Bristol

I am in the process of organising a trip to Bristol to attend a conference (this one, if you are interested).  I lived in Bristol for a while as a child (1980-1983, or something like that).   I was young enough that my memories centre around home, the nearby environment, parks, the walk to the local shops, the Downs, and a very few other things - the long road with the toyshop (Dawson's Toys) on, for example.  It will be strange to be back.  Like with any work travel, I will be there just in time for the start of the meeting and leaving just as the meeting ends and will not be able to visit any old haunts, but I expect it will be a slightly odd experience in any case.  It's the only place I've lived as a child that I've never really been back to.  I was born in Glasgow and have been back many times, and lived in London, Oxford, Tennessee, Portsmouth, Bishop's Stortford (where my parents still live) and have visited all those places again over the years.

If you ever watched the opening of TVAM's Good Morning Britain programme when it was on the air over many years, then you would have seen me, aged 6, somewhere in the top-right part of the "D" in this spelling out of the words "GOOD MORNING BRITAIN" made by a group of people on the Bristol Downs.  

The snapshot is taken from a YouTube video I found (here) so you can see the whole thing, where we were all milling around on the Downs and then at a signal we all had to move to a roughly-designated position inside some letters that were marked on the ground.  The director on the ground heard back from the helicopter that it had apparently worked brilliantly - and the effect is pretty neat!

PDRA positions in York

The University of York nuclear physics group is currently advertising for three post-doctoral researchers to work with them.  This is excellent news for the group there, indicating as it does great success in having their peer-reviewed grand proposals funded, with three full-time researchers enabling them to carry out the promised research.  It's also good news for the UK nuclear physics community, and in particular the very small theory component of it.  Especially it is good for those looking to secure a post-doc in nuclear theory, based in a lovely city. 

The deadline for applying is 18th March.

Here is an image I found of the theory group at York, probably taken before the pandemic!  As I understand it from the job advert, the Principal Investigator on all three projects is Prof Jacek Dobaczewsku, on the left in the picture

doi on arxiv

 My last post was about the arXiv and now there is more news to report about it:  All papers posted there since the beginning of 2022 will have a doi assigned.  This is excellent news, as the doi has become such a standard way of providing a link to an online article.  I assumed that that the reason this hadn't been done in the past was because of the non-zero cost of having a doi assigned.  I don't know what the cost is, but I guess it was not so much of a hindrance after all - and of course arXiv is not free to run, but it does have sponsorship and institutional funding, and presumably the arXiv board arrived at the decision that subscribing to the doi system was worthwhile and affordable. 

From arXiv to ar5iv

A little while ago I posted about a website which took arXiv articles and presented them as html for better reading on devices such as phones where pdf does not work so well.  Now I've come across another one, ar5iv which makes html5 versions of arXiv papers (where the original is in LaTeX).   To use it you can just replace the X by a 5 in the URL of a paper and hopefully it will return a readable version.  

Here's an example from a paper writing up a summer student's code.  It seems to work pretty well even with the LaTeX package we used for pretty-printing the source code in an appendix.  

Nuclear reactions breaking causality?

In response to a tweet about a paper taking a long time to get published, Toshihiko Kawano of Los Alamos tweeted about a paper of his that appears to violate some physical laws in its publication.  Good job Toshihiko!

Having Covid-19

 I managed to get this far before getting Covid, but with four children in four different schools, and with three of the children under 12 and hence not vaccinated (since that is the regulation in the UK) it seemed only a matter of time until we got it.  It seems to have been rife in my 5yo's school, and we tested him, even though he did not have symptoms before sending him to a trampolining party in an encolsed space.  He tested positive, was pretty stoical about it, even about missing the party, and he is now the first to get through the other side and testing negative again.  Meanwhile, I and my partner have it.  It has been hard work both being ill at the same time and having to keep the kids home because of the Covid in the house, all the while trying to get through a few most-vital work tasks.  

The line on my own lateral flow tests is fading, and according to the UK rules I can return to society on Tuesday no matter what (even if testing positive).  I see in the national statistics of case number that though we are past the recent peak, we are sitting on a smaller peak, or shoulder to the main peak which seems to me to be thanks to schools going back after Christmas, with younger years having no masks, no vaccinations and really no precautions at all.  

 

Books of 2021

Here are the list of books I've read in 2021: https://www.goodreads.com/user_challenges/25611691

I use the Goodreads website to keep track of what I've read, and set a somewhat arbitrary "reading challenge" each year in terms of number of books.  This year I met the target exactly, though I do include books I read my 8 year old, which perhaps I shouldn't, and don't include the much shorter books I read my younger children.  I'm not sure much would be gained by adding a selection of Mr Men books multiple times to my reading record.  I think I have missed a couple of the (excellent) How To Train Your Dragon books off the list.

From the list, I think I have cemented my view that I particularly enjoy biographies (auto, or otherwise), and found Lea Ypi's Free, Gyles Brandreth's Odd Boy Out and Tara Westover's Educated among my three favourite.  The first and last of those also appeal to my sub-genre of early-mid career academic types reflecting on their life so far (see also, The Lost Properties of Love by Sophie Ratcliffe and Red Threads by Charlotte Higgins).  I read relatively little fiction this year, except to my 8 year old, but I enjoyed each of the small selection in its own way, and it must be in Elizabeth Day's favour that I made my first foray into her work (The Party) and then wanted to follow it up with her new release this year, Magpie.

Probably the longest book, and one that I spent a lot of time immersed in and really enjoying was Orlando Figes' The Europeans.  A history of a period in Europe, roughly spanning the life of opera singer Pauline Viardot and concentrating on the cultural history, I found myself gripped, even if I am largely ignorant and not particularly intersted in opera.  

edit: I have realised thanks to a comment on Twitter that the Goodreads website will only let those logged in to see the list.  Here are screengrabs of the lot in reverse chronological order (so Educated is the last one I read):