I was just reminded that it was on 24th January 1975 – 50 years ago today – that pianist Keith Jarrett played a live solo concert at the Opera House in Köln, West Germany. The concert was recorded and released on ECM Records as a double LP later that year. It went on to become the best-selling solo album in jazz history and the best-selling piano album ever. It’s a must-have for anyone interested in jazz.
You don’t need me to tell you why as the whole concert is available for your listening pleasure here:
So it’s just after 11am on Friday 24th January 2025 and the Red Alert in my area related to Storm Éowyn has just been downgraded to Orange. It was very windy overnight and this morning, though there was no discernible damage to my house and no interruption to the electricity supply. That has not been the case for many others, though. There are a staggering 715,000 power outages across Ireland this morning. That’s so many that it will probably take many days to fix them all.
Here’s a map showing some of the power outages in my general vicinity:
I’m told that power is off in a few places in Maynooth and various traffic lights are not working; fallen trees are also blocking some roads. It’s still very windy – though the force seems to be abating quite quickly – so I think I’ll leave it a while before going out to see if there is any obvious damage in an around town. Shops and businesses would have been closed during the Red Alert, most planning to open around noon. Obviously that will depend on whether or not they have electricity.
Anyway the storm is now heading North East and its presence will soon be felt in Scotland
Update: 12.08, the weather warning was downgraded to yellow at noon. It’s still very windy though.
Update: 14.11, went for a walk into Maynooth. Traffic lights on Straffan Road out from the Glenroyal up to Main Street. All shops on Main Street closed and apparently without electricity. Traffic lights at the Roost are working as are those on Mill Street. Dunnes stores in Manor Mills is open but the rest of the shops are closed. South Campus was closed but I walked around North Campus; there are lots of branches of various sizes that have sheared off, but no serious damage that I saw. No sign of buses or trains having resumed.
I have seen Red Weather Alerts from Met Éireann before, but never one that covered the whole country! This unprecedented situation is down to Storm Éowyn. This is the map for tomorrow morning, 24th January:
I’ve been following the predictions of the HARMONIE model for Storm Éowyn as they get updated. This storm is an absolutely monster! The latest model maps look like this:
Note the wind speeds, well over 200 km/h in the white areas; these are gusts, not steady average speeds, but could be very damaging. As usual the West coast will bear the brunt. Where I am, in County Kildare, is much more sheltered, but even here gusts are forecast to exceed 100 km/h. The one thing to be optmistic about is that in any location its duration will be relatively short. The Red Alerts start about 2am on the West coast, but in Kildare the maximum danger is between 6am and 11am. The predicted impacts are:
• Danger to life • Extremely dangerous travelling conditions • Unsafe working conditions • Disruption and cancellations to transport • Many fallen trees • Significant and widespread power outages • Impacts to communications networks • Cancellation of event • Structural damage • Wave overtopping • Coastal flooding in low-lying and exposed areas
(The last two aren’t relevant for Kildare, which is inland. At least I hope “waves overtopping” isn’t relevant 30km from the sea!)
During the red alerts there will be no public transport, and many offices etc will be closed until the Red Alert is over. There will be no postal deliveries anywhere tomorrow either.
Maynooth University Campus is understandably closed tomorrow too. Fortunately the exam period is over and teaching does not resume until the start of February, so this won’t cause too much disruption to academic life. I’ll be working on home. Ireland’s electricity system is fragile at the best of times, however, so there is a significant risk of power cuts and interruptions to internet access. If I don’t blog tomorrow, you will know why! I have plenty of work that I can do without the internet, though.
I have a ticket for a concert at the National Concert Hall tomorrow evening. I usually travel by train into Dublin for such things. Public transport should have resumed by the time I would travel, but I’ll keep an eye on things. Fallen trees are a real hazard around here, and could affect both road and rail transport. If there is continued disruption, I’ll stay at home. If it’s very bad, of course, the event might be cancelled anyway.
My kitchen is entirely electric so in case of power cuts I’ll do a bit of shopping to make sure I have enough food for tomorrow that can be eaten cold. It is raining at the moment but when there’s a gap I’ll move all moveable objects in my garden into the shed, including the wheelie bins, in case they blow away. I have a feeling there’ll be quite a few twigs and branches to clear up on Saturday!
Hurrah! Today I received the Christmas issue of Private Eye:
It’s only taken a month to cross the Irish Sea from the UK and find its way to Maynooth!
I don’t know whether the delay is the fault of the Royal Mail or An Post or a mixture of both. Post is often delayed over the Christmas period, but not usually for this long. Storm Darragh caused some damage at the Port of Holyhead on 6th December which caused delays there until January. There was then bad weather in Ireland which caused disruption to deliveries. I suspect this item is part of a backlog gradually being cleared, as I have received post from the UK sent more recently than this.
Although this delay is an extreme example, the Eye usually arrives after about 10 days which means that more often than not I miss the deadline for the Crossword competition. I have therefore decided not to renew my subscription and instead to buy a copy at the local newsagent when it comes out.
My shadow -- I woke to a wind swirling the curtains light and dark and the birds twittering on the roofs, I lay cold in the early light in my room high over London. What fear was it that made the wind sound like a fire so that I got up and looked out half-asleep at the calm rows of street-lights fading far below? Without fire Only the wind blew. But in the dream I woke from, you came running through the traffic, tugging me, clinging to my elbow, your eyes spoke what I could not grasp -- Nothing, if you were here!
The wind of the early quiet merges slowly now with a thousand rolling wheels. The lights are out, the air is loud. It is an ordinary January day. My shadow, do you hear the streets? Are you at my heels? Are you here? And I throw back the sheets.
I am very late passing this sad news on, but I only just heard of the death (on 28th December 2024, at the age of 90) of Sverre Aarseth, who spent almost all of his research career at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge. Sverre was a pioneer in the use of N-body numerical techniques for solving gravitational problems and whose work had enormous impact across many aspects of astrophysics and cosmology, not least because he made his codes available as “open source”. I suspect many of us have used an “Aarseth code” at some point in our careers! I only met him a few times, but he struck me as a friendly and self-effacing man. He was certainly never someone who tried to hog the limelight but he was held in a very high regard across the research community.
The journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (A&A for short) announced last week that it was increasing page charges on longer papers. The table of new charges to be implemented is here:
A&A is published on behalf of the European Southern Observatory by EDP Sciences(Édition Diffusion Presse Sciences) which began life as a joint venture of four French learned societies in science, mathematics, and medicine. The company was acquired in 2019 by China Science Publishing & Media (which has headquarters in Beijing). Judging by its social media activity, EDP Sciences sees A&A as a flagship journal; for a list of other journals it runs see here. I gave some background on A&A here.
A&A publishes papers through a curious hybrid model called “S2O” (Subscribe to Open; not to be confused with “420”). This is not fully Open Access because it requires libraries to pay a subscription to access the journal. For this reason it is not compatible with some institutional open access policies. Unlike some journals, however, A&A does allow authors to place their papers on arXiv without restriction, so they can be read there for free. Previously A&A required authors (or their institutes) to pay “Page Charges” – essentially an Article Processing Charge (APC) – if they were not from a “member country”; this policy was introduced in 2020. Authors from a member country will now have to pay APCs to publish (if their paper exceeds the page limit) but their institutional libraries still have to pay a subscription if they are to access the paper. In other words, A&A is double-dipping.
According to A&A,
… the average length of papers has also been increasing. Too often, papers are longer than necessary, leading to increased workload for authors, referees, and editors, and hindering the reader’s ability to efficiently grasp their content. As well as needing logistical consideration, the challenges related to the journal’s growth have financial implications that must be addressed to ensure long-term sustainability.
I agree that many papers are far too long. As a journal Editor myself I know that it is much harder to find people willing to review very long papers, a fact that some authors seem reluctant to recognize. On the other hand I very much doubt that any of the funds generated by page charges will be given to the refeees who do the most important – indeed I would argue the only important – work of a journal.
If the desired effect is to reduce the number of long papers this policy may work, though I suspect authors who are incurably prolix will respond by splitting their work into several shorter papers to avoid the page charges and thereby generating even more work for the journal. I suspect however that the desired effect is really to increase revenue; so often in the context of academic publishing “sustainability” really means “profitability”. I would also bet that these charges will increase further in future.
The changing charges at A&A have widespread implications, including for the Euclid Consortium, most of whose scientific papers are published there. I’m sure the Euclid Consortium Editorial Board will discuss this development. I’m not a member of the ECEB so it would be inappropriate to comment further on publication policy so I’ll leave the discussion to them. I would say, however, that the publication process at A&A is rather slow. The main post-launch Euclid Overview paper by Mellier et al., for example, was accepted for publication in August 2024 but has still not appeared. It is, however, available on arXiv, which is all that really matters. That paper, incidentally, is over 90 pages long. According to the table above that would cost about €12,000 in page charges. It was submitted in May 2024 and accepted quite quickly but is planned to appear in a special issue Euclid on Sky the publication of which is being delayed by other papers still going through the editorial process.
(Incidentally, Mellier et al. has already acquired 157 citations despite not yet being officially published, which illustrates how little difference “official” publication is actually worth.)
It’s been a while since I shared any music on this blog, so here’s a favourite track of mine from the late Fifties. The tune, Speak Low, which was written in 1943 by Kurt Weill and rapidly became a jazz standard. The following is an instrumental version but it’s worth mentioning that the lyrics were written by Ogden Nash, a man much more known for humorous verse than for beautiful love songs.
Anyway, this version is from a great album called Sonny’s Crib recorded in 1957 by a band led by pianist Sonny Clark and released on the Blue Note label in 1958. Clark was an excellent piano player but he’s not as well known nowadays as he should be, largely because he died very young (in 1963, at the age of just 31, from a heart attack caused by a heroin overdose). I bought the album on vinyl when I was still at school, perhaps 45 years ago, and I still have it. This particular track has also featured in many “best of” collections.
Alongside Sonny Clark (piano), the sextet contains John Coltrane, no less, on tenor sax who, just a couple of weeks before, had recorded the album Blue Train as leader, also for Blue Note. Coltrane does plays a prominent role in this track and indeed in the whole session. There’s also fine Curtis Fuller (trombone) and Donald Byrd (trumpet), Art Taylor (drums) and Paul Chambers (bass). Credit must ago to Rudy van Gelder for producing that very distinctive Blue Note sound that does justice to the great musicians that recorded for the label.
It’s Saturday morning so once again it’s time for an updated of papers published at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. Since the last update we have published three new papers which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 7 and the total so far published by OJAp up to 242.
In chronological order of publication, the three papers published this week, with their overlays, are as follows. You can click on the images of the overlays to make them larger should you wish to do so.
First one up is “Potential-density pairs for Galaxy discs with exponential or sech^2 vertical profile” by Walter Dehnen and Shera Jafaritabar (Heidelberg, Germany). This paper was published on Tuesday 14th January 2025 in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It presents a new set of analytic models for the structure of disc galaxies. The overlay, which includes the abstract, is here:
You can find the officially accepted version of this paper on arXiv here.
The second paper, which was published on Thursday 17th January 2025 also in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies, is “Quantifying Bursty Star Formation in Dwarf Galaxies” by Yuan-Sen Ting (Ohio State University) and Alexander Ji (U. Chicago). This paper describes an application of Gaussian mixture models to distinguish between discontinuous and continuous star formation histories in dwarf galaxies.
Here is a screen grab of the overlay, which includes the abstract:You can find the officially accepted version of the paper on the arXiv here.
The third paper to announce, also published on 17th January 2025 but in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, is “Fast Projected Bispectra: the filter-square approach” by Lea Harscouet, Jessica A. Cowel, Julia Ereza & David Alonso (Oxford U., UK), Hugo Camacho (Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA), Andrina Nicola (Bonn, Germany) and Anže Slosar (Brookhaven). This paper presents Presenting the filtered-squared bispectrum (FSB), a fast and robust estimator of the projected bispectrum for use on cosmological data sets.
You can see the overlay here:
The accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.
That’s all for this week. I’ll do another update next Saturday.
This afternoon, for the first time in a while, I encountered Maynooth University Library Cat at his customary position. Unfortunately he didn’t seem favourably disposed and when I tried to take his picture he turned his back on me. Luckily I was with a colleague who was strategically positioned to take the snap above.
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In the Dark 