Richard Alexander

Proud dad moment: the boy worked a Hamilton lyric into a homework essay. 👏🏻

Entirely appropriate terminology. 😀 I plan to continue referring to myself as “mid-40s” until about two weeks before my 50th birthday.

Absolutely. Cutting grants/jobs means the only options for ECRs are to move location, or change careers, and there are many good reasons why people might not be able to uproot their lives. It's a huge bias against people with families, caring responsibilities, illnesses / disabilities, and more. 😢

Schrödinger’s QR funding, which both is and isn’t funding research. 🙄

Basically the bucket is a label which allows the government to say it’s putting billions into “curiosity-driven research”, while most of that money isn’t actually funding research at all.

It seems to me that there's a huge disconnect around QR funding. UKRI see it as no different to grant funding, but that is not how most universities see it. If most of the "curiosity-driven" funding is actually QR rather than investigator-led, there's going to be a lot of talking at cross-purposes.

Here is a copy of the open letter from the heads of physics departments across the UK- worth reading as it makes a lot of excellent points

www.iop.org/about/news/o...

Don’t want to say the endless rain is getting to us, but the cycling club group chat has switched from which bikes are affordable or unaffordable, to which roads are fordable or unfordable. ☔️

One point I don't think it made clearly enough to non-scientists: research grants are jobs. Mostly jobs for early-career scientists. Cutting grants means young people losing their jobs. The message these cuts send to ECRs is that their only career options are to leave science, or to leave the UK.

Just encountered Captcha-style anti-robot measures on the NASA ADS search page. I guess it's a sign of the system creaking, presumably under the weight of endless scraping by LLMs. 😢 🔭

Yes, but also I’m still saying Lola Rennt.

In this case it's screenwash for the car. 😂

Diluting juice. 😀 I may even once have threatened to throw the boy out of the house for saying "squash". 😂

(Screenwash for the car, in case that wasn't clear. 🤣)

After spending more than half my life as an ex-pat, I sometimes wonder if I'm really still Scottish. But then I write "skoosher juice" on the shopping list, and I wonder less. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

Can you fill a whole seminar with the word "DON'T!" in 200-point font? 😂

Not sure that really counts as a hot take. The default position of UK politics for the last 20+ years has been that we can have Scandinavian levels of public services on US levels of taxation. It turns out...you can't.

True. I'm hoping that will just mean things will get better in other subjects, rather than making ADS worse, but I guess we'll see. 🤞🏻

This is yet another example where astronomers don't realise how good we have it. I do actually have a GS account, but the profile is private, and I haven't looked at it for many years. Everything we do is via NASA ADS, which is - and has always been - vastly superior to anything Google offered. 🔭

These cuts to physics research will be a disaster for UK scientists – and for our standing in the world | Jon Butterworth If plans by the UK’s science funding body go ahead, we won’t be able to benefit from Britain’s membership of Cern and other large international projects, says Jon Butterworth, professor of physics at ...

These cuts to physics research will be a disaster for UK scientists – and for our standing in the world
www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The PPAN budget gets a 30% cut, and Harwell gets an expansion plan.

NASA ADS is still down? That's several days of patchy or no service now - starting to become a worry. 😬

We’ll still definitely be able to measure the structure and composition of exoplanets from transit spectroscopy though.

Losing a game of Elite after about 3 months, because the tape it was saving to reached the end of a side. 😭

Sadly I think the answer is yes. Anecdotally, this year is the worst I've known it. Not much data to go on, but seems like lack of positions in the US is the main factor, with a knock-on effect of many more applications to jobs elsewhere.

And not even close to the stupidest example in orbital dynamics:

“True anomaly”
…
“Longitude of the ascending node”
…
“Semi-latus rectum” 🤦🏻‍♂️

Or just stick with apocentre/pericentre and be done with it. 🤣

GW emission is a steep power of semi-major axis (or really peri-centre distance), so it's very little energy/mass is carried away in something like a flyby. Even with a merger, most of the GW energy is released during the last few orbits of the in-spiral.

May improve the enjoyment of this if you're Welsh though. 🫣

Explained thus in my undergrad cosmology lecture slides...😂
bsky.app/profile/rich...

Eccentricity vs priors on the orbital fitting.