Flamin' Groovies

Hot on the heels of my visit to London to see the Divine Comedy, I went to another gig on Saturday.  This time it was at the 100 Club on Oxford St, to see the Flamin' Groovies.  I took my Dad, as a birthday present for him.  I had looked through the listings for bands I thought he might want to see.  I had heard of The Flamin' Groovies, but didn't really know them, and my Dad had not heard of them, but they've been around since the late 60's, and the idea of going to the 100 Club, where my Dad used to go around half a century ago to listen to jazz, decided us in favour of this being the birthday present.  My Dad and I have a combined age of 122, but it certianly wasn't the kind of gig where either of us felt particularly old or out of place.  At one point, though, the lead singer did say he needed to pause and catch his breath, and that he was 74 ("youngster" my 75yo Dad muttered).  Despite their age, the band rocked pretty hard!

Departmental Colloquium Series: Michelle Collins

 I've just got back from Michelle Collins' excellent talk as the first speaker in a new colloquium series being organised in the Department of Physics by Payel Das and Jack Henderson.  These are supposed to be accessible research talks given to a whole-department audience as a way of bringing us together after the lockdown period, and as a way for us to better know what we each get up to research-wise.  Who knows, maybe it will start some new collaboraitons?  Michelle talked about dwarf galaxies as a way to understand the dark matter structure of the universe.  There were lots of pretty pictures taken with telescopes, though I think it did need guidance from the expert eye to understand the significance of blurry patches of the starfields which to me were just ... blurry patches.

Here's the view from where I sat.  I went fairly far back because I was going to sit and do some emails.   The talk, though, was too interesting, and I left the emails until after both the talk, and writing this blogpost about it!  

The Divine Comedy

 Yesterday was a busy day with meetings: meeting personal tutees, then a session of the department Equality Diversity and Inclusion committee.  Straight from that into my weekly research group catch-up meeting, then straight to a parent information briefing from the University nursery where my son goes, then a call with the research student office to help fill in some paperwork for a new PhD student, then a final year project student meeting in my office followed by an online chat with a placement student of ours who is working at JLab in the US.  As soon as that was over, a whole-research-group strategy meeting.  It was definitely a case of eating lunch al desko.

 So, it was a nice end of the day to take a train up to London to see the band The Divide Comedy at the London Palladium.  I'm not sure if I've ever been there before.  It's a bit of a bigger venue than for most bands I tend to see, but a friend had a spare ticket and I like the band so I went along, and very enjoyable it was.  I don't consider myself a super-fan, but I first heard them around the time they started ~30 years ago, when my then-girlfriend bought a single of theirs which I most remember because it had a cover version of The Throwing Muses' Hate My Way on one side.  This somewhat obscure cover of a somewhat obscure song from a limited edition picture disc EP is certainly not something they played in their kind of greatest hits show last night, but I looked up the song online, and here it is.  A picture from last night's show is at the top

Jyväskylä PAC meeting

 Yesterday I attended my final meeting as chair and panel member of the Jyväskylä Programme Advisory Committee (PAC).  This is the group that looks at proposals for experiments to take place at the accelerator facility and decides which to suggest to the laboratory to accept.  The period of tenure on the committee is 3 years over which 6 meeting take place.  Of course the last three years have been very unusual and we ended up running most of the meetings virtually.  There is also the issue for the lab of what to do with the recommended proposals while people couldn’t travel to the lab during lockdown. 

I enjoyed my time on the committee and learned a lot from the other members about some of the more technical and experimental details. It’s a bit disappointing not to visit Finland but also hard to justify the carbon cost of getting there for a meeting that actually works well virtually. 

Now three new panel members will join as I and two others rotate off.  I wish the new members well!

Day one at the IoP Nuclear Physics Conference

The University of Surrey was closed today, as it kindly gives all, or most, staff a bit of extra holiday around the Easter weekend.  However, it was also the host site of this year's Institute of Physics Nuclear Physics Group conference, so I was in work as an attendee and local organising committee member (though really the chair Paddy Regan has done almost everything from the local commitee point of view). 

 It was nice seeing my colleagues from all over the UK and a few from farther afield.  Even before the pandemic-enforced cessation of face-to-face conferences it was probably a few years since I last attended one of the national ones, and it has been great to see old friends and colleagues.

The picture below was taken by the conference chair, and posted on Twitter.   I am in the picture, just, over at the right though quite cropped.  I'm wearing the stripy jumper and clearly part of a funny conversation with Kate Jones (University of Tennessee) and Carl Wheldon (University of Birmingham).  I think we were remembering the time around 20 years ago when we were all at the University of Surrey together.

As well as meeting old colleagues, I saw some recent ex-undergrads who are now PhD students.  My faviourite part of the day was talking to them, not least because they told me that my lectures were their favourites when then were undergraduates.  A lovely thing to say, and I could feel myself blush when they did so!

QCTIP 2022

 As promised in a post last month, I have come to the QCTIP conference in Bristol.  QCTIP stands for Quantum Computing Theory In Practice and the topic cover quantum computing from a largely mathematical and computer science point of view, with applications to various areas, including physics.  As something of an outsider, I found the talks ranged from very understandable to pretty hard to follow.   While online conference work pretty well for listening to and interacting with the talks, I wanted to attend in person so I could get to know some of the people working in the field, and get known by them.  For that, I think it was worth coming.  Particularly in the poster session, where I displayed a poster made by my student Isaac.  There was a pretty constant stream of people coming up and talking to me.  The idea that someone was applying quantum computing to nuclear physics was new to them, and they seemed genuinely interested.  I was also reasonably reassured that our neophyte forays into quantum computing were along the right lines.

The conference is organized by the mathematics department at Bristol.  As such, there are blackboards dotted around the building and people used them to discuss work during coffee breaks, as in the picture below

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!