I’m sharing this interesting post with a quick reminder that the Vernal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere occurs today, 20th March 2019, at 21:58 GMT.
Spring Equinox in the Ancient Irish Calendar | 20 March 2019
Posted in Uncategorized with tags astronomy, History, ireland, Vernal Equinox on March 20, 2019 by telescoperNew Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics!
Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:1811.11584v2, Cosmology, Darsh Kodwani, David Alonso, large-scale structure of the Universe, Open Access, open science, Pedro Ferreira, statistics, The Open Journal of Astrophysics on March 20, 2019 by telescoperIt’s nice to be able to announce that the Open Journal of Astrophysics has just published another paper. Here it is!
It’s by Darsh Kodwani, David Alonso and Pedro Ferreira from a combination of Oxford University and Cardiff University.
You can find the accepted version on the arXiv here. This version was accepted after modifications requested by the referee and editor.
This is another one for the `Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics’ folder. We would be happy to get more submissions from other areas of astrophysics. Hint! Hint!
P.S. A few people have asked why the Open Journal of Astrophysics is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The answer to that is simple: to qualify for listing a journal must publish a minimum of five papers in a year. Since OJA underwent a failure long hiatus after publishing its first batch of papers we don’t yet qualify. However, so far in 2019 we have published four papers and have several others in the pipeline. We will reach the qualifying level soon and when we do I will put in the application!
Follow @telescoperA Grand Slam Weekend
Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Rugby with tags Grand Slam, ireland, Six Nations, Wales on March 19, 2019 by telescoperWell, here I am sitting in Cardiff Airport yet again waiting for a flight back to Dublin so I reckon it’s time to break my self-imposed blogging silence.
I had an enjoyable little break, the highlight of which was the rugby on Saturday between Wales and Ireland. I actually managed to get a ticket for the game, though I am not at liberty to divulge how I got it. I was a long way back from the pitch, practically in the rafters of the Principality Stadium, but the view wasn’t bad. Sadly, I forgot to charge my phone up overnight before the match and by the time I made it to my seat the battery had died, so I have no pictures of the event to share.
I had expected Wales to win, but hadn’t expected such a one-side match. After scoring after just over a minute, Wales controlled the game. Instead of the intense atmosphere I’d been anticipating, the mood in the crowd was more like that you might find at a cricket match while the home side is steadily accumulating runs against ineffective bowling. When the Ireland fightback hadn’t materialized by the fourth quarter of the game, the celebrations started and the singing grew louder in the steadily falling rain. At least Ireland got a consolation try at the end, but if truth be told they didn’t really turn up for the match.
I got absolutely drenched walking back to the Cardiff residence, but it was worth it for the privilege of seeing a Grand Slam unfold live. I only caught the second half of the final match of this year’s Six Nations, the Calcutta Cup match between Scotland and England, on the radio. This seems to have been the most exciting of the tournament, ending in a 38-38 draw after England had been 31-0 up! Greatest comeback since Lazarus!
But all credit again to Wales for their Grand Slam, a great achievement by any standards. It’s revenge what happened ten years ago, when I was in Cardiff (though not in the ground) for a Grand Slam decider between Wales and Ireland, a frantic and exciting match which Ireland won. Not so much excitement this time, but a far happier crowd of Welsh supporters!
So that’s the St Patrick’s Bank Holiday Weekend over with and I’m now heading back to Ireland. This week, or what’s left of it, is `Study Week’ which means there are no lectures. We have finished six weeks of teaching this term at Maynooth, and there are six more after Study Week but there is another week off looming for Easter. As it happens, I’m attending a small conference in London on Thursday and Friday (of which more soon) so I’m just back in the office tomorrow before flying off again for two days in the capital of Poundland.
Interlude
Posted in Uncategorized on March 15, 2019 by telescoperWell, it’s St Patrick’s Day on Sunday (17th March), the day before which is a certain rugby match between Wales and Ireland in Cardiff, and the day after which is a Bank Holiday in Ireland. I’m therefore taking a short break to enjoy the long weekend. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, but in the meantime there will be a short intermission.
Follow @telescoperSemper Cavete Quod Idibus Martiis
Posted in Uncategorized with tags Carry on Cleo, Ides of March, Kenneth Williams on March 15, 2019 by telescoperToday is the Ides of March so I thought I’d keep up the little tradition I’ve established of posting this priceless bit of British cultural history relevant to such a fateful day.
This is from the First Folio Edition of Carry On Cleo, and stars the sublime Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar delivering one of the funniest lines in the whole Carry On series. The joke may be nearly as old as me, but it’s still a cracker…
Follow @telescoperThey – by R.S. Thomas
Posted in Poetry with tags Poetry, R. S. Thomas, The Night Sky on March 14, 2019 by telescoperThe new explorers don’t go
anywhere and what they discover
we can’t see. But they change our lives.
They interpret absence
as presence, measuring it by the movement
of its neighbours. Their world is
an immense place: deep down is as distant
as far out, but is arrived at
in no time. These are the new
linguists, exchanging acrosss closed
borders the currency of their symbols.
Have I been too long on my knees
worrying over the obscurity
of a message? These have their way, too,
other than a prayer of breaking that abstruse code.
New Publication at the Open Journal of Astrophysics!
Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:1812.07963, astronomical instrumentation, Observational Astronomy, observatories, Open Journal of Astrophysics, Pauline Barmby on March 13, 2019 by telescoperIt’s nice to be able to announce that the Open Journal of Astrophysics has just published another paper. Here it is!
It’s by Pauline Barmby of the University of Western Ontario. You can find the accepted version on the arXiv here.
I think this paper is a good demonstration of the broad remit of the Open Journal of Astrophysics: our only rule is that if it’s suitable for the astro-ph section of the arXiv then we will consider if for publication. Rather than being a hardcore research paper, this is comprehensive and pedagogical review of observational techniques, instrumentation and data analysis in astronomy for use by researchers and educators in other disciplines, which we feel is a very useful addition to the literature
My thanks to the Editor and referees for dealing with this one so efficiently! We even have a Twitter testimonial from the author:
The editor & referee were great, refereeing process was trouble-free. 💯 would submit again!
— Dr Pauline Barmby (@PBarmby) March 13, 2019
We have more publications in the pipeline but would be more than happy to receive more…!
I hope soon to get to the point where we have so many papers I can’t write a blog post about every one!
Theresa May: Friend of Hedge Funds
Posted in Uncategorized on March 12, 2019 by telescoperCompare and contrast the following behaviour of the Pound Sterling versus the Euro last night
And this morning
Of course the Pound’s rise yesterday was based on speculation that the Prime Minister Theresa May’s trip to Strasbourg would lead to changes to the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and EU that would make it acceptable to the House of Commons (by which I mean to the pro-Brexit faction of the Conservative Party). The subsequent fall this morning is explained by the fact that she achieved nothing of substance and the Withdrawal Agreement is unchanged.
It seems to me that there are two possible explanations for yesterday’s elaborately choreographed charade. Only a fool would think that Mrs May succeeded in negotiating a concession from the EU, but one thing she can be sure of is that the House of Commons (and particularly the Conservative Party) has plenty of fools in it. The PM might have thought this absurd piece of flummery was worth a shot and convincing Tory buffoons who haven’t read the Withdrawal Agreement anyway. It might even* work!
On the other hand, regardless of what happens in this evening’s `Meaningful Vote’, one thing is clear. Some currency traders will have made an awful lot of money by short-selling the pound. Theresa May’s Strasbourg pantomime will undoubtedly have made her very popular among the Hedge Fund Managers who in any case are the main financial beneficiaries of Brexit…
*It worked with some, but not enough to stop the deal being lost by 149 votes.
Follow @telescoperA Boost for Data Science in Ireland
Posted in Cardiff, Maynooth with tags Data Analytics, Data Science, Hamilton Institute, ireland, Maynooth University, Science Foundation Ireland on March 11, 2019 by telescoper
Regular readers of this blog (both of them) will know that before I moved to Maynooth University I worked (part-time) in the Data Innovation Research Institute at Cardiff University, during which time we were very happy to be awarded a Centre for Doctoral Training by the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC), shared across Cardiff, Swansea and Bristol, as part of a big investment in this area by the UK government.
Now Science Foundation Ireland has announced a similar programme in Ireland: on Tuesday 5th March, Minister for Business, Enterprise, and Innovation, Heather Humphreys TD, and Minister of State for Training, Skills, Innovation, Research and Development, John Halligan TD, announced investment of over €100 million in six new SFI Centres for Research Training in the fields of ICT and data analytics. I’m very pleased to hear that Maynooth University is involved in two of these; there’s a news item on the University web pages here.
One of the new SFI Centres for Research Training, in Foundations of Data Science, is a joint initiative of Maynooth University, University College Dublin and the University of Limerick, with the support of Skillnet Ireland underpinning its industry and enterprise engagement. This Centre was awarded a total of €21 million, including industry and university contributions to train 139 PhD students towards a world-class foundational understanding of Applied Mathematics, Statistics, and Machine Learning. This represents the largest ever investment in mathematical sciences research in Ireland. The Maynooth involvement is based around the famous Hamilton Institute.
I’m not involved in this initiative myself, at least part of the reason for which is that I didn’t even know about the scheme until the results were announced, but I do hope there will be opportunities for my future PhD students working in `Big Data’ problems in cosmology to benefit from some of the training opportunities it provides.
A much wider issue is that companies based in Ireland have reported difficulties in filling vacancies with candidates sufficiently well trained in data science so hopefully this will help close the skills gap here.
The Gaia Sausage
Posted in The Universe and Stuff with tags GAIA, Gaia DR2, Gaia Sausage, Milky Way, Neil Wyn Evans, Royal Astronomical Society on March 10, 2019 by telescoperI had to undertake a top secret mission on Friday, which turned out to be much less exciting than I’d hoped, but at least it gave me an excuse to catch some of the Royal Astronomical Society Open Meeting followed by dinner at the RAS Club. I actually sat next to the Club Guest Michael Duff, the eminent theoretical physicist Michael Duff who gave a nice after-dinner speech.
An artist’s impression of the Gaia Sausage. The Gaia fork has not yet been proved to exist.
The last talk at the RAS Meeting was by Neil Wyn Evans of Cambridge University in the Midlands on the subject of the `Gaia Sausage‘ (which, as you can see, has its own Wikipedia page). The Gaia Sausage is so named because it is consists of a marked anisotropy of the velocity distribution of stars in Milk Way, which is elongated in the radial direction (like a sausage) indicating that many stars are on near-radial (i.e. low angular momentum orbits). This feature has been revealed by studying the second data release from Gaia.
The work Wyn described in his talk is covered by a nice press release from Cambridge University which links to no fewer than five articles on it and related topics, which can all be found on the arXiv here, here, here, here and here.
The most plausible explanation of the Gaia Sausage is that it is a consequence of a major collision between the Milky Way with a smaller galaxy containing about 109 stars about 8-10 billion years ago, as illustrated in this simulation.
I vote that this explanation of the velocity structure of the Milky Way should henceforth be called the Big Banger Theory.
Geddit?
I’ll get my coat.
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In the Dark 