Wednesday 28 September 2022

Donkeys, pigs and goats

One nice thing about working at a University is the diversity of things that goes on there.  For example, I can go and listen to a talk from some erudite expert in something far from my own field or I can attend the weekly classical music concerts put on by students in the Music Department. 

Today, the thing I could do (and did do) was to visit the farm animals that were brought onto campus for us to pet.  There were three pens of happy-seeming goats, pigs and donkeys.  They all seemed pleased enough with the attention of cooing students and staff, and we all got a pleasant distraction from our cares. 

Thanks to Miller's Ark for bringing them along



Wednesday 14 September 2022

Visit to JLab

 I have just spend the last couple of days in Newport News, Virginia, USA.  I'm here, because it's where Jefferson Lab is.  Jefferson Lab is a major nuclear physics research facility in which electrons are accelerated to very high energies and smashed into nuclear targets to understand in particular the quark-gluon structure of protons and neutrons, though there are other physics goals too.

My University has a master's student, Rocco, on placement there, working with Jerry Gilfoyle from the University of Richmond who has kindly taken Rocco on as a salaried researcher for 10 months to help develop new algorithms to help disentangle real signals coming out of the complex detector system from the noisy background. 

As part of the scheme where we (University of Surrey) send student on placements, we also make a couple of visits during the year.  I made the first as a virtual visit, and make the second one, this week, in person.  After the visit, Rocco, Jerry and I met in the centre of Newport News for dinner.  Here's a picture of Rocco by the fountains in downtown:


 I also used the fact I was at the Lab to meet the new deputy director for scientific, David Dean.  I know David from my PhD days when I spent quite a bit of time at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.  David was there at the time, and was a kind of surrogate supervisor for a time.  It was nice to catch up with him.  I didn't take a picture of him, so I can't post one here, but one day when I go through my old photographs of the time, I might be able to dig one out and post it to the blog.


Tuesday 13 September 2022

The man from the future: book review

 Yesterday I read a Ananyo Bhattacharya's biogrophy and popular science book about the life and work of John von Neumann.  Here's the review I posted on goodreads:

Wednesday 7 September 2022

David Brink in Royal Society's Biographical Memoirs

 I just got an email from Angela Bonaccorso to say that the biographical article about David Brink has appeeared today in the Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society journal: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2022.0020