Technical Problems

Posted in Biographical, Cardiff with tags , , , , on March 10, 2019 by telescoper

This morning I got up early to travel to Cardiff Airport to get a flight back to Dublin.

We boarded the plane on time, left the gate on time and arrived at the end of the runway, apparently about to take off. We then sat there for 20 minutes before the pilot explained that there was a problem with the instruments on the flight deck. The plane then taxied back to the terminal, and an engineer got on, but he was unable to fix the problem so we all got off the plane which is clearly going nowhere soon.

A FlyBe Embraer 175 actually flying.

I’m currently sitting in the departure lounge drinking a coffee and wondering when (if) I’ll get to Dublin.

We’re told a plane will arrive from Edinburgh in half an hour and that will take us to Dublin. I’m not convinced. I think there’s a significant probability that my flight will be cancelled, but you never know..

The service with FlyBe has deteriorated in recent weeks almost as quickly as its fares have gone up. The airline has only recently been rescued from collapse and I suspect a major reorganisation is coming up.

Anyway, I know it’s safety first and all that, but my main concern is that we got all the way to the runway before anyone noticed there was a problem. Don’t they check before leaving the gate?

Update: we arrived in Dublin on Plane Number Two at 12.30, two hours and twenty minutes late but all in one piece.

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Star Maker, by Remedios Varo

Posted in Art with tags , , , , , on March 9, 2019 by telescoper

by Remedios Varo Uranga (1908-63), painted in 1958.

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To Like and to Like not

Posted in Biographical, Poetry with tags , , , on March 8, 2019 by telescoper

Travelling today, I was reminded that exactly a week ago, WordPress sent me this notification:

I was a bit surprised, to be honest, as that I posted a St David’s Day poem and usually when I post poetry the traffic goes down. Last Friday however it seems all my St David’s Day poetry posts going back years attracted traffic (and ‘likes’), so I was quite pleased.

Some time ago a senior astronomer emailed me to say that he thought that, for a science blog, there was far to much other stuff for his liking. Other stuff presumably including poetry, music, sport and the rest.

Anyway my response was that this isn’t really a science blog. It’s just a personal blog written by someone who happens to be a scientist. I post about science fairly often but I wouldn’t enjoy blogging half as much if I only covered that.

Some people have asked me why I post poetry and music and the rest. The answer is simple: to share things I enjoy. If just one person were to discover a poem they like by reading it here then it makes it all worthwhile!

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Splitting with Elsevier

Posted in Open Access with tags , , , , on March 7, 2019 by telescoper

Just time today to pass on a bit of Open Access news: the University of California has ended negotiations which academic publishing giant Elsevier and will no longer subscribe to Elsevier Journals. The negotiations broke down over two key points: a refusal by Elsevier to reduce its charges (currently $11M) and a failure to meet guarantees on Open Access. There’s another piece about this here.

The University of California should be congratulated on its firm position here, as should organizations in Sweden and Germany for their similar decisions last year.

I’ve made my views of the academic publishing racket very clear over a number of years so I won’t repeat that rant here. I’ll just remind readers of the staggering fact that the global revenues of the academic publishing industry amount to about, €22 billion per annum. This exceeds the global revenues of the recorded music industry. Profit margins for these publishers are much larger (up to 45%) than Apple, Google and BMW.

The research community is being fleeced, and the worst offenders are the `Big Four’: Elsevier, Springer, Wiley and Taylor & Francis. It’s taken a while but it seems many organizations are finally waking up to what is going on. I don’t think we need `for-profit’ publishers at all – there are far better and cheaper ways of disseminating scientific research in the digital era, such as the arXiv.

I’ll also make a small plea here. If there are any rich philanthropists out there who want to do something positive for science then let me suggest that instead of funding more prizes or awards they consider making a large donation to the arXiv? In my view that would do far more for science than throwing yet more money at a few eminent individuals!

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Quality Cat

Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags , , , , , on March 6, 2019 by telescoper

Well, today is the first day of the Quality Review Panel visit to the Department of Theoretical Physics at Maynooth University. It has come up very quickly; I blogged about the preparations some weeks ago.

Anyway, what with the Quality Review and regular teaching and marking I’m going to be a bit preoccupied for the rest of today and tomorrow. I was in early this morning ahead of the first meeting, and noticed Maynooth University Library Cat was on sentry duty at his usual post:

More surprisingly I learn that said cat now has his own Twitter account, so please give him a follow!


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R. I. P. Wolfgang Rindler (1924-2019)

Posted in Books, Talks and Reviews, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , , , on March 5, 2019 by telescoper

A recent comment on this blog drew my attention to the sad news of the death, at the age of 94, of Wolfgang Rindler. He passed away almost a month ago, in fact, but I have only just heard. My condolences to his family, friends and colleagues.

Wolfgang Rindler was a physicist who specialized in relativity theory and especially its implications for cosmology. Among other things he is attributed with the first use of the phrase `Event Horizon‘ as well as elucidating the nature of horizons in general relativity, both in the context of black holes and in cosmology. I never met him personally but to me, and I think to many other people, Wolfgang Rindler will be familiar through his textbooks on relativity theory. I have two in my collection:

I bought the one on the right on recommendation when I was an undergraduate over thirty years ago and the other (shorter) one I acquired second-hand some years later. Both are still very widely used in undergraduate courses.
I found the first one then (as I do now) rather idiosyncratic in approach and notation but full of deep insights and extremely effective from a pedagogical point of view. I still recommend it to students, to balance more conventional modern texts which tend to be far more conventional. It’s no easy thing to write textbooks and Wolfgang Rindler deserves high praise for having devoted so much of his time, and considerable talent, into writing ones whose impact has been so widespread and lasted so long.

Rest in peace, Wolfgang Rindler (18th May 1924 – 8th February 2019).

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Fat Tuesday!

Posted in Jazz with tags , , , , , on March 5, 2019 by telescoper

Well, it’s Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day, Mardi Gras and Fat Tuesday which gives me four excuses to post this lovely old record made by Humphey Lyttelton’s Paseo Jazz Band in the early Fifties. That’s the band that featured Humph’s regular crew alongside a number of London’s marvellous West Indian musicians of the time, hence the abundance of percussion and the resulting infectious calypso beat. Enjoy!

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Surrey, another unsustainable UK University

Posted in Education with tags , , , on March 4, 2019 by telescoper

A couple of weeks ago I posted an item about planned job losses at Cardiff University during which I remarked that it seemed that a number of other universities are suffering financial problems.

I quote:

There are cold winds blowing through the sector. Many institutions (including Cardiff) have committed to ambitious building programs funded by a combination of borrowing and on optimistic assumptions about growth in student numbers and consequent increases in fee income. Although I no longer work in the UK Higher Education system, I do worry greatly about its sustainability. Even from across the Irish Sea the situation looks extremely precarious: the recent boom could easily end in some institutions going bust. I don’t think that will include Cardiff, by the way. I don’t think the Welsh Government would ever allow that to happen. But I think the English Government wouldn’t act if an English university went bankrupt.

Now the University of Surrey is ringing alarm bells, making £15M cuts and opening up a redundancy scheme `to all staff’. I wonder if that includes the Vice Chancellor, Max Lu, who is quoted on the BBC website:

Mr Lu said: “Some of the main financial challenges include reduced income due to Brexit and an ever more competitive student recruitment environment, significantly increasing pension costs and a national review of tuition fee levels.”

…

Mr Lu added: “Our university also faces the not inconsiderable impact of a fall in our national league table positions.”

The latter shows the ruinously real effect meaningless league tables can have on an institution and, more importantly, the livelihoods of the staff that work there. The whole higher education sector is suffering because of the ideologically-driven attempt to turn it into some sort of market. A crash seems inevitable unless the dangers are recognized and dealt with.

One thing I want to know, though, is: if the University of Surrey’s redundancy scheme is open `to all staff’, what happens if they all take it?

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Beard of Ireland 2019 poll opens

Posted in Beards, Politics on March 4, 2019 by telescoper

Well, much to my surprise I find I am on the ballot paper for Beard of Ireland 2019. I don’t suppose I’ll feature among the front-runners as I don’t think my beard has had much impact on the Irish landscape. At the moment, however, the current leader is a DUP politician…

kmflett's avatarKmflett's Blog

Beard Liberation Front

Press release 3rd March

Contact Keith Flett 07803 167266

BEARD OF IRELAND 2019 POLL OPENS

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that competition for the Irish Beard of the Year title is expected to see hairs split as the voting for the annual award opens

The 2017 winner was politician Colum Eastwood who bearded broadcaster William Crawley for the annual Award.

In 2018 the DUP’s Lee Reynolds shaved writer Dominic O’Reilly for the honour with Colum Eastwood in a steady third place.

The 2019 winner will be announced to mark St Patrick Day on 17th March

The BLF says that while traditionally a land of predominantly clean-shaven cultures, Ireland has in recent times become something of a centre for stylish and trendy beards.

Contenders for the title in 2019 include a diverse range of the hirsute- actors, comedians, political activists, journalists…

View original post 121 more words

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A Bayesian Look at Cosmic Anomalies

Posted in Cosmic Anomalies with tags , , , on March 3, 2019 by telescoper

I’ve posted a few times on this blog about Cosmic Anomalies, by which I mean apparent departures from the predictions of the standard cosmological model. From time to time I also talk about this subject at seminars and conferences.

There’s an interesting new paper on this topic on the arXiv now by Shaikh et al., with the following abstract:

You can click on the image to make it larger. You can also find the PDF version of the full paper here.

I find this Bayesian analysis of two of the apparent anomalies (low amplitude in the power spectrum at large angular scales and hemispherical power asymmetry) may be different manifestations of the same underlying phenomenon, which would make them easier to account for without invoking new physics. Rather than being two independent statistical flukes these measurements might both be the result of one, which would be more likely to occur in the standard model. This analysis however suggests that this might not be the case after all, and these are two different things after all. This presupposes, however, that the model chosen to describe the asymmetries is appropriate. Anyway, this paper is well worth a read if you’re into Bayesian model testing (which you should be)…

This also gives me the excuse to post the following poll, which has been running for several years (even longer than Brexit):

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