One week to go…

Posted in Education, Maynooth on September 13, 2021 by telescoper

It’s Monday 13th September 2021 which means that teaching begins a week today. Gulp.

We still don’t really have any idea how many students we’ll have on our courses in the first year. The 2021 Leaving Certificate Results only came out on Friday 3rd September and the first round of CAO offers went out last week (on Tuesday 7th). Today at 3pm is the deadline for accepting these offers, so we expect to have some reasonably firm information later this week. There are two more rounds of CAO offers, though, so there may be some late arrivals.

This week we’re having some orientation and induction sessions for the new students. I recorded several videos to help students make their choices and am doing two live webinars about Mathematical and Theoretical Physics. I’m not doing one for our denominated Theoretical Physics & Mathematics programme because students on that do not have options in the first year. There’s also a live online Q&A session.

Lectures for first-year students don’t start until 27th September (two weeks from today) but there will probably be quite a few students who accept their places this week and would be able to start with the rest of the students next Monday. I think we’ll devise some optional sessions for them to keep them amused until teaching starts in proper.

Meanwhile the returning students (second, third and fourth years) have been enrolling. That seems to have gone alright and we now have a good idea how many we’ll have in those classes.

Unfortunately we still have the problem I’ve already, mentioned that for visa reasons we’re short of a member of staff, who is likely to have to start giving his lectures remotely. He has been allocated one second year and one third year module. I’ll wait a day or two to see if his visa comes through and if not inform the students that these lectures will be online. I suspect the students won’t be happy but it’s out of my hands. The visa application has been waiting for months for an answer from the Immigration Service in Ireland, which is a very poor level of performance by them.

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The Self on the Shelf

Posted in Biographical, Books with tags , on September 12, 2021 by telescoper
Financial Times Weekend Edition

In this Weekend’s Financial Times there is an article (above) about why some of us find it hard to throw away old books. This range home to me because the work involved in packing and shipping my possessions to Ireland recently would have been considerably reduced had I thrown away my books, all 25 boxes of them. The removers who did the packing mentioned that they dislike packing books because it takes so long. You have to use small boxes otherwise they are too heavy to shift but mainly it’s because books aren’t all the same size so it can be awkward to pack them efficiently.

Anyway, it would have been a lot easier not to have bothered moving them and , but I just find it very difficult throw books away. So there they are on my shelves (or part of them).

They’re arranged somewhat randomly because I just put them wherever they would fit. This is the packing problem in reverse: it’s hard to organize books by theme or author when they can differ so much in dimension that they don’t fit. For this reason I tend to arrange books by height but I can usually remember the size and cover colour so I can find them quite quickly.

The various gaps are because some books are currently on loan friends while another is on my bedside cabinet (as I realized when I was unpacking that I hadn’t read it yet and am now doing so).

My house in Maynooth came equipped with a large selection of bookshelves. Above you see half the shelves in my sitting room. The hallway is also lined with built-in bookcases; the spare room has a set of similar shelves and my study has four standalone bookcases (of the ‘Billy’ variety, for those of you familiar with Ikea). I also have a small bookcase unit in the kitchen in which I keep cookery and gardening books. All of these are full (or nearly full). That amounts to well over a thousand books altogether – and no, they’re not mainly dictionaries.

So why do I have so many books?

The FT article hits on some of the reasons. There are definitely some that I consult regularly, for different reasons. Reference books such as dictionaries are obvious examples. I also have quite a few old maths and physics textbooks which I keep because they’re useful sources of homework problems and exam questions. I dip into poetry books quite regularly too as one can read a couple of poems at a time; I have a habit of putting a volume of poetry in my pocket when I travel on the bus or train. Quite a few of these and other books have scribbles in the margins, another habit of mine.

Other books I keep because they remind me of the experience of reading them. Just as you might keep a souvenir of a visit to a foreign land, a book is a memento of a journey of the mind. That doesn’t explain however why I tend to keep books I’ve read but didn’t enjoy!

Among the other ideas suggested in the FT article is that a library of books is that they are statement of identity or even a form of bragging: you display them to impress visitors to your house with your intellect and erudition. I don’t think that works for me, though, as I don’t have many visitors and didn’t even before the pandemic. In any case I think most people aren’t likely to be “impressed” by stacks of books – they’re more likely to think you’re a weirdo.

But there’s another reason missed by the analysis in the Financial Times and that is that books actually look quite nice on shelves. Covering a wall in that way saves you the bother of having to paint it!

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Musée des Beaux Arts

Posted in Art, Poetry with tags , , , on September 11, 2021 by telescoper

Reminiscing about the events of twenty years ago I was reminded of this poem by W.H. Auden, arguably his greatest, which for some reason I have never posted before. The painting referred to in the second part of the poem is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder which is in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, a visit to which inspired Auden to write this poem in 1938. I remember being quite amused when I saw it in the same gallery about 15 years ago, because it took me a while to spot Icarus! It made me think of one of those Where’s Wally cartoons…

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

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Memories of 9/11

Posted in Biographical, Politics with tags , , on September 11, 2021 by telescoper

Today is 11th September 2021 which means it is exactly twenty years since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon which led to the loss of almost three thousand civilian lives (and many more in the longer term). At the risk of contributing to the deluge of (mainly mawkish) reminiscences about the happenings on this day a decade ago, let me just give a brief account of my recollection. The events of 9/11 are, I suspect, etched on many a memory in much the same way as people remember what they were doing when President Kennedy was assassinated.

For what it’s worth, I was actually at a conference on that day. It was called A New Era in Cosmology, and was hosted in the fine city of Durham; in fact one of the organizers was a certain Tom Shanks, an occasional commenter on this blog. Above you will see part of the conference poster which I took from a recent Facebook post by him where I also found the text below. I was also reminded that 9/11 was the first day of that meeting and that I gave a talk on the first morning, the last before lunch. Such was the effect of the events that unfolded that day that I had completely forgotten about that.

What I do remember is sitting near the back of the lecture theatre after we returned from lunch, listening to one of the afternoon talks – I can’t remember who it was by – when a dear friend of mine, Manuela, came into the auditorium and walked down the aisle, stopped by me. She tugged my arm, mumbled something about the “Twin Towers” and then ran back up the stairs and out of the lecture theatre. Thinking it was something to do with Wembley Stadium, I followed her out and she explained what had happened. We found a TV set, around which a crowd had already formed. The coverage was, not surprisingly, shambolic and it was not until late afternoon that the scale of what had happened became clearer.

There were rumours of more planes likely to be involved in attacks and discussions about whether the military might have to shoot down civilian aircraft. Fortunately that wasn’t the case. I had a friend visiting New York at the time and was unable to contact her by mobile, so was worried, but I don’t think anyone was able to contact anyone in New York by mobile phone in those hours and it turns out she was fine.

Meanwhile the other participants were informed about the events on the other side of the Atlantic. It was an international conference with many US-based attendees who were understandably worried. The preface to the conference proceedings reveals that discussions were held about whether to cancel the meeting:

I think it was the correct decision to proceed with the conference, including the conference dinner and all that. As it happened all passengers flights were grounded for several days anyway, so nobody could get home who didn’t live in the UK.

The rest of the conference was pretty much business as usual as far as possible, although as the text above explains we did stand in silence in memory of the victims on the Thursday morning. When the meeting ended on the Friday quite a few people had to stay on in Durham or elsewhere before being able to fly home. It was this event that led to the heightened security measures at airports that we have been living with since then.

The loss of human life, though awful, turned out to be much less than had been feared and was subsequently dwarfed by the hundreds of thousands killed in the “War on Terror” set in motion by the events of that day. Will the recent withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan lead to further attacks of this sort?

Anyway, my point is not the politics but to invite a bit of audience participation. Would anyone else like to contribute their memories from that fateful day? If so, the comment box awaits your entry…

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Trepidation

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth on September 10, 2021 by telescoper

I spent most of today in various virtual meetings to do with next Semester’s teaching which is due to start on September 20th for returning students (and a week letter for first-years). I’ve also been keeping an eye on the student record system, as the returning students have started to register. We don’t expect most first-years to start enrolling until next week, although I did see a few early acceptances coming through…

One of the meetings I had today was about how to handle the first-year “Omnibus” science course in which some of the modules are taught in large classes which have to be held remotely and others in smaller groups which will be in person. One of the complications is if students have, say, two lectures online, which they can view at home, will they really travel to campus to attend another one in person? And if they have an online lecture immediately before or after an in-person one, where will they view it if they haven’t got time to get between home and campus (or vice versa)?

All this reminded me of similar discussions we had at this time last year. Back then all the plans came to naught anyway because everything went online anyway a few weeks into term as infections rose (see left panel below):

  • Last year
  • This year

Today 1620 new cases of Covid-19 were reported in Ireland. On this day last year the number was 196 I keep a full record here where you will see that between 10th September 2020 and 10th September 2021 3,378 deaths were recorded, most of them resulting from the big spike that followed Christmas. There is evidence of a dip right now, which is sincerely hope continues, but to me the rate of infections is alarmingly high. If infections start to climb then they’ll be starting from a much higher level than last year.

Of course we now have vaccines and the good news is that it seems that well over 90% of those over the age of 18 in Ireland will have been vaccinated by the start of term but with the Delta variant in circulation will this be enough?

At least we have had a significant change in the wording given to students: masks are now “mandatory” in lecture theatres.

I still think there’s a significant chance we have to revert to online teaching just as we did last year. Looking on the bright side at least we know how to do that now, as we’ve done it before.

But that’s enough worrying for this week. I’m now going to have a glass of wine and cook myself some dinner. Sautéed chicken with Cavolo Nero and Parmesan, in case you were wondering.

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Attica Blues

Posted in History, Jazz, Music with tags , , on September 9, 2021 by telescoper

I was reminded just now that today marks the 50th anniversary of the Attica Prison Rebellion, the bloodiest prison riot in American history which began on 9th September 1971 as a protest against poor living conditions in the Attica “correctional facility” in New York state. Four days of violence ensued that ended in the deaths of 32 inmates and 11 prison officers, along with scores of wounded.

That episode inspired a brilliant album by Archie Shepp, which I have on LP (above), which is dedicated to George Jackson, a leading member of the Black Panthers who was shot dead while attempting to escape from San Quentin prison in California in August 1971, an event which contributed to the tensions in Attica prison that led to the riot a few weeks later.

Musically, the album is a fusion of soul, funk and avant-garde Jazz, the arrangements incorporating strings and vocals alongside the jazz soloists. The sound is absolutely redolent of the early 70s. Here’s the title track, Attica Blues:

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Back to the Veggie Box

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Maynooth on September 9, 2021 by telescoper

Still life with vegetables

Since I’ve now been reunited with my kitchenware, cooking utensils and whatnot I thought I’d try to sort out a routine that enables me to eat a bit more adventurously and healthily. I’ve been a bit lazy in that regard over the last few years.

Many years ago when I lived in Nottingham I decided on a plan to increase the quantity and quality of the vegetables I was eating by ordering a weekly box  from an organic supplier. The one I picked there was called River Nene who provided very good stuff all year around. When I moved to Cardiff I had to cancel the arrangement, and I remained predominantly inorganic while I was renting a flat there. When I finally managed to buy a new house and move in, though, I looked to reestablish the regular deliveries. I was pleased to find a company called River Ford, which is kind of affiliated to River Nene, and which undertook deliveries of organic produce in the Cardiff area. I kept that up until I moved to Sussex. I did resume for a while when I returned to Cardiff in 2016 but the company changed the delivery arrangements suddenly and without telling me and I couldn’t use them anymore.

Anyway, I found a company called HarvestDay that provides a similar service here in Ireland that delivers fresh, seasonal organic vegetables direct from the farm to the customer. I decided to place a trial order to check them out before placing a regular order. The first box came this morning, delivered by a nice young man called Josh, and I am very pleased with it. Among other things there was a squash, Calabrese broccoli, spring onions and Cavolo Nero as shown in the picture.

There are several reasons why I choose to get my vegetables delivered this way.

First and foremost, organically grown vegetables fresh from the farm definitely taste far nicer than the bland varieties carried by most mainstream suppliers, including both supermarkets and local greengrocers. Once you’ve tasted how ‘carrotty’ a carrot should be you’ll never want to eat one of those supermarket ones that look too orange to be true and have no flavour at all.  This applies not just to carrots but to most vegetables: fresh organic ones are so much better.

Some supermarkets do carry organic ranges but the prices are usually astronomical, and they are often shipped in from all around the world. That brings me to the second point which is that all (or virtually all) the vegetables I get in my weekly box are grown locally. They’re correspondingly fresh and the environmental impact of bulk transportation is also lessened.

Third, the nature of the scheme is that all the vegetables are seasonal. I think it’s quite sad that people have largely lost respect for the seasons by virtue of the fact that you can get strawberries all year around in supermarkets. I think it’s good to celebrate the natural cycle of things by eating  the correct food when it happens to be ready. You wouldn’t want to have Xmas dinner every day, so why not be prepared to wait until October to eat fresh sweetcorn?  To every thing there is a season. There’s always something yummy to eat if you’re prepared to be imaginative with your cooking.

And that’s the final point.. If you place a standing order for a small box of vegetables every week, the composition varies from week to week and with the time of year. The company does email and post on its website the contents of the following week’s boxes, but I generally don’t look at it. When this sort of box arrives, it’s usually a mixture of staples plus things that are not so familiar, and often something I’ve never cooked before.  If it hadn’t been for the veggie box, I would probably never have found out about how to cook chard, romanesco, jerusalem artichokes and celeriac. I look forward to these surprises. Not knowing exactly what’s coming forces me to cook new things, and if I don’t know how to cook them there’s always google. That’s why I get vegetables this way rather than going to a shop. It forces me to be a bit less lazy.

Of course, the summer salads and lighter things have now finished and, with winter coming on, there will be more root vegetables. I think the heavier vegetables tend to put some people off a bit, but there’s enough variety to keep it fun. My practice is to eat the more perishable things first, then move onto the rest. If it looks like things are going to go off or be unused I usually chuck them into a vegetable curry, which can be frozen or eaten over several days. Spicy dishes improve with time.

Each box looks like a lot of food, but I always manage to eat most of it. I have to admit that not all my culinary experiments are successful, but more often than not I am pleasantly surprised. I tried curried beetroot a few years ago, with more than a little trepidation. It turned out to be absolutely delicious, even if I did have to ad-lib a bit with some of the ingredients. The only drawback was an unexpectedly colourful trip to the lavatory the next morning…

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Offers and Points

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on September 8, 2021 by telescoper
Today’s Irish Times Supplement

Yesterday the Central Admissions Office released the first round offers for entry to Irish Universities; today the details appeared in the Irish newspapers. I don’t usually buy a newspaper on a weekday but I couldn’t resist getting a copy of the Irish Times so I could pore over the information presented in the CAO supplement, of which the picture above shows only a part, rather like I tend to do with the football results or cricket scores.

As expected, the points required for courses are significantly higher than last year. As a result of the Covid-19 pandemic the School Leaving Certificate involved a combination of school-based assessment and examinations that obviously worked to the benefit of the students. Looking through the results I struggled to find courses where the points requirement had fallen, but there are a few examples.

Students who have met the requirements for a course they applied to have until 13th September to decide whether to accept. There is then another round of offers starting on 20th September and closing on 22nd September. Here in Maynooth we start teaching new students on 27th September so the CAO process is very truncated this year. I’d imagine that most students will settle on their choices in the first round.

My biggest worry this year is now not to do with the business of offers and acceptances but the mad scramble for accommodation at the start of term. It’s going to be a stressful few weeks for everyone.

Anyway, let’s take a look a the offers for Maynooth. Most students in the Department of Theoretical Physics come either through our denominated programme MH206 Theoretical Physics & Mathematics (TP&M for short) or through MH201 Science (the so-called “Omnibus” Science programme):

The denominated programme in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics (MH206) is up 11 points on 521 from last year’s 510 but that’s not an exceptionally high figure in historical terms although it is one of the higher offers for Maynooth. Points for MH201 Science are also up this year to 401 from 360 last year. This is higher than I can remember any previous year I have been here.

We don’t normally publish information on how many offers have been made* so I’ll just say that on the basis of first-round offers it looks like we have done pretty well on TP&M. A good thing about this course is that it doesn’t involve laboratory work so is not constrained by capacity in the way that experimental subjects are. The total number of first-year students on MH201 for example is largely constrained by space in Chemistry labs: students are given a free choice of subjects in Year 1 so we have to allow for them all to choose any subject which leads to a bottleneck. Students on MH201 don’t choose their first-year subjects until they enrol so we won’t find out what numbers are like on this course for some time.

*I know, and could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.

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Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8, arranged for Wind Quintet

Posted in Biographical, Music, Uncategorized with tags , , , on September 7, 2021 by telescoper

One of the treasured items in my CD collection recently moved from Cardiff is a boxed set of the Shostakovich String Quartets by the Fitzwilliam String Quartet:

When I took it out of the packing case last night it suddenly reminded of the following video I saw a few weeks ago. I think the String Quartets contain some of Shostakovich’s finest music, and the 8th (Opus 110, in C Minor) – written in just three days after the composer saw the aftermath of the bombing of Dresden – is especially intense. I don’t usually like rearrangements of string quartets for other instruments – there’s something very special about the texture produced by string instruments which is difficult to improve upon – but this is really interesting. It’s arranged by David Walter for five wind instruments (clarinet, French horn, cor anglais, flute and bassoon) and played by the Aquillos Wind Quintet, an unusual combination that provides a very fresh take on this piece while maintaining its dark expressiveness and brooding atmosphere.

P.S. Regular readers of this blog might recognize the clarinet player…

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Two weeks to go…

Posted in Education, Maynooth on September 6, 2021 by telescoper

Science Building Foyer

I’ve decided to escape from the boxes and packing materials in my house in order to come onto campus. The Science Building is still rather empty but, despite the deserted appearance of the foyer above, there are a few other people working here. In fact, later this afternoon I’ll be having the first in-person meeting I’ve had with my PhD student for about a year; we’ve met regularly once a week via Teams so this will be a change!

It’s 6th September 2021 which means that teaching begins two weeks today. On top of the problem I’ve already mentioned that we’re short of a member of staff, we still don’t really have any idea how many students we’ll have on our courses. The 2021 Leaving Certificate Results only came out on Friday 3rd September and the first round of CAO offers will be published tomorrow (7th September) so please spare a thought for the admissions teams who have been working through the weekend to sort things out. We’ll get our first information tomorrow afternoon how things have gone, but we won’t have firm numbers until very close to the start of term, which is why teaching for new students won’t begin until 27th September, a week later than returning students.

Today is also Consultation Day, on which students can discuss their results in the August Repeat Examinations with members of staff (including myself).  Students who had disappointing results may need to repeat the year; others may progress to the next year of studies, having passed their repeats. Others who passed some but not others may be able to progress but with a restricted range of options. It’s all quite complicated but the few inquiries I’ve dealt with today have been resolved quite straightforwardly.

There’s a lot to do over the next fortnight, but it’s quite a relief to be in a situation where we can actually start doing out jobs rather than  just wait for others to do theirs. As Gandalf said on the eve of the Battle for Minas Tirith:

The board is set, the pieces are moving. We come to it at last…

 

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