There’s a competition running at ITP2022 that involves holding out a copy of the book Gravitation by Misner Thorne & Wheeler in one hand at arm’s length for as long as you can following the instructions below:
The current record is an impressive three minutes! How well can you do?
UPDATE: The winner of the competition was John Brennan, formerly of Maynooth University, with a time of 3 minutes and 29 seconds!
Just a quick note to say I’ve spent today not only out of the office but out of Maynooth at the first conference I’ve attended since before the pandemic started. The Irish Theoretical Physics Meeting (ITP22) is taking place from today (Wednesday 25th) to Friday 27th at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. I’ll be commuting from Maynooth for the rest of this week. There is quite a big contingent from the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth in fact.
My talk isn’t until tomorrow morning but I chaired one of the sessions this afternoon. It’s an interesting meeting with an eclectic mixture of talks and lots of time for the sort of face-to-face discussion we’ve all missed for so long. If that weren’t enough it’s also a nice change from marking examinations…!
I’ve been at home today, doing the last of my examination marking, doing some Open Journal business, and preparing a presentation for later this week so I’m indebted to my colleague Dr Joost Slingerland for the above picture of Maynooth University Library Cat.
I’ve seen him quite a few times recently, as I’ve been on South Campus to collect exam scripts etc, and he seems in fine feline fettle. In the picture he looks like he’s guarding his Library from unwelcome visitors.
Soon the exams will be over and the campus will be relatively quiet again, though no doubt he will continue to be kept well provisioned and not short of company when he wants some.
It’s been a very busy day so in lieu of a proper post I thought I’d recycle an old joke with a new picture I took on my way to collect some examination scripts earlier today for marking.
I’m sad to have to use the medium of this blog to report the tragic death of the Hubble parameter. It had been declining for some time and, despite appearing to pick up recently, the end was somewhat inevitable. Condolences to the other parameters, especially Ω (who was in a close relationship with H), on this sad loss.
An older version of this joke, posted 11 years ago, can be found here.
Time for a quick reaction to an exciting final day of the Premiership season.
There were 20 candidates, no absences, and no extenuating circumstances recorded. The final marks are all in and we can now proceed to the classification of honours:
Looking at the last column we can see that the top four all get first-class honours, with Man City (top of the class) and Liverpool in line for prizes. Arsenal may also end up with a 1st, possibly depending on the result of a viva and consultation with the external examiner.
Among the others, Man Utd will be disappointed with their 2.2. By contrast Brighton will be delighted to have scraped theirs.
Newcastle in 11th only get a 3rd but they did at one point look like failing so will be relieved; they might also be bumped up to a 2.2 after a viva or if there are extenuating circumstances. There is a long tail of poor marks near the bottom: Norwich, Watford and Burnley all drop out but may return to resit at some stage.
(I think may have been spending too long recently marking examinations…)
I don’t know very much about Australian politics but I was delighted yesterday to hear news of Rupert Murdoch’s defeat in the Federal elections. The losing leader of the illiberal party, and previous PM, Scott Morrison, has now resigned. I’ve got nothing against Mr Morrison’s family, but I’m glad he’s going to be spending more time with them.
One thing that confused me is that the victorious Australian Labor Party is the spelling of the word “Labor”. I think Australians use the English spelling “labour” for the noun or verb so why the political party uses a different spelling for the political party is unclear to me. It is however just a name, and we all know that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Some people refer to “labor” as the American spelling but it’s not as simple as that. The English word “labour” is derived from the 3rd declension Latin noun labor/laboris from which in turn is derived the verb laborare. The same sort of Latin origin is the case for many other familiar words: honor, color, valor, humor, vapor, rigor, and so on. All these were original Latin nouns that came into English via Norman French in the course of which they acquired the “u”.
The person responsible for the spelling of these words in American English (ie “labor” etc) was Noah Webster who thought English spelling was unnecessarily complicated and reverted to the Latin in these cases. It was also he who turned “centre” into “center”, for example. This spelling was introduced in his famous dictionary, first published in 1828, and subsequently acquired by the G&C Merriam Co and still in circulation nowadays after many revisions as the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
Anyway, my point is that the English often look down on such spellings as “labour” and “colour” as vulgar Americanism but these are the “original” (unfrenchified) spellings.
It’s interesting that Norman French words sometimes displaced Old English words entirely but sometimes the Old English form survives as synonym. For example, the Old English word for “colour” is “hew” which survives as the English “hue”. The Old English word for “labour” is “swink” which has completely disappeared from common usage (though it is listed in the One True Chambers Dictionary with the description archaic).
All of which nonsense gives me an excuse to mention that I managed to get an HC (“Highly Commended”) for my clue in Azed Competition No. 2603 which I thought was a very tough puzzle to complete, which is no doubt why there were only 117 entries!
Just a very quick reblog of this post because the deadline is tomorrow (22nd May) at 23.30. It’s a for a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Theoretical Quantum Physics, interpreted broadly to include quantum computation, quantum information theory, quantum many-body systems, quantum field theory, and applications thereof to condensed matter and high-energy physics, etc.
Just a short post passing on the information that we have a permanent Lectureship (Assistant Professorship) available in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University. You can find the details, including a full Job Description and salary, here.
For the purposes of this position we interpret Quantum Physics broadly to include quantum computation, quantum information theory, quantum many-body systems, quantum field theory, and applications thereof to condensed matter and high-energy physics, etc.
This position is the first of several to be advertised across the Departments of Theoretical & Experimental Physics at Maynooth University, in areas including Astronomy and Earth Science, on top of this opportunity at Professorial level in Observational Astrophysics or Cosmology. Watch this space for more details!
The position is available from 1st September 2022 and the deadline for applications is 23.30 on Sunday 22nd May 2022 and you should apply through the Maynooth jobs…
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I saw a paper some months ago by former Sussex colleague Xavier Calmet and collaborators that attracted quite a lot of press coverage largely based on a press release from the University of Sussex that claimed:
Stephen Hawking’s famous black hole paradox solved after hair-raising discovery
(If you want to learn more about the black hole information paradox you could start here.)
The press release is pure unadulterated hype. The paper in Physical Review Letters is actually rather good in my opinion but it says next to nothing about the black hole information paradox. Unfortunately the Sussex press release was picked up by the BBC’s science editor Pallab Ghosh who turned it into a very garbled article. Unfortunately Ghosh has quite a lot of form when it comes to producing nonsensical takes on science results. See, for example, this piece claiming that recent results from the Dark Energy Survey cast doubt on Einstein’s general theory of relativity when they do nothing of the sort.
Fortunately in the case of the black hole paper David Whitehouse has done a good job at demolishing the “BBC’s black hole baloney” here so I don’t need to repeat the arguments.
What I will mention however is that there is an increasing tendency for university press offices to see themselves entirely as marketing agencies instead of informing and/or educating the public. Press releases about scientific research nowadays rarely make any attempt at accuracy – they are just designed to get the institution concerned into the headlines. In other words, research is just a marketing tool.
This isn’t the only aspect of the marketisation of universities. If an academic tries to organize a public engagement event or do some schools outreach activity, the chances are their institution will hijack it and turn it into a marketing exercise, aimed exclusively at student recruitment. Universities are increasingly unconcerned with education and research and obsessed with income.
Forget the phony controversies about woke politics and free speech manufactured by right-wing press. The real culture war in modern universities is between those who believe in the intrinsic value of higher education and those who see it simply as a means of generating profit by whatever means possible. As in any war, truth is the first casualty.
And now for something completely different…
The other evening it was warm enough for me to sit out in the garden, listening to the birdsong until it got dark. I couldn’t identify some of the sounds so when I came inside I started googling about for various combinations of “birds singing in the evening”. To cut a long story short I found this, and it’s been in my head ever since so I thought I’d share it here.
The song Mbube by South African singer and composer Solomon Linda was first performed in 1939 and was an immediate hit in his native land. Since then it has had more cover versions than I’ve had hot dinners, mostly with an English title The Lion Sleeps Tonight or Wimoweh, a not-entirely-accurate phonetic attempt to render the isiZulu phrase uyimbube (“you are a lion”) which occurs in the song. Solomon Linda sold the rights to the Gallo record company for just ten shillings in 1949 so never received significant income from the worldwide sales. The song was also used in the Disney film The Lion King without any royalties being paid, leading to a lawsuit brought by Linda’s surviving relatives (which was settled out of court).
There are two other fascinating things about this tune.
The first is that the “lion” referred to in the song is none other than the famous Zulu king Shaka Zulu (the subject of this famous poem) who acquired legendary status after his death. Rather like King Arthur, there was a folk belief that Shaka is not dead but only sleeping and one day he will return to liberate his people from their colonial oppressors.
The second is that the (mostly wordless) falsetto vocals were improvised by Solomon Linda (over wonderfully sonorous and rhythmically compelling bass riffs) but it was not until near the end (about 2:22) of this, the third, take that he was inspired to produce the melody that is now universally associated with the words “In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight”.
Anyway, here it is.
You may recall that I blogged here and here about a software platform called Researchfish and the heavy-handed reaction response to criticism by the provider of this “service”, a company called Interfolio, and the Government organization UK Research and Innovation that harvests the data thereby collected. In its response to Interfolio’s apparent misuse of data and bullying of academics who dared to express negative opinions about Researchfish – which I would say, based on my own experiences (admittedly several years ago), is a very poorly designed system – UKRI made a sort of non-apology that managed to make matters worse.
A couple of days ago, in response to a Freedom of Information request, UKRI released correspondence between itself and Infosys that shows not only that UKRI knew about the bullying by Infosys but actively encouraged it. The story is covered in full by Research Professional so I shall comment on briefly here.
Here’s an example from UKRI which talks about taking “disciplinary” action against someone for criticizing Researchfish on Twitter (even though they subsequently apologized and deleted the tweet) and goes on to list their grant awards, presumably in order to facilitate sanctions against the individual:
Here’s another that claims that bullying by Researchfish “set the right tone”:
Unbelievable. I bet the redacted bits are even worse!
It’s a shocking indictment of the culture at UKRI that they are prepared to behave in such a way, conniving in threats against the community it is supposed to be supporting. Moreover, Interfolio seems to be keener to police comments about Researchfish than it is to make improvements to its service. It can’t be healthy for researchers in the UK to have their freedom of speech stifled to protect a software company’s reputation.
The brevity and informality of the emails between UKRI and Infotech suggests they have a very cosy relationship. Does anyone know anything about the tendering process by which Interfolio acquired its contract with UKRI?
In the Dark 