It’s Sunday and I’ve just finished work for the day. Too tired to write anything substantial I thought I’d share a track featuring and named after the guitarist I went to see at the National Concert Hall a few weeks ago. John McLaughlin is the 4th track on the Miles Davis (double) album Bitches Brew. It doesn’t feature Miles Davis on trumpet nor Wayne Shorter on saxophone but does involve the electric pianos of Chick Corea and Joe Zawinul, the bass of Dave Holland, the drums of Lenny White and Jack de Johnette, other percussion by Don Alias and Juma Santos and Bennie Maupin on bass clarinet; the latter addition to the ensemble being a stroke of genius by Miles Davis. I know quite a lot of fans of Miles Davis don’t like this album at all, finding it all a bit perplexing but I don’t mind music that’s a bit perplexing and I think it’s great. Most of the tracks are very long but this one is only four and a half minutes or so in duration, built around a simple riff laid over a loose and very dynamic rhythmic accompaniment. Like the other numbers, it’s almost entirely improvised.
John McLaughlin
Posted in Jazz with tags Bitches Brew, John McLaughlin, Miles Davis on June 12, 2022 by telescoperA Leaving Certificate Applied Maths Problem
Posted in Cute Problems, Education, mathematics with tags Applied Mathematics, Leaving Certificate on June 11, 2022 by telescoperThe 2022 cycle of Leaving Certificate examinations is under way and the first Mathematics (Ordinary and Higher) were yesterday there’s been the usual discussion about whether they are easier or harder than in the past. I won’t get involved in this except to point you to this interesting discussion based on an archive of mathematics questions, that this year the papers have more choice for students and that, apparently, the first Higher Mathematics paper had very little calculus on it.
Anyway, I was looking through some old Applied Mathematics Leaving Certificate papers, as these cover some similar ground to our first year Mathematical Physics at Maynooth, and my eye was drawn to this question from 2010 about two balls jammed in a cylinder…
I’d add another: does it matter whether or not the cylinder is smooth (as this is not specified in the question)?
Your answers are welcome through the comments box!
Concerning Covid Immunity
Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Maynooth with tags CCR5-Δ32, Covid-19, HIV, SARS-Cov2 on June 10, 2022 by telescoperOver the past few weeks I’ve attended a number of events at which most people were not wearing face coverings, including a recent Open Day at which I took my mask off in order to be heard in a very crowded space. Although I still wear a mask on public transport and in shops, most people now do not.
The first thing I’d note is that that there has been a clear upturn in reported Covid-19 cases, with figures now running at about 700 per day:
(Official figures for Ireland are only issued weekly these days…)
It’s not an alarming increase but hospitalizations and testing positivity are also increasing, though the mortality rate remains low because of the protection afforded by vaccines. Incidentally, it was a year ago on Wednesday (8th June) that I received my second Pfizer dose. One wonders how long vaccine protection will last, though, until further boosters are needed. If cases continue to rise I wonder if any measures will be put in place before the start of next academic year?
A number of my colleagues at home and abroad have attended scientific conferences recently, a number of which have led to mini-outbreaks and some instances of quite serious illness. Although most people seem to think Covid has gone away, it clearly hasn’t. A resurgence is all we need right now.
Anyway, one of my colleagues at work expressed surprise that I didn’t catch Covid during the largely unmasked Open Day at the end of April. Of course I might have done but I certainly didn’t display any symptoms. I’ve actually been quite surprised that I have never shown any sign of SARS-Cov2 at all during the entire period of the pandemic, while many of my colleagues and students in the Department have come down with it.
Coincidentally, a comment appeared yesterday on a blog post I wrote a while ago in which I revealed that I have the CCR5-Δ32 genetic mutation which confers protection against HIV infection. As a matter of fact I have it twice (i.e. homozygotic). For one thing the commenter pointed out that this mutation may have protected against smallpox, which means some evolutionary selection may have been involved in its propagation. The commenter also drew attention to the evidence – by no means conclusive at this stage – that this mutation may also protect against Covid-19. If you’re interested here are links to some papers:
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34913355/
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33728925/
- https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.11.02.20224659v
The last of these is a preprint but the other two are peer-reviewed publications.
Could it be that I’ve yet again been a jammy bastard and inherited immunity to Covid-19 too?
R.I.P. David Hughes (1941-2022)
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags astronomy, David W Hughes, Solar System on June 9, 2022 by telescoper
I am once again very sorry to have to pass on some sad news. Astronomer David Hughes (formerly of Sheffield University) passed away suddenly on Monday 6th June at the age of 80.
Born in Nottinghamshire, David did his first degree at Birmingham University and his DPhil in Oxford. He moved to Sheffield in 1965 and worked there until he retired in 2007.
David was an expert on the Solar System, especially its minor bodies, such as asteroids and comets; the Mars-crossing asteroid 4205 David Hughes is named in honour of his many achievements. He was also very knowledgeable about the history of astronomy and the threat to Earth from meteors and other impact phenomena. An ebullient public speaker, he was much in demand as a guest on TV programmes, as well as giving lectures on cruise ships and talks to amateur astronomical societies and lay audiences. Through these activities he did a huge amount for the popularization of astronomy especially in the UK.
I send my condolences to his family, friends and colleagues both in Sheffield and around the world.
R.I.P. David W Hughes (1941-2022)
Writing, Publishing and Blogging
Posted in Biographical, Maynooth on June 8, 2022 by telescoperThis morning I saw this bit of guidance about writing a blog produced by a colleague from Maynooth:
I’m not sure how well I’ve followed this guidance over the last 14 years or so but was struck by the assertion that “a blogpost is a publication”. It reminded me of a webinar I did a while ago about Open Access publication which led to a discussion of whether or not a preprint is a publication. Taking the definition of “publish” to be “to issue to the public”, I think it is. In the digital era methods of publication are much simpler and more diverse than in the days when everything was circulated on paper and although I haven’t thought much about it before, I agree on this basis that a blog post is indeed a publication.
That means I have 5942 publications! Or actually 5943 after I’ve published this one. Not counting a couple of hundred “proper” ones, of course…
Anyway I have never really seen a good reason why this blog should be entirely about my professional life. It is true that the most popular posts have proved to be about my research interests but people seem to read the other stuff too so I see no reason to be restrictive.
A dozen years ago I wrote a post about how and why I started blogging, and what follows is an edited version of that.
Lots of people have asked me over the years why I have a blog and why I apparently spend so much time writing it. Well, for me, there are two answers. The first is just that I enjoy writing. I think because of that I’ve always been able to write stuff fairly quickly and developed a little bit of a knack for it. I also sometimes find it easiest to figure out what I actually think about something by trying to write about it. Publishing a post written for this reason is almost irrelevant and there have been a few occasions when I’ve regretted posting items in which I’ve been “thinking out loud” in this way. Sometimes it’s good to remember that people may actually read what you write…
When I started blogging I realized that it gave me the chance to write about things quite different from the usual themes I had previously tackled in publications. I’d written scientific papers, textbooks, lecture notes, popular books and newspaper articles before but most had been quite strictly controlled by editors and were always related to my scientific work.
It was only after I’d been blogging quite a while that I started doing music and poetry items, entirely for my own amusement, like keeping a scrapbook, but if people actually enjoy things that I’ve put up that they’d never seen before then all the better. I know a lot of people think I’m a pretentious twat for posting about poetry or Opera or modern jazz – some have said as much to my face, in fact – but that’s what I like. There’s enough blogs about pop music, TV celebrities and computer games already, not that I’d be able to write about them. I’m flattered too by the fact that some of my music and other posts have been linked to Wikipedia articles – and, no, I didn’t put them there!
The other reason I had for starting to blog is much more personal. I moved job from Nottingham to Cardiff in 2007, but I got caught up in the credit crunch and was unable to sell my old house for quite a while. I spent far too much time commuting from Nottingham to Cardiff and back for the weekends and got thoroughly depressed, a state of mind not helped by some other issues which I won’t go into. In the middle of this my father died. Though not entirely unexpected, I did have to take some time out to deal with it. He hadn’t left a will, and I had to sort out the legal side of things as well as dispose of his belongings and arrange the funeral. In the aftermath of all that I had pangs of nostalgia for my childhood in Newcastle and an urge to connect with all that through writing down some thoughts and memories. Many of my early posts on here were quite morbidly introspective and probably not much fun for anyone to read, but I found writing them quite cathartic, as indeed I’ve found other posts for different reasons.
Anyway, knowing my tendency to write bits and bobs and then forget about them, quite a few people had encouraged me to start writing a blog but I hadn’t done it because I didn’t know how to go about setting one up. Fortunately, after a public talk I’d given, Phil Brown of the British Association for the Advancement of Science gave me a few pointers to getting started writing a blog. After finally managing to sell off the Nottingham house and after relocating fully to Cardiff, I started blogging in 2008.
So there you are. That’s some of why and most of how I came to start writing this blog. I wish I could say I had a mission to change the world, but it’s really just partly a big exercise in self-indulgence and partly a piece of occupational therapy.
I would add two things in my defence. One is that I think that among all the other stuff, I do a bit of public service on here. Any bits of news about funding, exciting or controversial science results and things I think my colleagues might find interesting tend to go on here and I do think that’s a useful thing to do. People in my own Department sometimes find things first from reading here, which I think adds a healthy bit of transparency to the otherwise closed world of academic life. The other thing to say is that, contrary to popular opinion, I don’t actually spend a huge amount of time writing the blog. Much of it is recycled and the rest thrown together quite quickly. I know it’s rubbish, but at least its fast…
Some time ago I came across the idea of a “commonplace book“. To paraphrase Wikipedia
Such books came into use in the middle ages and were essentially scrapbooks, filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and humanists as aids for remembering or developing useful concepts ideas or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.
Dare I say, just like a blog?
R.I.P. Richard Hills (1945-2022)
Posted in Biographical, The Universe and Stuff with tags Cavendish Laboratory, Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory, Richard Hills on June 7, 2022 by telescoper
Yet again I find myself having to pass on some sad news. I heard yesterday that Professor Richard Hills FRS lately at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, passed away on 5th June at the age of 76. Richard was a specialist in radio and sub-mm astronomy, being heavily involved in the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) and more recently the Atacama Large Millimetre Array (ALMA; shown in the background above).
I remember two encounters with Richard particularly well.
The first was when I was an undergraduate student at Cambridge. I did a final-year theory project that involved making a computer simulation of a laser. I had to attend a viva voce examination with two members of staff after submitting my project report. Richard was the one of the pair and, although it was not his specialist subject, he seemed genuinely interested in what I’d done. He managed to ask some very searching questions at the same time as being very friendly and encouraging. I must have answered quite well because they gave me a very good mark!
The other was much more recent occasion when I gave a seminar at the Cavendish about phase correlations in cosmological fields. As an expert in interferometry he knew a lot about this from a different perspective and again he asked some very interesting questions, ending up with a discussion of the closure phase.
Richard Hills was a very eminent scientist who made a huge range of contributions to astronomy, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2014. He will be greatly missed by his friends, family and colleagues in Cambridge and around the world to whom I send my condolences.
R.I.P. Richard Edwin Hills (1945-2022)
Exploitation and Surplus Value in Academia
Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags Karl Marx, Surplus Value, Theory of Exploitation on June 7, 2022 by telescoperAfter two years of Covid-19 pandemic requiring academic staff to undertake countless hours of unpaid overtime, I’m sure all my colleagues at Maynooth University, especially those whose workloads went through the roof during this time, will be as delighted as I am to learn that the University made a surplus of €13.2 million last year.
I’m reminded of a post I did a while ago about why academic publishing is so profitable. The argument I presented based on Marx’s theory of exploitation which holds not only for capitalist societies but for all class-based societies (including, e.g., feudal societies). In Das Kapital Marx argued that
…living labour at an adequate level of productivity is able to create and conserve more value than it costs the employer to buy; which is exactly the economic reason why the employer buys it, i.e. to preserve and augment the value of the capital at his command. Thus, the surplus-labour is unpaid labour appropriated by employers in the form of work-time and outputs.
The current situation certainly seems like exploitation to me, though it’s not only the staff but also the students who are being taken for a ride.
In a couple of weeks I am supposed to spend yet another Saturday (unpaid) delivering an open-day talk at which I attempt to persuade students to come to Maynooth to study Theoretical Physics. I probably won’t mention that we haven’t got enough staff to teach them effectively, we haven’t had sufficient investment to offer decent levels of teaching infrastructure (e.g. no lecture capture facilities), and they probably won’t be able to find anywhere to live near campus so won’t be able to attend lectures without lengthy commutes. I don’t suppose prospective students care about those things anyway. But I’m sure they’ll be delighted to hear about the size of the University’s surplus….
…I bet that will make them feel really good about coming to Maynooth!
Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh
Posted in Biographical, Irish Language, Maynooth on June 6, 2022 by telescoperToday has been (and indeed continues to be) the June Bank Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) in Ireland. It is the equivalent of the usual May Bank Holiday in the UK in that both have their origin in the old festival of Whitsuntide (or Pentecost) which falls on the 7th Sunday after Easter. Because the date of Easter moves around in the calendar so does Whit Sunday, but it is usually in late May or early June. Here in Ireland the Bank Holiday is always on the first Monday in June whereas on the other side of the Irish Sea it is on the last Monday in May (except for this year when it was moved at the behest of some old Queen).
Although I’m only at beginners’ level in Irish, the phrase Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh gives me a chance to bore you about it. It’s actually quite a straightforward phrase until you reach the last word: “Lá” means “day” and “Saoire” means “leave” or “vacation” so “Lá Saoire” means “holiday”; “i” is a prepositional pronoun meaning “in” and “mí” means “month”. So far so good.
The word for June however is Meitheamh (at least when it is in the nominative singular case). As an Indo-European language, Irish is distantly related to Latin which has six grammatical cases for nouns (actually seven if you count the rarely used locative case). Irish has only four cases – there’s no ablative and, curiously, no real distinction between nominative and accusative (though there is for some pronouns). That leaves nominative, dative, genitive, and vocative. The dative case– used after simple prepositions – is only rarely distinct from the nominative so basically the ones you have to learn are the genitive and the vocative.
Whereas in Latin cases are indicated by changes to the end of noun, in Irish they involve initial mutations. In the example of “mí Mheitheamh” meaning “month of June”, requiring the genitive form of “June”, the initial consonant “M” undergoes lenition (softening) to sound more like a “v”. In old Irish texts this would be indicated by a dot over the M but in modern orthography it is indicated by writing an “h” after the consonant. This is called a séimhiú (pronounced “shay-voo” ). Note the softened m in the middle of that word too but it’s not a mutation – it’s just part of the regular spelling of the word, as is the -mh at the end of Meitheamh. There’s also a softened “t” in the middle of Meitheamh which makes it vrtually disappear in pronunciation. Meitheamh is thus pronounced something like “Meh-hiv” whereas “Mheitheamh” is something like “Veh-hiv”.
Anyway, here’s a picture of Maynooth University Library Cat.
Dead of Night
Posted in Film, The Universe and Stuff with tags Dead of Night, Ealing Comedies, Ealing Studios, Fiilm on June 6, 2022 by telescoperLast week I was chatting to one of my colleagues about old films, particularly those made in the immediate post-war years by Ealing Studios. Nowadays this film production company is most strongly associated with superb comedy films, including such classics as Passport to Pimlico, Whisky Galore, The Ladykillers and The Lavender Hill Mob among many more. But there was more to Ealing Studios than the Ealing Comedies. During the war the company was involved in making propaganda films to help with the war effort, most of which are now forgettable but at least one, Went the Day Well, about people in an English village attempting to resist ruthless German paratroopers, is genuine shocking to this day because of its unusually frank depiction (for the time) of brutality and violence in a normally tranquil and familiar setting. The image of Thora Hird taking on the invaders with a Lee Enfield rifle is one that stays in my mind.
Horror films were banned during the War but in 1945 Ealing Studios released one which was to become enormous influential in the genre and which holds up extremely well to this day. As a matter of fact, I watched it again, for the umpteenth time, last night.
I’ve actually blogged about a bit of this film before. There is a sequence (to me by far the scariest in the film) about a ventriloquist (played by Michael Redgrave) who is gradually possessed by his evil dummy which came up in a post I did about Automatonophobia many moons ago.
Anyway, you only have to watch Dead of Night to watch it to appreciate why it its held in such high regard by critics to this day. Indeed you can see ideas in it which have been repeated in a host of subsequent (and usually inferior) horror flicks. I’m not going to spoil it by saying too much about the plot. I would say though that it’s basically a portmanteau film, i.e. a series of essentially separate stories (to the extent of having a different director for each such segment) embedded within an overall narrative. It also involves an intriguing plot device similar to those situations in which you are dreaming, but in the dream you wake up and don’t know whether you’re actually awake or still dreaming.
In this film the architect Walter Craig arrives at a country cottage, is greeted by his host Elliot Foley who has invited him to discuss possible renovations of the property. He is shown into a room with several other guests. Despite apparently never having been to the property before it seems strangely familiar and despite never having met the guests before he says he has seen them all in a recurring dream. One by one the guests recount strange stories. When they’ve all had their turn the film reaches a suitably nightmarish ending but Craig then wakes up in bed at home and realizes it was all a dream. Then the phone rings and it’s Elliot Foley inviting him to his country cottage to discuss possible renovations. The film ends with Craig arriving at the cottage just as he did at the start of the film.
Here is the trailer:
It’s the “dream-within-a-dream” structure (presumably repeated forever) – what physicists would call a self-similar hierarchy – of the overall framework of this movie that gives it its particular interest from the point of view of this blog, because it played an important role in the evolution of theoretical cosmology. One evening in 1946 the mathematicians and astrophysicts Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Tommy Gold went to see Dead of Night in Cambridge. Discussing the film afterwards they came up with the idea of the steady state cosmology, the first scientific papers about which were published in 1948. For the best part of two decades this theory was a rival to the now-favoured “Big Bang” (a term coined by Fred Hoyle which was intended to be a derogatory description of the opposing theory).
In the Big Bang theory there is a single “creation event”, so this particular picture of the Universe has a definite beginning, and from that point the arrow of time endows it with a linear narrative. In the steady state theory, matter is created continuously in small bits (via a hypothetical field called the C-field) so the Universe has no beginning and its time evolution not unlike that of the film.
Modern cosmologists sometimes dismiss the steady state cosmology as a bit of an aberration, a distraction from the One True Big Bang but it was undeniably a beautiful theory. The problem was that so many of its proponents refused to accept the evidence that they were wrong. Supporters of disfavoured theories rarely change their minds, in fact. The better theory wins out because younger folk tend to support it, while the recalcitrant old guard defending theirs in spite of the odds eventually die out.
And another thing. If Fred Hoyle had thought of it he might have called the field responsible for creating matter a scalar field, rather than the C-field, and it would now be much more widely recognized that he (unwittingly) invented many elements of modern inflationary cosmology. In fact, in some versions of inflation the Universe as a whole is very similar to the steady state model, only the continuous creation is not of individual particles or atoms, but of entire Big-Bang “bubbles” that can grow to the size of our observable Universe. So maybe the whole idea was actually right after all..
Follow @telescoperJubilee Stomp – Duke Ellington
Posted in Jazz with tags Bubber Miley, Duke Ellington, Platinum Jubilee, Tricky Sam Nanton on June 5, 2022 by telescoperAs my only contribution to the ongoing Platinum Jubilee celebrations, here’s a classic record that’s almost as old as Queen Elizabeth II and is by a prominent member of the Jazz nobility, the Duke of Ellington.
As far as I know this is the first recording of Jubilee Stomp, made in early 1928, though the band made several other versions. At the time this one was made, Duke Ellington’s Orchestra had just started as the house band at the famous Cotton Club in Harlem which soon established the venue as the hottest nightspot in New York. That almost didn’t happen: the residency was initially offered to King Oliver, but he wanted too much money and so it passed to the second choice, Duke Ellington. The rest, as they say, his history.
Anyway, this is a digitally remastered version of the original Okeh recording, which brings out the best of the Ellington Band of that time, especially the great Wellman Braud who introduced the style of walking bass that quickly established itself as a mainstay of every rhythm section.
This version of Ellington’s Orchestra was actually only a ten-piece band, but it was packed with great soloists and you’ll hear superb growl trumpet from James “Bubber” Miley, clarinet from Barney Bigard, and trombone from Joe “Tricky Sam” Nanton, among others. There’s also a nice example of the piano style of the young Duke Ellington himself. Enjoy!
In the Dark 