Cristo Redentor – Donald Byrd

Posted in Jazz with tags , on June 2, 2020 by telescoper

Duke Pearson was inspired by the famous statue that looks down over Rio de Janeiro to write this tune, of which this is the very first version, put on record in 1963 and released a year later in 1964 to become an instant classic. It’s a wonderful fusion of jazz, blues and gospel music but above all it’s a gentle hymn to peace and respect.I don’t think I have to explain why I think it’s apt to put it up today.

Front and centre is Donald Byrd on trumpet, but the rest of the band includes Hank Mobley (tenor), Herbie Hancock (piano), Donald Best (vibes), Kenny Burrell (guitar), Butch Warren (bass) and Lex Humphries (drums). The choir consists of 8 voices (4 male, four female) but sadly they are not named on the liner notes.

 

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Cosmology Talks – Colin Hill on Early Dark Energy

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , , on June 2, 2020 by telescoper

Here is another one of those Cosmology Talks curated on YouTube by Shaun Hotchkiss.

In the talk, Colin Hill explains how even though early dark energy can alleviate the Hubble tension, it does so at the expense of increasing other tension. Early dark energy can raise the predicted expansion rate inferred from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), by changing the sound horizon at the last scattering surface. However, the early dark energy also suppresses the growth of perturbations that are within the horizon while it is active. This mean that, in order to fit the CMB power spectrum the matter density must increase (and the spectral index becomes more blue tilted) and the amplitude of the matter power spectrum should get bigger. In their paper, Colin and his coauthors show that this affects the weak lensing measurements by DES, KiDS and HSC, so that including those experiments in a full data analysis makes things discordant again. The Hubble parameter is pulled back down, restoring most of the tension between local and CMB measurements of H0, and the tension in S_8 gets magnified by the increased mismatch in the predicted and measured matter power spectrum.

The overall moral of this story is the current cosmological models are so heavily constrained by the data that a relatively simple fix in one one part of the model space tends to cause problems elsewhere. It’s a bit like one of those puzzles in which you have to arrange all the pieces in a magic square but every time you move one bit you mess up the others.

The paper that accompanies this talk can be found here.

And here’s my long-running poll about the Hubble tension:

 

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Welcome to Pride Month 2020!

Posted in Covid-19, LGBTQ+, Politics on June 1, 2020 by telescoper

Once again it’s time for a month of LGBTQ Pride.

Although the main Dublin Pride event has been cancelled this year because of the Covid-19 outbreak, there are still a number of virtual events going on.

Thus year more than any other Pride gives us an important opportunity to express solidarity to all grieving and fighting for a better world in the face of monstrous injustices such as the murder of George Floyd.

That includes those of us who are white and gay acknowledging that systematic racism exists and that by keeping quiet and doing nothing we are, however unintentionally, complicit in it.

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Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh

Posted in Maynooth with tags , , , on June 1, 2020 by telescoper

So here I am in Maynooth where it is a lovely sunny day and a Bank Holiday. Looking back through this blog I realise that this is my third June Bank Holiday in Ireland. Tempus fugit!

To celebrate the occasion here is a picture of Maynooth University Library Cat which I took when he was on post waiting for food a couple of days ago.

The June Bank Holiday (Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh) in Ireland is actually the equivalent of last week’s late 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. I understand Pentecost is when the Holy Spirit went down on the Disciples.

Anyway, because the date of Easter moves around in the calendar so does Whit Sunday, but it is usually in late May or early June. When the authorities decided to fix a statutory holiday at this time of year, presumably to reduce administrative difficulties, the UK went for late May and Ireland for early June. Whit Sunday was actually yesterday (31st May) so this year Lá Saoire i mí Mheitheamh coincides with Whit Monday.

Incidentally, when I was a lad, ‘Whit Week’ was always referred to as ‘Race Week’. Geordie Ridley’s famous music hall song The Blaydon Races begins “I went to Blaydon Races, ’twas on the 9th of June, Eighteen Hundred and Sixty Two on a summer’s afternoon…”. Easter Sunday fell on 20th April in 1862, so Whit Sunday was on 8th June. After raucous scenes at the Blaydon Races, they were scrapped and replaced with a Temperance Festival on the Town Moor in Newcastle which evolved into one of the largest open-air funfairs in Europe, The Hoppings, although I suppose there was any of that this year.

This year the Bank Holiday is a bit strange, what with the Covid-19 restrictions, and I still have exam marking to do, but I have decided to put the autoreply on for my work email and take the day off.

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This Violation

Posted in Film, Politics with tags , , , on May 31, 2020 by telescoper

A typically perceptive and powerful piece in the Guardian by Fintan O’Toole about dignity, violation and the Dominic Cummings has been turned into a short film by Mark Cousins. It features a hundred people, from all walks of life, each reading a line of it to camera. It’s very well worth watching.

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The Trees, by Philip Larkin

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on May 31, 2020 by telescoper

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

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What are scientific papers for?

Posted in Astrohype, Open Access with tags , , on May 30, 2020 by telescoper

Writing scientific papers and publishing them in academic journals is an essential part of the activity of a researcher. ‘Publish or perish’ is truer now than ever, and an extensive publication list is essential for anyone wanting to have a career in science.

But what are these papers actually for? What purpose do they serve?

I can think of two main purposes (which aren’t entirely mutually exclusive): one is to disseminate knowledge and ideas; the other is to confer status on the author(s) .

The academic journal began hundreds of years ago with the aim of achieving the former through distribution of articles in print form. Nowadays the distribution of research results is achieved much less expensively largely through online means. Nevertheless, journals still exist (largely, as I see it, to provide editorial input and organise peer review) .

Alongside this there is the practice of using articles as a measure of the ‘quality’ of an author. Papers in certain ‘prestigious’ ‘high impact’ journals are deemed important because they are indicators of status, like epaulettes on a uniform, and bibliometric data, especially citation counts, often seem to be more important than the articles themselves.

I thought it was just me getting cynical in my old age but a number of younger scientists I know have told me that the only reason they can see for writing papers is because you need to do it to get a job. There is no notion of disseminating knowledge just the need to establish priority and elevate oneself in the pecking order. In other words the original purpose of scientific publications has largely been lost.

I thought I’d test this by doing a (totally unscientific) poll here to see how my several readers think about this.

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Covid-19 in Ireland: the Pandemic’s Progress

Posted in Covid-19, Maynooth on May 29, 2020 by telescoper

I noticed last night when I was updated the numbers and graphs on my Covid-19 page that it is now 90 days since I started counting on 28th February. By way of an update here are the latest graphs (as of last night):

Mindful of a study that suggests that the general public do not understand log plots – I have had some angry messages on Twitter accusing me of deliberately misleading people by using a log axis – here are the daily updates on linear plots, first the record of new cases:

And second the recorded new deaths:

The latter appears rather noisy because of low numbers.

You may notice that these plots look a little different from those presented elsewhere (e.g. here). That is because I have treated the various retrospective corrections that have been made in a different way from others, generally by adjusting the cumulative totals but not the daily figure. For a full explanation of what I’ve done see the notes here. I also haven’t smoothed the data at all. Other representations tend to use a 7-day moving average to get rid of weekly artifacts of reporting, especially the “weekend effect” by which there appear to be fewer deaths on Saturday and Sunday.

If you don’t like log plots then you really won’t like this one, which is a plot of daily cases against the cumulative number on log-log axes:

I like this plot because I think the message is clear: it would give a straight line if the cases were growing exponentially, which was the case initially. You can see that both cases and deaths are well past this stage. In Ireland it seems the Covid-19 pandemic is under reasonably good control. According to the experts the value of the reproductive number R in Ireland is in the range 0.4 to 0.5, and it seems community transmission of the disease has almost stopped.

I haven’t left Maynooth since February so I’ve been here all through the lockdown. The overwhelming majority of people I’ve seen have been observing the restrictions. I can just think of just one occasion that was an exception, on the way into the local supermarket, when someone failed to observe the 2m social distancing when he pushed past me while I was washing my hands with the gel provided. When told by an assistant that he had to wait in line and wash his hands before coming in he refused and was then told to leave, which he eventually did after unleashing some foul language. He was obviously drunk, but probably a twat even when sober. Maynooth is a small and rather quiet place (especially when there are no students around, like now) and there may be worse issues elsewhere, but it does seem that Irish folk are behaving very sensibly.

For the record, as of last night there were 24,481 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Ireland and 1,639 people have died. That means that the number of deaths per million of population is approximately 332. That’s a lot fewer per capita than the UK (officially 553, but probably more like 900) a lot larger than, say, Denmark (which is of a similar size) which is on 98 Covid-19 deaths per million population or Norway which is on 44. The reason for the large number despite the stricter lockdown than the United Kingdom, seems to have been the number of deaths in care homes.

On this basis I’d summarise the situation by saying that Ireland hasn’t done all that well when you look at it in the cold light of day, but it could have been a lot worse. Credit is due to the medical experts for their leadership.

Another thing worth mentioning is that according to the experts the fraction of the population that has been infected with Covid-19 is probably around one per cent and is very unlikely to exceed five percent. That means that if the infection begins to spread again then it will do so with very little resistance and the exponential phase we saw in March will recur.

So what next?

Ireland is currently in Phase 1 of a the Roadmap, a programme of gradual and justifiably reduction of the restrictions imposed to halt the spead of Covid-19. Phase 2 is supposed to begin on June 8th. However, next Monday (1st June) is a bank holiday and we have very good weather at the moment – it’s about 27 °C outside as I write this. That, together with the good news from the Covid-19 data may well convince some people to forget about the restrictions and start having barbecues, go to the beach, etc. There must be some concern that this may trigger a second wave, which will at best cause delays on the Roadmap and may require a second total shutdown.

There is a thoroughly reprehensible opinion piece in the Irish Times today by Stephen Collins that on the one hand deliberately encourages mass disobedience if the government “doesn’t move to ease the lockdown measures”. Bu the government has moved to ease the lockdown measures. Quite rightly, though, the movement is slow and cautious. People need to be patient and continue listening to the experts, not people like Stephen Collins.

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From May to September

Posted in Biographical, Covid-19, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , , on May 28, 2020 by telescoper

So here we are, then. The final pair of examinations online timed assessments for students in the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University have just started and the students’ submissions will come in later this afternoon. By a curious coincidence the last two comprise a 3rd Year module on Special Relativity and a 4th year module on General Relativity, both of which happen at the same time (in the reference frame of the students).

I don’t want to jinx this afternoon’s proceedings but the switch to online assessments has gone much more smoothly than I imagined it would. I’ve been keeping an eye on all of them and there have been very few problems, and those that did arise were sorted out relatively easily. I’m immensely relieved by this, as I think I’ve been more nervous during these examinations than most of the students!

After this afternoon we will have to knuckle down and get these assessments marked in time for the round of Exam Board meetings. We have been allowed an extra week to do this because grading will be a slower process than usual, especially for the kind of mathematical work we do in the Department of Theoretical Physics. We’ll have to see how it goes but I’m confident we can get the results ready by 18th June, which is the date of our (virtual) Exam Board.

After the Exam Boards we would normally be thinking of relaxing a bit for the summer, and doing a bit of research, but there’s no sign of that being possible this year.

Among the urgent things to deal with are managing the `return to work’ of staff during the various phases of the Irish Government’s Roadmap. This document does not give much detail and there are serious issues to be solved before we can even start Phase 2 (due to commence June 8th) never mind finish Phase 5 and return to some semblance of normal working.

Iontas Lecture Theatre, Maynooth University

Slightly further off, but no less urgent is the matter of how to deal with the start of the next academic year, assuming the progress of the pandemic allows this to happen at all. One of the big uncertainties is how many potential students will defer their university study until next year, which makes it difficult to predict how many students we will have to cater for.

I have to say I’m very annoyed by recent reporting of this issue in the Irish Times, which includes this:

The fact that most lectures will take place online, along with changed economic conditions facing families and inability of students to secure summer work, may make it less attractive for many students to go to college in the coming year.

The second word fact (my emphasis) is the problem, as it describes something that is not a fact at all. A lot can happen between May and September, but we are currently planning on the basis that most of our lectures in Theoretical Physics will go ahead pretty much as normal. That may in the end turn out to be impossible, e.g. if there is a second wave of infection, but at the moment it is a reasonable scenario. And even if we do have to move some or all lectures online we will still have face-to-face teaching in the form of tutorials, exercise classes and computer laboratories.

A slightly less misleading article can be found in the same newspaper here.

A couple of weeks ago, Cambridge University announced that there would be no face-to-face lectures at all next academic year. I was amused to hear a representative of that institution on the radio sounding as if he was saying that “at Cambridge, lectures have very little to do with teaching”. I think what he meant was that tutorials and other teaching sessions would still go ahead so the loss of in-person lectures was not as important as it sounded. That may very well be true of Arts and Humanities subjects, but I was an undergraduate in Natural Sciences at Cambridge (many years ago) and I can tell you the vast majority of my tuition there was in the lecture theatre.

Neither is it the case that Oxford and Cambridge are the only UK universities to have tutorials or small group tuition, but I digress…

My point is that, while I can’t promise that it will be business as usual from September 2020, it’s quite wrong to give potential students the impression that it would be a waste of their time starting this academic year. I can assure any students reading this of the fact that we’re doing everything we can to give them as good an experience as possible.

You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers!

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Page Charges at A&A…

Posted in Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on May 27, 2020 by telescoper

 

It was recently drawn to my attention that UK-based astronomers and astrophysicists now have to pay a charge of €100 per page (!) to publish in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (usually known as A&A for short). See their page charges information for details.

Contrary to popular belief, A&A only waives page charges for authors from countries who are sponsors of A&A, not all countries who are members of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) project. Although the United Kingdom is a member of ESO, it is not and never has been a sponsor of A&A: see the list of sponsoring countries and their representatives here .

Until recently, however, UK authors did have their page charges waived on what seems to have been an ex gratia basis. For some reason, that exception has now apparently been removed.

UPDATE 1: It should have occurred to me that that this also applies to authors from Ireland.

UPDATE 2: Apparently the liability for page charges is determined by the nationality of the first author. I had previously thought that if any of the authors belonged to a sponsoring country then charges would be waived.

Meanwhile, the Open Journal of Astrophysics publishes entirely for free and we are committed to continuing that way. You know what to do.

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