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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Predictive Blogging

Posted in Covid-19, Cricket, Opera, Politics, The Universe and Stuff with tags , on May 27, 2020 by telescoper

News has emerged that on 14th April 2020 Dominic Cummings doctored an old blog post to make it look like he had predicted a coronavirus outbreak. Given the indisputable fact that Mr Cummings is a career liar this should not in itself come as a surprise. What might surprise a few people is that this episode reveals that this self-styled genius is must in reality be rather stupid if he thought he could get away with hiding such a blatant attempt at self-promotion. Still, the truth obviously no longer matters in post-Brexit Britain so he probably won’t face any serious consequences.

I, of course would, never add things to old blog posts to make myself look clever.

I would, however, like to point out just a few of the various uncannily accurate predictions I have made in the course of my almost twelve years of blogging.

For example, in this September 2009 review of a performance of La Traviata by Welsh National Opera I wrote:

My love of Italian opera makes me regret even more that the UK will be be leaving the European Union in 2020.

And in this account of the May 2015 England versus New Zealand Test Match at Lord’s you will find:

… it was still quite gloomy and dark. My mood was sombre, thinking about Donald Trump’s forthcoming victory in the 2016 United States Presidential Elections.

My prescience is not only limited to politics, however. In my 2013 post about the Queen’s Birthday Honours List you will read:

The name that stood out for me in this year’s list is Professor Jim Hough, who gets an OBE. Jim is Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Glasgow, and his speciality is in the detection of gravitational waves. Gravitational waves haven’t actually been detected yet, of course, but the experimental techniques designed to find them have increased their sensitivity by many orders of magnitude in recent years, Jim having played a large part in those improvements. I imagine he will be absolutely thrilled in February 2016, when gravitational waves are finally detected.

You see now that Niels Bohr wasn’t quite right when he said “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future”. Sometimes it’s the past that’s hardest to predict.

 

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A Century of Peggy Lee

Posted in Jazz with tags , , on May 26, 2020 by telescoper

The great Jazz singer Peggy Lee (real name Norma Deloris Egstrom) was born a hundred years ago today, on 26th March 1920.

I couldn’t resist marking the occasion sharing this short clip of her famous live performance at Basin Street East, a nightclub in New York City, in 1961. I picked this not only because it is the tune of which I posted the original version last week but also because it’s a fine example of her vocal artistry and sizzling stage presence. I love the way she slides the notes as she drapes the melody languidly over the sounds from the band.

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Cosmology Talks – Deanna Hooper on CMB spectral distortions

Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on May 26, 2020 by telescoper

Here is another one of those Cosmology Talks curated on YouTube by Shaun Hotchkiss. This one was published over a month ago, but I missed it at the time.

In the talk, Deanna Hooper tells us about what we could learn from future measurements of the spectral distortions in the CMB, as well as how spectral distortions complement current and future measurements of CMB anisotropies. I’m particularly interested in this as I wrote a paper on it with John Barrow almost thirty years 30 ago and it’s fascinating to see how far the field has moved on from the theoretical point of view. Our paper was motivated by limits on spectral distortions imposed by the FIRAS instrument on COBE, and there hasn’t been anywhere near as much observational progress since then.

The paper that accompanies this talk can be found here.

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An Open Letter from Irish Scientists

Posted in Politics, Science Politics on May 25, 2020 by telescoper

Just a quick post to pass on the news of an Open Letter from Irish Scientists (and other academics) that is doing the rounds. The letter begins:

Five years ago over 1,000 Irish scientists wrote to government urging a rebalancing of funding toward basic research. Basic discovery research is exactly the type that produces the scientists, skills and serendipitous solutions we need when faced with an unexpected challenge like COVID-19. Half a decade on from that letter little has changed for the better. The crisis in Irish research has deepened and risks becoming fatal if not addressed. To avoid another decade of drift that the nation cannot afford we the undersigned believe Ireland needs to establish a dedicated cabinet-level Department for Higher Education & Research. We fear the country will pay the price in future crises and miss opportunities for innovation if government doesn’t recommit to proper investment and attention for higher education and research urgently.

You can read the rest of it here where, if you are so minded, you can also sign it (as I have done; I’m Number 307).

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If One Person Breaks The Rules..

Posted in Covid-19, Uncategorized on May 25, 2020 by telescoper

The above message was sent out by the UK Government on April 15. Obviously it’s not meant to apply to anyone by the name of Dominic Cummings..

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Arrogant and Offensive

Posted in Politics with tags , , on May 24, 2020 by telescoper

This extraordinary tweet (now deleted) was posted by the official UK Civil Service account after the Prime Minister’s shameful attempt to defend the obvious wrongdoing of his boss, the unelected official Dominic Cummings. It was only live for about ten minutes but was very widely circulated, as the stats show.

Whoever posted the tweet has obviously now lost their job, but it had to be said and I applaud them.

The Cummings affair demonstrates even more clearly that the UK Government considers itself above the rule of law. People need to wake up, quickly.

More immediately, Boris Johnson has just thrown the UK’s response to Covid-19 in the bin. If the rules don’t apply to Cummings why should anyone else obey them?

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Educating Rita in Maynooth

Posted in Film, Maynooth with tags , , on May 24, 2020 by telescoper

Not a lot of people know that the 1983 film Educating Rita, starring Julie Walters and Michael Caine, though mostly set in Northern England, was entirely shot in Ireland.

For example, the scenes at the University in which Caine’s character Frank works were filmed at Trinity College Dublin. Here’s the facade from an early scene:

A list of many of the outdoor scenes and their actual locations can be found here.

One thing I hadn’t realised until yesterday involves the short part of the film in which Frank is on holiday in France. Here is a still from that sequence.

The setting is St Patrick’s College Maynooth!

Other scenes supposed to be in France were filmed just down the road from Maynooth, in Celbridge.

I never thought Maynooth looked particularly French, but there you go. You live and learn…

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See See Rider Blues

Posted in History, Jazz with tags , , on May 23, 2020 by telescoper

There have been dozens of versions of the old song See See Rider and its origins are lost in the mists of time, but I’m pretty sure that the first ever recording was this one, made in October 1924 by the fabulous Gertrude `Ma’ Rainey (vocals) together with a stellar backing group including Louis Armstrong on cornet, Buster Bailey on clarinet and Fletcher Henderson on piano.

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Hydroxychloroquine & COVID-19: the Evidence

Posted in Covid-19 on May 23, 2020 by telescoper

It’s amazing how many people there are on social media who seem completely convinced that hydroxychloroquine is a totally effective remedy for Covid-19.

In a (probably vain) attempt to stem the tide of gullibility I’m sharing this link to an article in The Lancet.

If you can’t be bothered to read the paper here is the summary of the conclusions:

We were unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine, when used alone or with a macrolide, on in-hospital outcomes for COVID-19. Each of these drug regimens was associated with decreased in-hospital survival and an increased frequency of ventricular arrhythmias when used for treatment of COVID-19.

It’s not a properly randomised trial (which probably should be done at some point) but this study does support the view that hydroxychloroquine has no therapeutic value against COVID-19. Why then have so many fallen for the myth that it has?

Update: June 4th the Lancet article referred to above has now been retracted…

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