Passo del Tonale Winter School 2012

Posted in Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews with tags , , on December 18, 2012 by telescoper

I’m having a restful morning at home because (a) it was our Departmental Christmas Lunch yesterday meaning that I’m feeling a bit fragile and (b) there’s a planned electrical shutdown in our building this morning meaning that there’s not much point going in until it’s all back up anyway.

Anyway, since various people made the odd facetious comment accusing me of skiving off last week, I thought I’d take the opportunity to reflect a little on the Winter School that I was lecturing at last week. This took place at Passo del Tonale, in the Italian Alps and was the Sixth in a series of schools for graduate students and postdocs held there annually. When I was invited to take part, I was asked to give five lectures as a sort of overview of the current state of cosmology. Subsequently one of the other speakers dropped out so instead of inviting a replacement, the remaining four were given an extra lecture each. Then one of those was taken ill during the summer school so I stepped in at short notice to give another one. And so it came to pass that I gave seven lectures altogether, in the space of five days. That’s considerably more lecturing than I would have done had I stayed in Cardiff.

Anyway, here’s a picture of me during one of the lectures (taken by one of the participants, Chris Crowe).

Tonale

Afternoons were kept free for skiing and snowboarding, but my dodgy knees don’t allow me to participate in such activities. I am not shap’d for sportive tricks nor made to court an amorous looking-glass. I had lectures to prepare anyway.

However the hosts looked after us well and there was a fine conference dinner on Wednesday evening,

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the main course featuring a roast pig brought into the room by the chefs with some aplomb:

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Everything was eaten. I was given the honour of having one of the ears, in fact. A bit chewy, but quite tasty in case you were wondering. I don’t know what the vegetarians did.

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Anyway, at the end of the school the lecturers were presented with bottles of fine Grappa. I’ll no doubt be sampling mine over the Christmas vacation!

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Debt

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on December 17, 2012 by telescoper

What do I owe to you
Who loved me deep and long?
You never gave my spirit wings
Or gave my heart a song.

But oh, to him I loved,
Who loved me not at all,
I owe the open gate
That led through heaven’s wall.

by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

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Kettles, pots and metonymic shifts….

Posted in Uncategorized on December 17, 2012 by telescoper

As our Departmental Christmas lunch is looming I only have time for a brief reblog of this nice discussion of boiling water in pots. It might strike you as as a bit obsessive to write about the physics of such an everyday phenomenon, but I think a bit of an obsession about physics is a very good thing indeed.

P.S. As a fully paid-up member of Pedants Anonymous I couldn’t resist drawing attention to the metonymic shift involved in the title “Watching pots boil”. Of course the pot doesn’t boil – the water in it does….

Michael de Podesta's avatarProtons for Breakfast

My previous article about kettles left me wondering: Can gas hobs really waste more than half of the calorific energy in the gas? I decided to try a few more experiments and finally I think I have an answer: ‘Yes’. Gas hobs really do fail to transfer a great deal of the calorific energy in the gas to the pan or kettle they are heating.

Experiment#1 Rather than measuring the total time to reach 100 °C, I measured the rate of temperature rise. Because the heat capacity of water is well known, this allowed me to estimate how much thermal power was entering the water. So I spent a happy hour or so heating up various amounts of water: first 200g, then 400 g, 600g and finally 800g and I measured the temperature every 20 seconds.

I knew the burner power was 1.75 kW, and after a little jiggery pokery with a…

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Another Refusal to Mourn

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , on December 17, 2012 by telescoper

I posted this poem after the terrible events in Norway last year. Sadly the awful killings in Newton, Connecticut make it relevant again.

The full title is A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London  and it was written  by Dylan Thomas. Published just after the end of the Second World War, it was written some time earlier when Thomas heard news of a young girl who had burned to death when the house she was in was set on fire during an air raid. Here is the poet himself reading it.

The idea behind the poem is complex, and its message double-edged,  but Thomas finds a perfect balance between horror and sadness, and between indignation and heartbreak. Children shouldn’t have to die, and neither should anyone else whose life is cut short by another’s hand, but we have to accept that they can and do.  There’s no consolation to be found in mourning  and in any case it’s hypocritical to favour one death with elegies, when suffering is so widespread. The best we can do is allow the dead some dignity and their families and loved ones some time to grieve.

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

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God sent the shooter….

Posted in Uncategorized with tags on December 16, 2012 by telescoper

Sometimes I just despair. Watch this and weep. If this is your God, I weep for you too.

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Elsevierballs

Posted in Open Access with tags , , on December 16, 2012 by telescoper

Have you heard all the stories about the carefully-managed system of peer review that justifies the exorbitant cost of Elsevier journals? Then read this…

Ivan Oransky's avatarRetraction Watch

elsevierFor several months now, we’ve been reporting on variations on a theme: Authors submitting fake email addresses for potential peer reviewers, to ensure positive reviews. In August, for example, we broke the story of a Hyung-In Moon, who has now retracted 24 papers published by Informa because he managed to do his own peer review.

Now, Retraction Watch has learned that the Elsevier Editorial System (EES) was hacked sometime last month, leading to faked peer reviews and retractions — although the submitting authors don’t seem to have been at fault. As of now, eleven papers by authors in China, India, Iran, and Turkey have been retracted from three journals.

Here’s one of two identical notices that have just run in Optics & Laser Technology, for two unconnectedpapers:

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Astronomy Look-alikes, No. 80

Posted in Astronomy Lookalikes with tags , on December 16, 2012 by telescoper

Apparently, while I was away, Elias Brinks, the manager of Tottenham Hotspur (which seems to be some sort of football team), came to Cardiff to examine a PhD thesis scouting for new players to sign. One of the locals was struck by his resemblance to Andre Villas-Boas, the well-known astrophysicist from the University of Hertfordshire. I wonder if by any chance they might be related?

Lookalikes

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Back to “Civilization”….

Posted in Biographical with tags , , , on December 15, 2012 by telescoper

Time for a quick post this evening now that I’m back in Blighty. I’ve spent the last week in Passo del Tornale in the Italian Alps giving some lectures at the 2012 Transregio Winter School in Cosmology, of which (perhaps) more anon. I was in fact a day late getting home because British Airways decided to cancel the flight on which I was booked (from Verona to London Gatwick) yesterday. I’m not sure whether it was to do with the fact that it was snowing pretty heavily, or that the flight was under-booked and they couldn’t be bothered. Anyway, BA at least sent a text message while I was still on the train from Trento to Verona and I was able to re-book to 10.30am today straight away by phone. Rather than get grumpy about being delayed for a day I decided to make the best of it, there being many worse places in the world than Verona to be stranded after all. So, having found a nice hotel, I went off with two others from the meeting who had been similarly inconvenienced for a stroll around the city, which looked very atmospheric in the slush that was developing as the snow turned to rain. Here is the famous Arena di Verona as I snapped it with my Blackberry:

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And here is the even more famous, at least for people who’ve heard of Shakespeare, but somewhat less impressive Casa di Giulietta.

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What light from yonder window breaks? Actually it’s a floodlamp.

After that we had a warming glass of vin brulé (mulled wine) in the Piazza delle Erbe before finding a rather posh Trattoria and having a sumptuous meal, accompanied by a bottle of excellent (and rather expensive) Amarone. What the hell, it’s Christmas, and anyway when in Rome….

Anyway, a good night’s sleep followed and the second attempt to get home worked out very well: flight on time, train connections fine, no problems with the house when I got home (apart from the fact that my cable TV seems to have packed in), and it’s a lot warmer here than it was where I’ve been for the past week. Buying today’s Independent at Reading station, in between trains, I discovered that I’ve won the crossword prize again. Dictionary No. 10 should be here before Xmas.

It’s nice to be home.

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Interlude

Posted in Uncategorized on December 8, 2012 by telescoper

Well, dear readers, I have to go away for a week or so, and the place I’m going doesn’t offer internet access, so I’m going to have to suspend blogging activities until I return. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, but in the meantime here’s one of those old BBC Interlude films to keep you entertained…

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My Last Cardiff Lecture

Posted in Biographical, Education, The Universe and Stuff with tags , , on December 7, 2012 by telescoper

Hey ho.

This morning, as usual for a Friday, the alarm went off at 6am and I started the slow process of getting my brain in gear for a two-hour 9am lecture. As usual, by the start of the lecture I was still trying to wake up, but I at least managed to get through the performance  making only  finite number of errors.

The topic for day was Fourier series, and especially how to use them to solve interesting partial differential equations. The one I chose to illustrate the general method of separation of variables was the heat conduction equation, appropriately enough because Joseph Fourier, the man himself, developed the idea of using   trigonometric functions to represent other functions in order to solve that equation; he presented the method in his book Théorie analytique de la chaleur way back in 1822.

During the lecture I also had to distribute another bunch of questionnaires to the students to allow them to give constructive feedback vent their spleen at my incompetence and lack of organization. We already had one set of questionnaires halfway through the term, so I’m not sure why we need another one. Perhaps the students gave the wrong answers to the questions last time, so this is like a resit?

When it was all over, and I returned to my office to recover,  I suddenly realised that it was my last Cardiff lecture ever. (There is in fact another week remaining before the Christmas break, but I’m away next week and a colleague will fill in for me. ) In fact, it might have been my last undergraduate lecture ever, as I’m not sure how much time I’ll get for actual teaching when I move to my new job in the New Year. I think I’ll miss it, actually, but I’m not sure the students will!

Still, at least I get to set my alarm to a more sensible time from now on.

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