Well, as promised yesterday I went back into my office at Maynooth University this afternoon. I didn’t achieve very much apart from resetting some of the sophisticated equipment (see above) but it’s a start…
To be honest I was a little distracted by the cricket at Lord’s where there was a remarkable turnaround in Indian’s favour on the last day. Looking like they were going to struggle to save the game with six wickets down for 181, a lead of just 154 overnight, and losing two quick wickets in the morning, India went on to declare on 298 for 8, then bowled England out this evening for just 120. It’s been an excellent Test Match, full of twists and turns, ending in a result that seemed very unlikely at the start of the day.
Call me old-fashioned but you can’t beat Test cricket. Nothing compares to it!
It’s been a rather busy weekend as I’ve tried to complete the grading my repeat examinations. I’m almost done but I have six more scripts to do, which I will finish tomorrow morning. Once again I’ve set a bad example by being later than everyone else, but at least I’m not going to miss the deadline. We have our Examination Board on Friday and they’ll all be done and dusted by then.
Friday is 20th August, which means it’s exactly a month from then until the start of teaching in Semester 1 of the new academic year. We have now received draft instructions on how this is planned to start. They are not in final form yet, having been circulated to Heads of Department for comments. I’ll refrain from saying more in public until they are published but in a nutshell we are anticipating more-or-less a full return to on-campus teaching with no reduced capacity in lecture theatres but with slightly shorter lectures and staggered start and end times.
That is if everything is under control in a month. The latest Covid-19 figures are not reassuring. The latest 7-day rolling average is about 1800 new cases to day, which is as high as it was in January. Hospitalizations are increasing, though at a lower level than before presumably because of the vaccination effect. Mortality rates are unclear (to me) because of the continuing disruption to reporting caused by the HSE computer problem. I’m very conscious that all our plans were changed at the last minute at the start of last academic year, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Hopefully the incidence rate will stop rising over the next few weeks.
On Friday I took a prospective PhD student and his family for a walk around campus, mainly to introduce them to the famous Library Cat (who is fine, by the way, but bothered by wasps getting into his dish when I fed him). Most staff and research students in the Department are still working from home, but there were one or two people around to say hello. When I entered my office I saw I hadn’t changed the date on my calendar since June 15th, two months ago. By the look of the sports fields at the back of the college they haven’t been mown for much longer than that: at the moment they look more like hayfields!
I have been fairly content working from home over the summer (with two interruptions for travelling to Cardiff and back), but I really have to get into the habit of going to the office if we’re going to welcome students in person. I think when I’ve finished my marking tomorrow morning I’ll start trying to get back into the routine. For one thing quite a few things we moved before lockdown need to be moved back to their proper places. When I was waiting for the train from Cardiff on Thursday I saw railway workers removing the social distancing signs from the platform. I guess we’ll be doing that too.
I do hope all this isn’t premature, but I have a nagging feeling…
I was reminded yesterday that today, 14th August, is the 30th anniversary of the start of the arXiv so I thought I’d send a quick birthday greeting to mark the occasion. In case you weren’t aware, arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive containing (currently) 1,928,825 scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics.
There was a precursor to the arXiv in the form of an email distribution list for preprints, but arXiv proper started on 14th August 1991. It was based at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) with a mirror site in SISSA (Trieste) that was used by those of us in Europe. In the beginning, arXiv was quite a small-scale thing and it wasn’t that easy to upload full papers including figures. In fact the SISSA system was run from a single IBM 386 PC (called “Babbage”). As it expanded, the running of arXiv was taken over Cornell University. You can read more about the history here.
You have to remember that journals didn’t generally have electronic submission in those days: you had to send paper manuscripts in the post to the Editorial office. Likewise many of us carried on sending out paper preprints for some time after the arXiv was set up. Younger researchers should be grateful they don’t have to put up with the absolute chore of producing papers the old-fashioned way!
The astrophysics section of arXiv (“astro-ph”) started in April 1992. Although astrophysicists generally were quick to latch on to this new method of distributing preprints, it took me a little time to get onto arXiv: my first papers did not appear there until February 1993; my first publication was in 1986 so there are quite a few of my early papers that aren’t on arXiv at all. In 1993 I was working at Queen Mary & Westfield College (as it was then called). I was working a lot with collaborators based in Italy at the time and they decided to start posting our joint papers on arXiv. Without that impetus it would have taken me much longer to get to grips with it.
In case you’re interested, my first paper to appear on the arXiv was this one on 23rd February 1993 but it was followed a day later by two others, this one and that one. I don’t remember very well, but this was an exercise in catching up and all three of those papers were actually published in journals before we put them on arXiv. It was only later that we got into the habit of posting papers on arXiv at the same time as submitting to a journal, which I think is the best way to do it!
The Open Journal of Astrophysics would not have been possible without the arXiv but in a wider sense the astrophysics community has a very great deal to thank the arXiv for, but remember that it is funded by donations and is run on a shoestring. If you agree that it’s a tremendously useful asset for your research then please consider making a donation.
One of the things I did during my recent visit to Wales was to pack up my old vinyl LPs for removal to Ireland. I have quite a lot of them on digital formats now but that’s not true of all of them so I’m looking forward to listening to the others very soon.
I bought this particular album Blues Bag as a curiosity as it features the unlikely combination of Buddy De Franco on clarinet (bass clarinet on several tracks, including the one below) and Art Blakey on drums.
Whatever I thought the combination of the smooth style and impeccable technical virtuosity of Buddy De Franco with the powerful and aggressive drum foundryman Art Blakey would be like before I bought the LP, when I first heard it the thing that struck me was how superbly they complemented each other.
Anyway, I thought I would post a track so you can decide what you think. This is Dizzy Gillespie tune called Kush. I think this version is great, with very fine work on the drums by Blakey.
Back from my short trip, I now have time to announce another publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was published at the end of last month, but owing to the holiday season there was a delay in activating the DOI and registering the metadata so I have delayed posting about it until just now. It is the seventh paper in Volume 4 (2021) and the 38th in all.
The latest publication is entitled A Differentiable Model of the Assembly of Individual and Populations of Dark Matter Halos. The authors are Andrew P. Hearin, Jonás Chaves-Montero, Matthew R. Becker and Alex Alarcon, all of the Argonne National Laboratory.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here. This one is also in the folder marked Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.
We’ve had a bit of a surge in submissions over the last few weeks – no doubt due to authors using their “vacation” to finish off papers. August is not the best month for finding referees, but we’ll do our best to process them quickly!
Posted in Biographical on August 12, 2021 by telescoper
Missions accomplished, I’m now on my way back to Ireland via Birmingham. The trip by train from Cardiff is quite pleasant, a large part of it alongside the mighty River Severn..
At any rate the journey was more interesting than this ticket suggested:
Anyway I’ll be back in Maynooth this evening and then I’ll have a weekend mostly spent marking examinations..
So here I am sitting in a virtually empty house in Cardiff, the bulk of my worldly goods now in transit to Ireland. The house seems a lot bigger with nothing in it. It also feels a bit strange to see all your possessions listed in an inventory.
The 9th and 10th of August were the first opportunities to do the removal from my Pontcanna residence, so I flew over at the weekend to be here to supervise the packing. I paid for the removals firm to do the actual packing, which was well worth the extra money. The company told me it would take two full days to pack up, which surprised me. In fact they did most of it on Monday arriving at 9.30am and departing around 3pm. Yesterday they arrived at 8.30am and were finished by 10.30am. They could easily have done it all in one day but they only had a smallish van which they filled up before leaving on Monday.
My stuff now gets stored in a container in a warehouse for a couple of weeks or so before being delivered to Maynooth by ferry. They’re doing this removal as a return load, which means waiting for a lorry to arrive to the UK from Ireland which would otherwise return empty. Taking my stuff on the return journey makes it more efficient for them and also quite a lot cheaper for me. This seemed the best option as I am not in a particular rush to receive delivery. I’ve waited a year so a couple more weeks won’t matter!
The fact they finished early yesterday got me out of an awkward situation. The powers that be scheduled three repeat examinations simultaneously at 2.30pm yesterday so I assumed I would have to be scrabbling around with my mobile phone in amongst the boxes and packing materials, which might have been awkward.
As it turned out I had plenty time to walk across Bute Park to Cardiff University where a former colleague in the School of Physics & Astronomy was kind enough to let me use an empty office and eduroam did the rest. All three papers passed without incident, and I had the added bonus of a few pints in the Flute and Tankard afterwards.
Yesterday was A-level results day so there was much talk about the new academic year. It seems Cardiff University is going to resume face-to-face teaching in September. I hope the School of Physics & Astronomy gets a good intake of first-years and that all goes well for all students and staff as they prepare to resume some form of normality. Cardiff has been very good to me over the years and I wish everyone there all the best for the future.
Incidentally I popped in to the Data Innovation Research Institute (where I used to work) while I was at the School of Physics and Astronomy, just to see if I could say hello to anyone I used to work with. The office is just over the other side of a car park from the Queen’s Buildings. I found that the folks are being relocated from the old office to a new building along with Mathematics and Computer Science up near Cathays Station. There was only one person there, packing up his stuff for removal…
Time to announce another publication in the Open Journal of Astrophysics. This one was actually published at the end of last month, but owing to the holiday season there was a delay in activating the DOI and registering the metadata so I have delayed posting about it until just now. It is the sixth paper in Volume 4 (2021) and the 37th in all.
The latest publication is entitled Euclid: Forecasts for k-cut 3 × 2 point statistics. The first author is Peter L. Taylor of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, USA and there are almost 100 authors altogether. This is definitely the paper with the longest author list we have published so far, and also the first paper we have published on behalf of the Euclid Consortium. I am a member of Euclid so I of course recused myself from the editorial process.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay which includes the abstract:
You can click on the image to make it larger should you wish to do so. You can find the arXiv version of the paper here. This one is, fairly obviously, in the Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics folder..
The Euclid Consortium has a strict protocol for papers it publishes which, together with the large number of authors, not to mention the pandemic, meant it took quite a long time to make the revisions suggested by referees. Still, it has turned out a very nice paper I think. I am also very pleased that a major consortium such as Euclid has decided to publish in OJAp.
We have another bunch of papers in the pipeline – in fact one further has already been published – so watch this space for further developments!
I’ll end with a reminder to prospective authors that the OJA now has the facility to include supplementary files (e.g. code or data sets) along with the papers we publish. If any existing authors (i.e. of papers we have already published) would like us to add supplementary files retrospectively then please contact us with a request!
Working at home all day yesterday I thought I might take a break and go for a walk…
… and then I thought “perhaps not”.
The inclement weather did however remind me of something I should have posted last Sunday, namely that 1st August is regarded in the traditional Celtic calendar as the first day of Autumn. In Irish September is Meán Fómhair (middle of autumn/harvest season) and October is Deireadh Fómhair); August itself is Lúnasa.
Each season lasts approximately three months. Traditionally, winter starts on 1st November and includes November December and January (with the Winter Solstice in the middle). Summer consists of May June and July (with the Summer Solstice in the middle). That period is definitely the best time of the year in Ireland, actually. Spring (February to April) and Autumn (August to October) are likewise roughly bisected by the two equinoxes. It all makes astronomical sense.
This also makes sense of something that puzzled me until yesterday, which is why the repeat examinations held in August (which I should be marking instead of wasting my time blogging) are called the Autumn repeats in Maynooth instead of Summer repeats (which is what they are called everywhere else I’m aware of). That’s because August is in the Autumn.
P. S. The title is meant to be a play on Autumn Leaves…
Since my recent post about Latin I’ve been wracking my brain trying the remember the textbook we used at school to learn Latin grammar. Now, with the aid of an old school friend, I know the answer:
Part 2 took us up to O-level, but I think we used Part 1 in earlier years alongside the Cambridge Latin Course featuring the famous character Caecilius:
Caecilius was a resident of Pompeii and he snuffed it during the eruption of Vesuvius at the end of the first set of (orange) books, but the course continued with different characters in different coloured books including one set based in Britain.
The books by Wilding are very traditional grammar school texts. They weren’t easy going for us kids, and were quite formal and with some difficult exercises. They’re probably too old-fashioned to be in use now, but I’m tempted to acquire copies to see how much I remember!
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In the Dark 