We do this not because it is easy

I saw this jokey post on Facebook, and it made me laugh.  A play on Kennedy's speech in 1962 about landing astronauts on the moon in which he said "We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon... We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."

I think it made me laugh, not just because of the unexpected continuation of a well-known speech, but the familiarity of falling into the trap of thinking something would be easy, hence choosing that path, but finding it is in fact not at all easy!

How to pronounce "Nuclear"

 I'm at the Institute of Physics building in London attending a community meeting on nuclear physics.   Among all the interesting and/or useful information I've picked up from the talks, I've noticed that the word "nuclear" is being pronounced 'nucular' by some members of the community.  It's something of a joke in The Simpsons that Homer Simpson is so uncouth that even though he is an operator at a nuclear power plant, he thinks the word should be pronounced "nucular" and not "nuclear".  I don't wince like I once did when I hear it pronounced "nucular".  It seems that it is simply how some people hear it / are able to say it.  Neither OED or Chambers dictionaries have caught up with this yet, but I suppose they will.  The American Merriam-Webster dictionary has "nucular", and lists it as non-standard.

Though I no longer wince, it does still stand out to me when I hear nucular.  Perhaps I need to start using it myself, until I am completely at one with it.

Welcome Abhishek

We have a new postdoc who started this week in the nuclear theory group at Surrey.  His name is Abhishek, and that's him in the picture.  It is his given name, and he has no surname, a practice I did not realise was common in India. He says that there are possible neutral surnames (like Kumar) that sometimes get used by people with no surname for the purposes of filling out forms, but in India it is not usually necessary as e.g. one can have an Indian passport with a single given name as one's full name. 

That he has a single name is no problem in publishing scientific papers, where you can call youself what you like (see his latest preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.08757).  It can make it hard to search for his papers, though, with Abhishek being a reasonably common Indian name.

It is more problematic with University systems which require a first name and surname to exist.  It seems that the University has made up an initial for him and used Abhishek as a surname.  What a shame the system cannot cope with other cultural norms.