of it here:

The house itself (ours was the one on the left on this picture) was built of brick but to the left hand side you can just see a stone wall. The two cottages were demolished some time ago, along with Pendower School which was behind them as viewed from the picture.

I recently came across a picture of Pendower School taken sometime in the early 1990s when it was all boarded up and being sold for redevelopment.

The roof area with the fence around actually had a playground on it, used by Pendower Girls’ High school which occupied most of the building. The Infants and Junior schools which I attended were contained in the wing on the far right of the picture, the Infants downstairs and the Juniors upstairs. The school was built in 1929 and closed in 1992. It was used as a store for some time and then demolished.

The whole area including the school and the old cottages has now been covered with new houses, but for some reason they left the stone wall, part of which you can see to the left of the two cottages of the first picture. These were both taken from Ferguson’s Lane, which is immediately behind the stone wall to the left of the old photograph.

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In the second picture you can see the filled in outlines of the door which led to our backyard (on the right) and (on the left) the holes through which the coalman used to deliver the coal that was the only form of heating in the house. There was no central heating and no heating at all upstairs, incidentally, so we had very cold bedrooms in winter!

Anyway, my excuse for reposting this trip down Ferguson’s Memory Lane is that I recently came across this fascinating picture taken from the West in 1897 of the old Benwell Village:

 

I had never seen this picture before but I am now quite sure from looking at street maps of the time that the houses you can see at the far left are in fact the cottages shown in the very first picture of this blog, including the one I lived in! I had never thought about it before, but notice how close the roofline is to the top of the first floor windows. Note also the wall separating them from the rest of the row as they were originally on a private estate.  In the background you can see Benwell Towers which, many years later, is where the TV series Byker Grove was filmed.

The row of houses you can see includes two pubs: The Hawthorn and The Green Tree. Both pubs survived in name though the newer premises were on opposite sides of the road when I lived there. These houses and pubs were all demolished long before I was born to make way for a road (Fox & Hounds Lane) which is basically continuation of Ferguson’s Lane but curving to the left.

A slightly better view from the early 1900s again shows the cottages on the far right. If you click to expand it you can see the drainpipe coming down the front of the house beside the first set of windows, exactly as in the first image on this blog.

Here’s a slightly different view of the same area, taken in 1920 and showing both sides of Ferguson’s Lane, again with Benwell Towers in the distance.

The lamppost is very useful for orienting these three images!

The cottages on the right no longer existed by the time I lived in Benwell: the new Hawthorn Inn stood at their location. At the far end of that row of houses was the old Smithy part of which became a dodgy garage called HQ Motors, which when I lived in the area was guarded by a very scary dog called Patch.

I never really knew what the old Benwell Village looked like. Now I have a much better idea, despite the fact the School the cottages and the pubs have now all vanished!

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Gaia’s Third Data Release!

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on June 13, 2022 by telescoper

It seems like only yesterday that I blogged about the second release of data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission but today sees the release of the third data set, known to its friends as DR3. This completes the set after some initial data were released early as EDR3 back in 2020.

Gaia on the Launchpad at Kourou, French Guyana, on 13th December 2013

In case you weren’t aware, Gaia, launched way back in 2013, is an ambitious space mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracy needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.

Gaia is likely to operate until round about November 2024, so there’s a lot of data yet to come.

You can find a complete list of what is in DR3 here and if you want to go straight into the papers based on this dataset, go here. There is a nice promotional video here:

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R.I.P. Phil Bennett (1948-2022)

Posted in Biographical, Rugby with tags , , , on June 13, 2022 by telescoper

With the passing of Phil Bennett at the age of 73, one of the true greats of Rugby Union has left us. Known to many as “Benny”, Phil Bennett was one of the best players ever to play at fly half for any team at any time. While the role of outside half in the modern game involves a much greater emphasis on kicking ability, Bennett just loved to run with the ball and had an amazing box of tricks with which to bamboozle the opposition, including but not limited to his famous sidestep.

Watch him here in the classic Barbarians versus New Zealand match in Cardiff 1973. The coach of a mere mortal would tear his hair out seeing a player what Bennett did under the shadow of his own posts, but he didn’t just get away with it – he started the move that created a part of Rugby history.

Phil Bennett took over as outside half for Wales from Barry John, who retired early from Rugby, and soon established himself as a permanent member of the phenomenal Welsh team of the early 1970s, joining the ranks of such legends as JPR Williams, Gerald Davies, and Gareth Edwards.

I was born in England but had family connections to Scotland, Wales and Ireland too. Partly because the English team of that period was not strong we always cheered for Wales when we watched the Five Nations games at home. Years later I managed to meet a few of the players of that time. I was flabbergasted to bump into JPR Williams once just outside my house; met Gerald Davies at an event in Cardiff Bay; and encountered Phil Bennett in a bookshop in Cardiff city centre. On all occasions I was completely tongue-tied, struck by the awe of being in the company of such people. All of them were modest and gracious. Remember that Rugby Union in those days was an amateur sport and none of these extraordinary men became rich like modern players do.

Anyway, here is another sensational try featuring Phil Bennett who both starts and finishes the move – with a fantastic contribution from Gerald Davies in between. In the words of the great Bill McLaren “That was absolute magic, and the whole crowd here knows it”.

Rest in Peace, Phil Bennett (1948-2022)

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