EuNPC in Caen

 

I am at day 5 of 5 at the European Nuclear Physics Conference in Caen, France.   It's the first time I've been at one of the conferences in this series, and I've enjoyed the broad range of talks, attending not only the sessions very close to my own activity, but also those on applications and distant parts of the field.  

Caen seems like a nice enough place, though I can't say I have explored it very much.  We were driven out to something like an old tithe barn for the conference dinner, where we were treated to a covers band composed of nuclar physicists from the IJCLab in Paris.  

My talk was scheduled on Monday, so I enjoyed getting that out of the way, and the subsequent ongoing discussions about it with people as the week went on.  

I am staying on for one extra day to take part in a NuPECC meeting finishing Saturday lunchtime.

Homework is an uncountable noun

It's that time of year when my children enter a new school year.  In the case of one of them, it's a new school, too, as she enters year 7 and so secondary school.  

The school uses an app called Bromcom, named after the genre of male romantic comedy films for reasons that escape me. 

In the homework section of the app, parents and children can keep an eye on any homework assignments set.  Since we're just in the first few days of school, my daughter has not received any homework yet, and the app says "No homeworks found!"

Using homework as a countable noun grates with me.  I'm sure there's an element of me railing against new usages, but the uncountable status of homework is well-attested in dictionaries.  Here's the Cambridge dictionary's guide to countable and uncountable nouns, where they explicitly use homework as one of the examples of a uncountable noun:

Other common uncountable nouns include: accommodation, baggage, homework, knowledge, money, permission, research, traffic, travel.

These nouns are not used with a/an or numbers and are not used in the plural.

In my quick internet search, there seemed complete consensus on this from a whole range of sources.   

Oh well, here's a recent picture of me reacting to these kind of usages:

 

 

Summer projects

 It is getting near the end of the summer holidays.  Literally at the end for school kids with mine going back today and tomorrow, while university undergraduates have a couple more weeks to go before they are back in classes.  

There is no automatic summer holiday for university-based academics in the UK, though summer is, for many of us, the easiest time to take the bulk of our annual leave allowance.  It is not just research and community/admin activities that carry on in summer - there is teaching too.  In particular the standard UK MSc programme lasts for a full 12-month long year with the summer months being taken up doing a final project.  

I have been (co-)supervising  4 projects in nuclear physics and quantum computing, and I've been pleased to get two of the projects to get involved in providing some sample results for a paper for a conference proceeding that gives a summary of some methods for determining eigenstates and eigenvalues on a quantum computer.  This means that two of my MSc project students are now co-authors on a publication with me.  I'm not sure when the paper will appear in the official conference proceedings, but I've stuck it up on the University repository so that it is available to anyone to read.  May I present ... 

“Quantum Computing for Nuclear Structure”, Paul Stevenson, Chandan Sarma, Robbie Giles, Lloyd LaRonde, and Bhoomika Maheshwari, submitted to proceedings of 17^th International Conference of Nuclear Structure Properties (NSP2025), Sivas, Türkiye (2025)