Ice skating

 Last night I attended a training session of Guildford Ice Figure Skating Club.  On paper, I am a good enough skater to attend these training sessions, as I have passed the requisite level.  In practice, most of the other skaters are more advanced than I am, and have one-on-one tuition to take them to the next levels of skating.  I have got to the end of the stage where you can train in group lessons and have switched to ice dancing for my main activity, using these training sessions to top me up on figure skating skills.  Anyway, I post here because last night's session was co-led by Kristin Spours, an ex-learner in the club, who is now a leading skater, representing Team GB in the world figure skating championships this year.  It was very inspirational to have a training session led by her ... not that I am destined for such things, but perhaps some of the 40 children who were on the ice with me will make it to the same level.  Because of our star guest, we had a picture taken at the end.  It has been posted to a closed facebook group and I realise that I can't really share it here, because all the trainees last night except me were children... but I think I can crop just the bit with me on it... here it is, in its gloriously low resolution:

UK Nuclear Activity

 I got an email from the Institute of Physics today pointing out that the lastest in the UK Nuclear Activity monthly newletters is out.  Every month there are four sections:  1) Nuclear Physics Publications; 2) News to Report; 3) Outreach Activity; 4) Media Interactions.  

This month's edition has completely blank sections 2, 3, and 4.  That's a a real shame, and could look a bit embarrassing for the UK nuclear physics commnunity.  I guess it is on all of us who work in the area to put reports in, and I could certainly do better here.  Some of the stuff I put up on this blog can count as nuclear physics news with a UK community link, and I think I could easily pass some short reports along to the newsletter.  For example, (though I didn't write it up in the blog), I and at least one other UK nuclear person attended the recent Quantum Techonologies for Fundamental Physics STFC outreach workshop, and we could easily have given a quick report for the newsletter.  

I like to hope that I will do better here in future, but I think the whole community's excuse this month is that we all had the deadline to submit our next STFC consolidated grant at the beginning of the month.  

Section 1 (the publications) relies on a combination of the newsletter editor noticing papers in the most common nuclear physics journals, and community members sending in other things.  It is definitely because of "other things" that my co-authored paper in Chin. Phys. C appears!

Cultural goings-on

Last night I took my oldest daughter to the Gielgud Theatre to see the new production of To Kill a Mockingbird.  This adaptation of the Harper Lee novel by Aaron Sorkin was first put on in 2018 on Broadway and has been in London since last March.  

The story is told through the eyes of the Finch children and their friend Dill, with re-enactment of events by the rest of the cast, split between the courtroom and the events taking place in the town.  I think I did read the book in school, though I re-read it as an adult something like 5-10 years ago, and I remembered reasonably well what the plot was.  The adaptation worked really well, I thought, telling the story, showing the horror of small town America, with the depressing message that much has not changed, with it still being dangerous to be black in the US.  The acting was pretty decent overall, and they all did creditable sourthern US accents, though the judge occasionally seemed to be speaking in an Irish accent.  Was he suppsed to be a recent immigrant?  Hmm.

Of course, no pictures were allowed during the play, but here is one of me and my daughter as we waited in our seats for it to start

 

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. 

Merry Christmas 2022

 It's Christmas Day!  Merry Christmas, people spending this morning catching up on blogs.  As part of a Christmas message from my colleague Aru in India, he sent some old pictures of me, and my Surrey co-workers Paddy Regan and Phil Walker, which I copy here.  How much younger we all looked!