I noticed on tonight’s TV schedule that there’s a live broadcast on RTÉ One of Midnight Mass from St Mary’s Church, Maynooth.
Unfortunately, it clashes with another Christmas tradition, Die Hard, on TG4.
Midnight Mass
Posted in Maynooth, Television with tags Maynooth, Midnight Mass, RTÉ One, St Mary's Church on December 24, 2024 by telescoperA Childhood Christmas – Patrick Kavanagh
Posted in Poetry with tags A Childhood Christmas, Patrick Kavanagh, Stephen Rea on December 24, 2024 by telescoperOne side of the potato-pits was white with frost -
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.
The light between the ricks of hay and straw
Was a hole in Heaven's gable. An apple tree
With its December-glinting fruit we saw -
O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me.
To eat the knowledge that grew in clay
And death the germ within it! Now and then
I can remember something of the gay
Garden that was childhood's. Again.
The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,
A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,
Or any common sight, the transfigured face
Of a beauty that the world did not touch.
My father played the melodion
Outside at our gate;
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.
Across the wild bogs his melodion called
To Lennons and Callans.
As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry
I knew some strange thing had happened.
Outside in the cow-house my mother
Made the music of milking;
The light of her stable-lamp was a star
And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.
A water-hen screeched in the bog,
Mass-going feet
Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,
Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.
My child poet picked out the letters
On the grey stone,
In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,
The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.
Cassiopeia was over
Cassidy's hanging hill,
I looked and three whin bushes rode across
The horizon — the Three Wise Kings.
And old man passing said:
‘Can't he make it talk -
The melodion.' I hid in the doorway
And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.
I nicked six nicks on the door-post
With my penknife's big blade -
there was a little one for cutting tobacco.
And I was six Christmases of age.
My father played the melodion,
My mother milked the cows,
And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned
On the Virgin Mary's blouse.
by Patrick Kavanagh (1904-1967)
Here is the poem, beautifully read by Stephen Rea:
Rétglu etir rind
Posted in Maynooth, Music with tags David Stifter, Rétglu etir rind, Ryan Molloy, St Patrick's College, St Patrick's Pontifical University on December 23, 2024 by telescoperSince Christmas is approaching rapidly, I thought I’d share this video of the first ever public performance of Christmas setting for Chamber Choir, Gallery Schola and Organ from Dr Ryan Molloy, based on a newly-composed text by Maynooth University Professor of Old Irish, David Stifter. It was recorded in the impressive chapel of St Patrick’s Pontifical University during the annual carol service at Maynooth which took place this year on 17th December. The Irish title Rétglu etir rind means “a star among constellations”.
Pay-to-Publish Academic Vanity Publishing
Posted in Open Access with tags Academic Publishing Racket, Open Access, Pay-to-Publish, unethical on December 22, 2024 by telescoperI’m not very good at keeping New Year’s resolutions, which is why I tend not to make many. I have however decided to make one for 2025. In future I will refer to any form of publishing in which the authors pay a fee as the ‘Pay-to-Publish’ model. This is much more descriptive of the reality of this form of the academic journal racket than terms such as “Gold Open Access”.
Many academic journals have switched to ‘Pay-to-Publish’ mode to maintain profit margines in response to demands that research outputs should be made freely available to read. This usually involves the payment of an Article Processing Charge, which is typically a four-figure sum in euros, pounds or dollars for each article.
Apart from the obvious danger with this model that the pressure to increase income by publishing more and more papers will lower editorial standards., the term ‘Open Access’ is inappropriate because, although the papers are free for anyone to read, authors are excluded if they cannot pay the fee. It seems to me that APC-driven publishers are therefore indistinguishable from what is usually called the Vanity Press. According to the Wikipedia page I just linked to,
[Vanity Publication]… has been described as a scam,[2] though, as the book does get printed, it does not necessarily rise to the level of fraud.[4]
I’ll leave it to readers to decide whether it is fraudulent to charge an “Article Processing Charge” has nothing to do with the real cost of processing an article. I couldn’t possibly comment on that. It is, however, beyond question that it is a scam. I’m not the only person to think this. It is, without doubt, unethical.
I would argue that academic vanity is one of the main reasons for the very perpetuation of a publishing system that is so palpably absurd. There is among many academics and, especially, managers an unjustified reliance on journal brand-name or even impact factor as a proxy for the quality of a paper. This is despite the fact that we can easily measure impact for individual articles so there’s no need to rely on such things.
In any case I do think that it would be quite reasonable to warn potential readers of an article that its authors paid to have it published. How would you react if you saw the statement ‘The authors of this article paid to have it published’ at the start of an article? At least it might make you think about the reliability of the accompanying hype.
Five New Publications at the Open Journal of Astrophysics
Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags arXiv:2402.10731v3, arXiv:2404.02566v2, arXiv:2406.13732v2, arXiv:2408.07026v3, arXiv:2408.17445v2, Astrophysics of Galaxies, Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, dark matter, Gravitational Lensing, High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, sub-mm astronomy, supernovae, ultra-diffuse galaxies on December 21, 2024 by telescoperTime for the usual Saturday summary of papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. We have published five more papers since the last update a week ago. The count in Volume 7 (2024) is now up to 119 and the total altogether to 234. As I mentioned in a post last week this means we have published more papers this year (2024) than in all previous years put together.
In chronological order, the five 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, published on Wednesday 18th December 2024 is “The picasso gas model: Painting intracluster gas on gravity-only simulations” byby Florian Kéruzoré, L. E. Bleem, N. Frontiere, N. Krishnan, M. Buehlmann, J. D. Emberson, S. Habib, and P. Larsen all of the Argonne National Laboratory, USA. The paper, which is in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics describes a method using machine learning based on an analytical gas model to predict properties of the intracluster medium.
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 second paper to announce, and the first of four published on Wednesday 19th December 2024, “maria: A novel simulator for forecasting (sub-)mm observations” by J. van Marrewijk (ESO, Garching, Germany) and 10 others based in Germany, USA, Norway, France and Italy. This paper describes a multi-purpose telescope simulator that optimizes scanning strategies and instrument designs, produces synthetic time-ordered data, time streams, and maps from hydrodynamical simulations, thereby enabling comparison between theory and observations. This one is in the folder marked Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics.
You can see the overlay here:
The accepted version of this paper can be found on the arXiv here.
The third paper is “Detached Circumstellar Matter as an Explanation for Slowly-Rising Interacting Type Ibc Supernovae” by Yuki Takei (Kyoto U., Japan) & Daichi Tsuna (Caltech, USA). This one was also published on 19th December and is in the folder marked High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here.
The fourth paper, also published on 19th December 2024, is called “On the dark matter content of ultra-diffuse galaxies” and was written by Andrey Kravtsov (U. Chicago, USA). The article discusses the implications of measured velocity dispersions of ultra-diffuse galaxies for models of galaxy formation and is in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies.
The overlay is here
You can find the officially accepted version of this paper here.
The fifth paper in this batch is “Estimating Exoplanet Mass using Machine Learning on Incomplete Datasets” by Florian Lalande (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology), Elizabeth Tasker (Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Kanagawa) and Kenji Doya (Okinawa); all based in Japan. This one was published on 10th October 2024 in the folder marked Earth and Planetary Astrophysics. It compares different methods for inferring exoplanet masses in catalogues with missing data
You can find the official accepted version on the arXiv here.
Finally for this week we have “A new non-parametric method to infer galaxy cluster masses from weak lensing” by Tobias Mistele (Case Western Reserve University, USA) and Amel Durakovic (Czech Academy of Sciences, Czechia). This one was also published on 19th December and is in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. The overlay is here
You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here.
That’s in for this week. I will do another update next Saturday only if we have any new papers on Monday. I will be taking a break over Christmas and also preparing Volume 8 (2025) for the new year, so publishing will be suspended from 24th December until 2nd January (inclusive). If you want your paper to be published in 2024 the final version must be on arXiv by Monday 23rd December at the latest, otherwise it will be held over until 2025.
The Winter Solstice 2024
Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags Earliest Sunset, Latest Sunrise, Solar noon, Winter Solstice on December 20, 2024 by telescoper
Just a quick note to point out that the Winter Solstice in the Northern hemisphere happens tomorrow, Saturday 21st December 2024, at 9.21 UT (GMT). I am posting this in advance as I am planning to have a line-in tomorrow morning.
In Dublin, sunrise today (20th December) was at 8.37 am and sunset at 4.07 pm, while tomorrow the sunrise is at 8.38 am and sunset at 4.08 pm. Notice that both sunrise and sunset happen later tomorrow than today, so the Solstice marks neither the latest sunrise nor the earliest sunset: the interval between the two events will, however, be about 2 seconds shorter tomorrow than today. For a full explanation of this, see this older Winter Solstice post.
Anyway, today is has been the last day of teaching at Maynooth University. I did my final lecture of 2024 this morning and attended project presentations this afternoon. Campus has been very quiet all day, most people having already departed for the break. That makes me feel less guilty about going home earlier than usual at 4.15pm. Now it’s time power down everything in my office for the break and head home via the shops!
Nearly there…
Posted in Biographical, Cardiff, Education, Maynooth with tags Cardiff, education, Maynooth, teaching on December 19, 2024 by telescoperToday I completed the lectures for one of my modules, the one on Differential Equations and Transform Methods for Engineering students, and gave the penultimate lecture for Differential Equations and Complex Analysis for final-year Mathematical Physics students. Both were revision lectures. As campus has been very quiet for the last few days I didn’t expect many (if any) students to show up for either of these classes, but some did, although numbers were a long way down on the start of the year.
Campus is always quiet this close to the holiday, but this time there has been a bug going around which has led to a few more absences than usual among students. Some staff have been affected too. I had a mild dose of whatever it was earlier in the week but got over it relatively quickly.
Tomorrow, the last day of Semester 1, I have my last lecture of this term, followed by a couple of final-year project presentations. Then that’s it until 2025. I am already thinking about what to do tomorrow evening to mark the end of term. I haven’t reached any definite conclusions yet, but it will almost certainly involve wine. Then I suppose I’ll have to start my Christmas shopping which will include buying more wine.
I am a bit flush this week because I’ve finally received rebates of overpayment from OVO Energy and Dŵr Cymru Welsh Water relating to my former house in Cardiff. I sold this property months ago, after much tedious to-ing and fro-ing, but getting money back from utility companies is like getting blood out of a stone. OVO Energy were particularly bad, violating their statutory obligations. The offer3d me £60 additional payment in recognition of this but, although they eventually settled the bill, they never paid the compensation. It seems they just lied.
In contrast, and giving credit where it’s due, I am grateful to Cardiff City Council for paying back my overpaid Council Tax very promptly.
Sonification of a Galaxy
Posted in Euclid, The Universe and Stuff with tags Euclid, Messier 78, Sonification, YouTube on December 19, 2024 by telescoperHere’s an intriguing experiment in sonification of an image from Euclid.
And here’s the official blurb about it:
An ethereal dance of misty clouds of interstellar dust with a myriad of distant stars and galaxies speckled like paint drops over a black canvas. This is a sonification of a breathtaking image taken by ESA’s Euclid space telescope of the young star-forming region Messier 78.
The sonification offers a different representation of the data collected by Euclid, and lets us explore the stellar nurseries in M78 through sound. Close your eyes and listen to let the cosmic image be drawn by your mind’s eye, or watch as the traceback line in this video follows the sounds to colour the image from left to right.
The twinkling sounds of various pitches and volumes represent the galaxies and stars in the frame. The pitch of the sound points towards where we see the dot of light in the image. Higher pitches tell us that a star or galaxy appears further at the top in the image along the traceback line.
The brightness of these objects in and around M78 are represented by the volume of the twinkles. Whenever we hear a particularly loud clink, the star or galaxy that Euclid observed appears particularly bright in the image.
Underlying these jingling sounds, we can hear a steady undertone, made up of two chords which represent different regions in Messier 78. This sound intensifies as the traceback line approaches first the brightest, and later the densest regions in the nebula.
The first two deeper crescendos in this undertone indicate two patches in the image where the most intense colour is blue/purple. These appear as two ‘cavities’ in M78, where newly forming stars carve out and illuminate the dust and gas in which they were born.
The chords intensify a third time at a slightly higher pitch corresponding to the red-orange colours in the image, as the sound draws over the densest star-forming region of the frame. This stellar nursery is hidden by a layer of dust and gas that is so thick that it obscures almost all the light of the young stars within it.
As the sound traces over the entire Euclid image, these different tones together form a cosmic symphony that represents the image of Messier 78, and the stars and galaxies that lie behind and within it. You can read more about this image that was first revealed to the eyes of the world earlier this year here: https://www.esa.int/Science_Explorati…
Many thanks to Klaus Nielsen (DTU Space / Maple Pools) for making the sonification in this video. If you would like to hear more sonifications and music by this artist, please visit: https://linktr.ee/maplepools
P.S. The first sentence of the Wikipedia page on sonification uses the word “perceptualize”. Ugh!
Extrapolation of the Open Journal of Astrophysics
Posted in Open Access with tags Diamond Open Access, Diamond Open Access Publishing, The Open Journal of Astrophysics on December 18, 2024 by telescoperThis morning I published another paper at the Open Journal of Astrophysics, taking the total number of publications for this year to 115 and the total altogether to 230. This means that we have now published as many papers this year as we have in all previous years combined. Here’s a table showing the sequence of papers published over the last six years and the series formed from the aforementioned sequence:
| Year | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
| Papers | 12 | 15 | 17 | 17 | 50 | 115* |
| Total | 16 | 31 | 48 | 65 | 115 | 230 |
(*=not out)
We’ll probably publish a few more by the end of the year – there seems to be a bit of a rush right now of people submitting papers before the break – so the final column may change. Anyway, the bigger question is I wonder what will happen next year? Extrapolating from the last two years using a simple model, we will publish about 230 papers next year, 460 the year after that, then 920, 1820, etc. Even at that optimistic rate it will take us several years to catch up to the big astronomical publishers, who publish thousands of papers per year.
As Niels Bohr once said “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future” but I wonder if anyone would like to make a guess as to how many papers we will publish in 2025. This time next year we’ll see who was closest. The prize will be a year’s free subscription to the Open Journal of Astrophysics.
Still, after a slow start it’s very gratifying to be accelerating. I’m certainly glad that I managed to use some of my sabbatical time automating the publishing side of the OJAp operation otherwise I’d definitely be struggling to keep up!
Anyway, this gives me the opportunity to make a small announcement about the forthcoming Christmas break. The site will remain open for submissions throughout the festive season, but please be aware that our volunteer Editors all deserve a bit of rest – as do referees – so progress may be slow at this time.
You may or may not know that the Scholastica platform we use is actually two distinct websites: one for peer review (used by all editors and authors); and the other for publishing (to which I, as Managing Editor, have sole access). I will be taking a break over Christmas and also preparing Volume 8 (2025) for the new year, so publishing will be suspended from 24th December until 2nd January (inclusive). If you want your paper to be published in 2024 the final version must be on arXiv by Monday 23rd December at the latest, otherwise it will be held over until 2025.
The Hunters in the Snow – Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Posted in Art, Poetry with tags Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Hunters in the Snow, William Carlos Williams on December 17, 2024 by telescoper
by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1565, oil on panel, 117×162 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna).
This very famous painting is the subject of this ekphrastic poem, written in 1962, by William Carlos Williams:
The over-all picture is winter
icy mountains
in the background the return
from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
sturdy hunters lead in
their pack the inn-sign
hanging from a
broken hinge is a stag a crucifix
between his antlers the cold
inn yard is
deserted but for a huge bonfire
that flares wind-driven tended by
women who cluster
about it to the right beyond
the hill is a pattern of skaters
Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen
a winter-struck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture
It seems strange to me that the poem misses what I think is the most important feature of the painting: that the hunters are returning empty-handed. It’s that that makes the image so bleak.
In the Dark 