Rally for Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, Earl’s Court, London July 1939.
Beer-brandishing ‘Man of the People’, Oswald Mosley.
Fascism is coming; probably a slimy Anglicised form of Fascism, with cultured policemen instead of Nazi gorillas and the lion and the unicorn instead of the swastika.
George Orwell, from The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937.
Follow @telescoperAs I had little window of opportunity before the start of exam marking season and other goings-on in Maynooth I decided to make a quick trip back to Wales back in Cardiff for the weekend.
I flew back on Thursday evening. It had been a busy day and I’d only had a sandwich for lunch so I went into the bar in Dublin Airport to get a beer and a burger. Who did I bump into there but Professor Walter Gear…
Walter was Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy at Cardiff University when I joined it in 2007, so and was he persuaded me to leave Nottingham. He was a very good Head of School and, in particular, he helped a lot when I had mental health problems seven years ago.
Anyway after twenty years in Cardiff during which he built up the School and particularly the world-leading Astronomy Instrumentation Group there, Walter has left for a new position as Dean for Science and Engineering at NUI Galway, in Ireland.
He was in Dublin Airport because he was travelling back to his leaving do in Cardiff, which I turned up for on Friday. There were drinks and speeches and presents and it was nice to see some old friends there and in the Flute and Tankard afterwards. It was a good send-off.
I’m sure that Walter (who was born in Ireland) enjoy his new role in the Emerald Isle very much indeed. Galway is quite a distance from Maynooth (almost 200 km) but I hope we will be in regular contact.
Anyway I should mention that there are advertisements out for a Research Associate in Sub-mm Astronomy and and a Lecturer in Astronomy (with an emphasis on the same) in Galway. I’m sure these will prove very attractive to many applicants!
Follow @telescoperIt is May 17th again, which means that it is International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia. If you’re wondering why May 17th was chosen, it’s to commemorate May 17th 1990, which is when the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from its list of “mental illnesses”.
Please remember at although attitudes in many places are much more enlightened than they were only a few years ago, homophobic violence still happens with distressing frequency and in over 70 countries around the world being gay is still a criminal offence. Moreover, the way that politics are going the rights that gave been established in many places over the past 50 years could so easily be lost.
The theme for this year is “Justice and Protection for All”. It is in part a celebration of the progress that has been made, but also a reminder that so much more needs to be done. In many countries it is still illegal to be gay.
Follow @telescoperRegular readers of this blog will know that I’m not averse to a bit of pedantry now and again and, in contrast to many of my colleagues, I actually find grammar quite interesting. I was however quite shocked to see these questions (shared on Facebook by a concerned parent). They appear on the Standard Attainment Test (SAT) for taken by her son, who is in Year 6.
I think they’re ridiculous. I wonder how many of you could answer these five sample questions correctly without looking things up on the web? I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do them all at age 11! More to the point, who* decided that the names of grammatical structures should be deemed so important?
Far better, in my opinion, to concentrate on cultivating a love of reading.
*It was Michael Gove.
QUESTION 1:
Circle the relative pronoun in the sentence below.
“It’s too rainy for the picnic today, which is a shame.”
QUESTION 2:
Circle all the determiners in the sentence below.
“The man’s hair was very long, so my uncle cut it using a pair of the clippers he owns.”
QUESTION 3:
Underline the subordinate clause in this sentence.
“I don’t need a school dinner today because I have brought sandwiches.”
QUESTION 4:
Circle the modal verb in this sentence:
“If I can leave early, I would like to meet Anna at the park, as she said she might be there.”
QUESTION 5:
Tick one box to show whether the word ‘before’ is used as a preposition or a subordinating conjunction:
“We left the cinema before the film had ended.”
“Simon finished before Paul in the race.”
“Train tickets are often cheaper before 9am.”
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Here’s a fascinating blog on the astronomy history which is well worth reading, so I thought I’d reblog to draw it to your attention!
Among others, it features Robert Grosseteste who I wrote about here.
Those readers, who have been around for a number of years, will know that from time to time the Renaissance Mathematicus has hosted guest posts. One thing that we are very proud of is the very high standard of the authors, who have delivered up, at our invitation, those literary #histSTM highpoints. We only host the best! Todays guest post continues this tradition with a real star of the world of science, science writing and #histSTM, Tom McLeish FRS. Tom was Professor of Physics at Durham University, where he was one of the initiators and chief investigators of the on going Ordered Universe international research project: InterdisciplinaryReadings of Medieval Science: Robert Grosseteste (c.1170–1253).
!4th Century portrait of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln Source: Wikimedia Commons
Tom is now Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York (I think he’s doing a slow…
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I couldn’t resist sharing this hilarious introduction to the art of the Wagnerian dramatic soprano from the sublime Anna Russell.
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I’m up to my eyeballs in matters Eddingtonian these days preparing for the big centenary, so I thought I’d share this which I was reminded about this morning. The official results of the 1919 Eclipse Expeditions were announced at a joint meeting of the Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society on November 6 1919. Members of a certain physics graduate student society at Cambridge, however, were treated to a sneak preview in October of that year, to which the minutes of the 83rd Meeting of the `Del-Squared V Club’ attest:
Arthur Stanley Eddington gave a talk at that meeting, a brief note of which appears on the right-hand page of the minute book shown above. You can see the Newtonian value for the expected deflection of 0.87 seconds at the bottom of the page. There’s also a nice reference to `The Weight of Light’. I had no idea Eddington was a lightweight speaker, but there you are.
I don’t think the Del-Squared V Club exists* any more, so I won’t make the joke that if you want to phone them up you have to go through the operator…
*I’m reliably informed that it has been defunct since 1970.
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After yesterday’s decennial celebration of the launch of ESA’s Herschel and Planck missions, I noticed that this morning a new paper from the Planck Consortium has arrived on the arXiv. Coincidence?
The other 2018 `last’ papers from Planck were released last year.
Anyway, this is the long-awaited paper IX about primordial non-Gaussianity and the abstract is:
In a nutshell, there’s no evidence for primordial non-Gaussianity from the Planck observations. The paper is rather long, but well worth reading because it shows how much work has to go in to extract higher-order statistical information from CMB data. It’s far harder than the (second-order) power-spectrum, which is no doubt why this paper to so long to emerge.
Follow @telescoperA little birdie told me (via a tweet) that today is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the ESA Planck and Herschel satellite missions. Can it really be so long ago?
Anyway, both were superbly successful and both involved many friends and former colleagues from Cardiff and elsewhere, so I thought I’d reblog this post which I wrote on the day of the launch (on May 14 2009)….
The Big Day has finally arrived!
I’ve managed to submit my paper to the journal and the ArXiv before the little shindig we’ve been planning for the Planck and Herschel launch gets under way at 1pm. Business as usual so far, though.
Strangely, I haven’t managed to get nervous yet, although I have to say there are many anxious faces around the department. I just keep telling people how much simpler their life is going to be if it all goes wrong, without all that messy and unnecessarily complicated data to deal with. It bothers me sometimes that I don’t often get nervous expect when watching sport. Mind you, being a Newcastle United supporter probably makes me more nervous more often than most people.
Anyway, at times like this a stiff upper lip is obviously called for. Anyone who cracks now is clearly not officer material. There’ll be plenty of…
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At the risk of being a complete bore about the 1919 Eclipse Expeditions, here is a plug for a public talk I am giving in Maynooth on 29 May 2019, the centenary of the event itself.
Here is the blurb:
Albert Einstein is the undisputed genius whose insights have revolutionised the way we think about the Universe. He is also a cultural icon whose fame extends far beyond the realm of theoretical physics.
Einstein’s transition to global stardom can be dated precisely to 29th May 1919, the date of a total solar eclipse at which the first measurements were made of the bending of light by the Sun’s gravity that tested Einstein’s then new general theory of relativity. The announcement of the results created an unprecedented media sensation: news of Einstein and his revolutionary theory made front-page news around the world.
To mark the centenary of this historic event, Peter Coles will describe the historical and scientific background to an experiment that changed the world, and explain why it was such an important event both for Einstein the physicist and Einstein the celebrity.
The event will be on the North Campus of Maynooth University. It is free, but please register at the Eventbrite site here if you want to attend so we can get an idea of numbers. If, for some reason, you can’t get to Maynooth, we are planning to do a live feed of the talk too, so please watch this blog for more details.
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In the Dark 
