by Michael D. Higgins (b. 1941), former President of the Republic of Ireland.
Here he is reading the poem from the President’s Office.
Stardust – Michael D. Higgins
Posted in Poetry with tags Michael D Higgins, Michael D. Higgins, Poem, Poetry, Stardust on November 20, 2025 by telescoperQueen’s University Belfast and Dundalk IT (not Maynooth?)
Posted in Education, Maynooth with tags Dundalk Institute of Technology, Maynooth University, Merger, Queen's University Belfast on November 19, 2025 by telescoperA couple of years ago I posted an item about the news of a proposed merger of Maynooth University and Dundalk Institute of Technology. That piece began with the following:
Life is full of surprises, especially if you’re a member of academic staff at Maynooth University.
Today it was revealed that the institution that employs me is planning to merge with Dundalk Institute of Technology. It was revealed not in a direct message to staff, but through an article in the national media, in this case the Sunday Independent. The article there is paywalled but there is another piece here.
This is astonishing news, not least because of the way it has come out. Yet again, the only way that staff at Maynooth can find out what’s going on is through the newspapers. Senior Management don’t deign to inform us of anything…
Not surprisingly I hadn’t heard anything about how the proposed merger was progressing except for a couple of items in the national media. For example, in May this year, there was an announcement of the formation of a Regional Graduate Academy linking postgraduate education in Dundalk and Maynooth.
Today, however, I saw another news item announcing that Dundalk IT has now decided to become a College of Queen’s University Belfast. It explains:
The new partnership between Queens University Belfast and Dundalk Institute of Technology is not a “parent child relationship,” and represents the first “all-Ireland university”, the Minister for Further and Higher Education has said.
DkIT is set to become a University College following the agreement with QUB, which will see it change from an IT to a University College of Queen’s University Belfast.
What does this new new relationship between DkIT and QUB mean for the old new relationship between DkIT and Maynooth University? Have they called the Maynooth-Dundalk merger off? Or will the three institutions form a ménage à trois?
Don’t ask me. I only work here. Perhaps I’ll be able to find out by reading the newspapers.
P.S. Coincidentally, the next “President’s Update” for staff at Maynooth, scheduled for December, has been postponed until the New Year.
P.P.S. It is about 80km from Belfast to Dundalk and about 100km from Dundalk to Maynooth.
It’s LGBTQIA+ STEM Day!
Posted in LGBTQ+, Maynooth with tags LGBTAIA+, LGBTQIA+, Maynooth University, Section 28, STEM on November 18, 2025 by telescoper
Just a quick post to point out that today is LGBTQIA+ STEM Day, which aims to celebrate to celebrate the work of LGBTQIA+ people in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), but also to highlight the barriers still facing us.
For more information see here.
This also provides an opportunity for me to send my best wishes to all LGBTQIA+ staff and students at Maynooth and around the world! As far as I know, my Employer is not marking this occasion. This surprises me as it is not unknown for them to engage in pinkwashing from time to time, whenever it suits them for some reason.
P.S. I’m reminded that it was 22 years ago today that Section 28 was finally repealed in England and Wales. With reactionary fforces around the world attacking our hard-won rights, it is important that we cling on to what we’ve got.
Principia for Sale
Posted in History, The Universe and Stuff with tags Isaac Newton, Ketterer Rare Books, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Principia on November 17, 2025 by telescoperWith Christmas approaching, you may be looking for gift ideas so I thought I would pass on this advertisement:
The book concerned is a First Edition of the Continental Issue of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, dated 1687.
For more details see here. The estimate is “only” €100,000, which seems to me a bit on the low side. A similar volume was listed by Christie’s in 2016 as $1,000,000 to $1,500,000 but in the end sold for $3.7 million. This one has had some repairs and is slightly browned with age, but has an interesting provenance. I’d be surprised if it didn’t fetch at least a million. We’ll find out in a week!
Concerning Muskopedia
Posted in Politics with tags arXiv:2511.09685, Conservapedia, Elon Musk, Grokipedia, wikipedia on November 16, 2025 by telescoperA colleague sent me this arXiv paper. The abstract reads:
Elon Musk released Grokipedia on 27 October 2025 to provide an alternative to Wikipedia, the crowdsourced online encyclopedia. In this paper, we provide the first comprehensive analysis of Grokipedia and compare it to a dump of Wikipedia, with a focus on article similarity and citation practices. Although Grokipedia articles are much longer than their corresponding English Wikipedia articles, we find that much of Grokipedia’s content (including both articles with and without Creative Commons licenses) is highly derivative of Wikipedia. Nevertheless, citation practices between the sites differ greatly, with Grokipedia citing many more sources deemed “generally unreliable” or “blacklisted” by the English Wikipedia community and low quality by external scholars, including dozens of citations to sites like Stormfront and Infowars. We then analyze article subsets: one about elected officials, one about controversial topics, and one random subset for which we derive article quality and topic. We find that the elected official and controversial article subsets showed less similarity between their Wikipedia version and Grokipedia version than other pages. The random subset illustrates that Grokipedia focused rewriting the highest quality articles on Wikipedia, with a bias towards biographies, politics, society, and history. Finally, we publicly release our nearly-full scrape of Grokipedia, as well as embeddings of the entire Grokipedia corpus.
It’s an interesting paper which shows that much of Muskopedia Grokipedia is just scraped from Wikipedia but some articles have been rewritten to reflect Elon Musk’s fascist attitudes.
Incidentally, the name is derived from Grok, an AI bot for spreading far-right propaganda on Twitter. “Grot” would have been a better name. I have no experience of Grok as I no longer use Twitter and have no intention of looking at Grokipedia either. I imagine it’s probably like Conservapedia, although considerably less (unintentionally) funny.
I remember that I should have posted a reaction to the spineless behaviour of the Royal Society, of which Mr Musk is a Fellow. At the “Unite the Kingdom” march organized by career criminal and racist thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), Elon Musk made a (remote) contributuion that used violent rhetoric to promote narratives of division and polarisation. This is what his sort will always do. The Royal Society’s response was to issue a lame public statement but take no further action. Musk’s continued presence is a terrible stain on the reputation of the Royal Society.
In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I do have a Wikipedia page. I’m told I don’t get a mention on Muskopedia. I am grateful for that. Anyway, this paper reminded me to make another donation to Wikipedia. I encourage you to do likewise.
Weekly Update from the Open Journal of Astrophysics – 15/11/2025
Posted in OJAp Papers, Open Access, The Universe and Stuff with tags 2504.19510v2, arXiv:2405.18468v2, arXiv:2501.01578v2, arXiv:2504.19510v2, arXiv:2505.04731v2, arXiv:2507.00757v2, arXiv:2509.07695v2, arXiv:2509.09764v3, Astrophysics of Galaxies, black holes, Cosmology, Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, Diamond Open Access, Diamond Open Access Publishing, downsizing, dynamical friction, Explosion, galaxy formation, gravitational microlensing, High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, jittering jets, JWST, M31, neutrinos, Open Access, Open Journal of Astrophysics, redshift drift, splashback radius, supernovae, The Open Journal of Astrophysics on November 15, 2025 by telescoperIt’s Saturday again, so it’s time for the usual update of the week’s new papers at the Open Journal of Astrophysics. It has been quite a busy week. Since the last update we have published another seven papers, which brings the number in Volume 8 (2025) up to 175, and the total so far published by OJAp up to 410.
First on the menu for this week is “Dynamical friction and measurements of the splashback radius in galaxy clusters” by Talia M. O’Shea (U. Wisconsin-Madison, USA), Josh Borrow & Stephanie O’Neil (U. Pennsylvania, USA) and Mark Vogelsberger (MIT, USA). Published on Tuesday 11th November in the folder Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics, this one presents a study suggesting that dynamical friction does not play a major role in reducing the radius of the splashback feature in real data compared to numerical simulations.
The overlay is here:
You can find the officially accepted version on arXiv here.
The Fediverse announcement is here:
The second paper of the week is “Microlensing of lensed supernovae Zwicky & iPTF16geu: constraints on the lens galaxy mass slope and dark compact object fraction” by Nikki Arendse (Stockholm University, Sweden) and and international cast of 11 others based in Sweden, UK and France. This one was published on 11th November 2025 in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies. It is about combining observations of two supernovae, iPTF16geu and SN Zwicky, with microlensing magnification maps to probe the properties of the lens galaxy.
The overlay is here:
You can find the official version of this one on arXiv here. The federated announcement on Mastodon is here:
Next one up is “Neutrino Constraints on Black Hole Formation in M31” by Yudai Sawa (U. Tokyo, Japan) and 11 others all based in Japan. This was published on Tuesday 11th November in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena. It presents a calculation of the neutrino emission expected from the collapse of massive stars and its use in constraining black hole formation using neutrino detectors.
The overlay is here:
You can find the official accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:
The fourth paper this week is “Redshift Drift in Relativistic N-Body Simulations” by Alexander Oestreicher (U. Southern Denmark, DK), Chris Clarkson (QMUL, UK), Julian Adamek (U. Zürich, CH) and Sofie Marie Koksbang (U. Southern Denmark, DK). This one was published on Wednesday 12th November in the folder marked Cosmology and NonGalactic Astrophysics. It presents numerical calculations of the cosmological redshift drift effect for comparison with future surveys.
The overlay is here:
You can find the official published version on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement follows:
The fifth paper for this week is “Attributing the point symmetric structure of core-collapse supernova remnant N132D to the jittering jets explosion mechanism” by Noam Soker (Technion, Haifa, Israel). This one, published on Wednesday November 12th in the folder High-Energy Astrophysical Phenomena, presents a discussion of the morphology of a supernova remnant and possible explanation for it in terms of the explosion mechanism.
The overlay is here:
The officially accepted version can be found on arXiv here. The Fediverse announcement is here:
The sixth paper to report this week is “Witnessing downsizing in the making: quiescent and breathing galaxies at the dawn of the Universe” by Emiliano Merlin (Osservatorio Astronomico di Roma, Italy) and an international cast of 20 others based in Italy, Germany, UK, USA, Switzerland, Spain and China. This one was published on Friday November 14th in the folder Astrophysics of Galaxies.
You can find the officially-accepted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:
And finally (for this week) we have “Beyond No No Tension: JWST z > 10 Galaxies Push Simulations to the Limit” by Joe McCaffrey (NUI Maynooth, Ireland), Samantha Hardin & John Wise (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA) and John Regan (Maynooth). This one was also published on Friday 14th November, in the folder marked Astrophysics of Galaxies. It asks the question whether newly-discovered high redshift galaxies are consistent with simulations of galaxy formation. The overlay is here:
You can find the officially acceopted version on arXiv here. The fediverse announcement is here:
And that concludes the update for this week. There will be another next Saturday.
The Key to Ireland’s Victory against Portugal
Posted in Football with tags Catherine Connolly, Football, ireland, Portugal, soccer on November 14, 2025 by telescoperAfter a run of disappointing results, Ireland’s footballers last night scored a memorable victory, beating Portugal 2-0 in a World Cup Qualifying match. I attribute the result to the new Head Coach, pictured below…
And here is a photo of Ireland’s two-goal hero, Troy Parrot, in action.
Quantum & Answers
Posted in Maynooth, The Universe and Stuff with tags IrelandQCI, Physics, Quantum Communications, quantum physics on November 13, 2025 by telescoper
Returning to my office in the Science Building at Maynooth University I saw a new feature, which I initially thought was a mobile coffee shop, but which turned out to be the Quantum & Answers trailer, a mobile engagement unit, developed by IrelandQCI, and designed to bring quantum technologies to life for the general public in Ireland.
In case you weren’t aware, IrelandQCI, the ‘Building a National Quantum Communication Infrastructure for Ireland’ project incorporates integrating innovative and secure quantum devices and systems into conventional communication infrastructures. This will be done by enhancing the ESB Telecoms’ optical fibre network with an additional layer of security, all based on quantum physics, in particular quantum key distribution (QKD).
You can read more about this initiative here.
It’s on Maynooth University campus for the rest of the day so if you’re around please feel free to visit and talk about quantum encryption and the like.
Update: I popped in to get out of the rain…
One Hundred Years of the Hot Five
Posted in History, Jazz with tags Gut Bucket Blues, Johnny Dodds, Johnny St Cyr, Kid Ory, Lil Armstrong, Lil Hardin, Louis Armstrong, Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five on November 12, 2025 by telescoperExactly one hundred years ago today, on 12th November 1925, five musicians gathered in the Okeh studios in Chicago to create musical history. The band was Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five and they were about to embark on a series of recording sessions that would result in a rich treasury of 20th century music in the form of 33 sides recorded between November 1925 and December 1927.
The band (pictured above) consisted of Louis Armstrong (on cornet on this track, although he switched to trumpet by the time of the later sessions). Kid Ory played trombone Johnny Dodds Clarinet. Lil Hardin (who was married to Louis Armstrong at the time and credited as Lil Armstrong) played piano and Johnny St Cyr played banjo or guitar. For many people, the collective imagination and sheer drive of Armstrong, Dodds and Ory made them just about the perfect front line. The way they take this one out at the end is a great example.
I won’t even try to write a detailed analysis of this historic record. I’ll just make a couple of points about the Hot Fives.
First, this band never played together as such in live concerts; they were strictly a studio band. In fact, they always sounded like a bunch of friends getting together to have fun making music, which is no doubt because that’s what they were. Most of the records they made were done in a single take, too.
Second, the line-up was unusual because it didn’t have a full rhythm section. At least part of the reason for this was that, at the time, drums were very difficult to record. In Louis Armstrong’s recorded reminiscences he talks about the fact that drums would often make the needle jump when cutting a record if they were were positioned close to the recording equipment. On the other hand if they were too far away to avoid that happening then they often couldn’t be heard at all. The low-frequency response of old fashioned recording systems made bass lines largely inaudible too. Anyway, it was decided that the excellent combination of Lil Hardin’s piano and Johnny St Cyr’s banjo would provide a sufficient framwork. So they were, though later on, in May 1927, a brass bass and drums were added to create the Hot Seven who made a further 11 sides, including the all-time classic Potato Head Blues.
Finally I’ll just remark that according to Satchmo’s memoirs, this track Gut Bucket Blues was the first to be recorded. It does sound like it too, as he introduces the members of the band. I wonder if they knew at this first session what a sensation these records were going to create?
P.S. I know it’s a bit scratchy, but it’s 100 years old. It’s amazing to me that you can hear anything at all.
Ireland has a new President
Posted in Politics with tags Catherine Connolly, Inuaguration, President of Ireland on November 11, 2025 by telescoper
Earlier today, in Dublin Castle, Catherine Connolly was sworn in as the new President of Ireland. Her inauguration was the 14th to the office of Uachtarán na hÉireann and she is the 10th person to have that title. The ceremony was the first of its kind I have seen and I was impressed by its combination of simplicity and dignity. The previous president, Michael D. Higgins, looked rather emotional as he handed over the reins. I wish him all the best in his retirement. I think he’ll be a hard act to follow, and I wish Catherine Connolly all the best in the role for the next 7 years.
Incidentally, the oath of office reads:
I láthair Dia na nUilechumhacht, táimse, [ainm*], á ghealladh agus á dhearbhú go sollúnta is go fírinneach bheith i mo thaca agus i mo dhídin do Bhunreacht Éireann, agus a dlíthe a chaomhnú, mo dhualgais a chomhlíonadh go dílis coinsiasach de réir an Bhunreachta is an dlí, agus mo lándícheall a dhéanamh ar son leasa is fónaimh mhuintir na hÉireann. Dia do mo stiúradh agus do mo chumhdach
*This “ainm” is the Irish word for “name”; the President-Elect inserts their name here. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the student to translate the rest of the oath into English.
In the Dark 