Mind warp

Hopefully this will save fresh faced material scientists some grief: Notes on the Brillouin zone

Niche, vague science result of the month - Oct 2011

Croatian pomegranates do not ripen on my chest of drawers given around six weeks of time under non-laboratory conditions.

Figure (a) below shows the pomegranates when first picked along with cut-away of an example from the batch which was later disposed of. Figure (b) shows the pomegranate after six weeks of ripening time on my chest of drawers in my bedroom. (Note different coloration is possibly due to dissimilar lighting conditions, or possibly not.)

Pomegranate shell had hardened and dried over time making them difficult to cleave, however a suitably sharp bread knife was able to finally cut the fruit.

This result shows that it is unlikely to be worthwhile holding onto pomegranates which are note yet ripe as they are unlikely to redden after picking. This is unless the fruit tested are not actually pomegranates, which may well be the case since the test batch was harvested from an unverified source.

I would like to acknowledge M. Arnold and D. Mager in participating in this research and for also providing good times this summer.

P&P

One of my supervisors received a conference poster from Brazil. Here is a picture of the envelope it came in - what does it mean?!

Acknowledgement

By far the most read portion of any physics thesis (bar maybe the abstract) is the acknowledgement section. And when a colleague's thesis is finally finished, it is hard to resist the urge to skip to the acknowledgements to see how they considered your role in the last 3-4 years of their work. Although, usually given to family, friends, collaborators etc., occasionally thanks are given to less figurative bodies.

Here is a particularly memorable extract from a colleague at TCD ...

... My eternal gratitude to the Guinness Brewery for the indescribably ambrosian incense with which it sanctifies the grey granite doorsteps of Dublin. Manys and manys the time it has wafted me to a reverie, carried thither and yon on the quickening zephyrs with which Trinity College exhales the soft airs of its centuries of youth. A spouse and midwife to scholarship and fluency, long may it stand at St. James’s Gate ...

I know what you did last summer

Here we have the preprint of the first major paper of the PhD,

Nesting of electron and hole Fermi surfaces in non-superconducting BaFe₂P₂

n. b. I promise this is the real deal and not some April fools joke, despite being posted on the arxiv on the 1st

Good use of LaTeX

When I was an undergraduate, my mother asked how things were progressing academically. I handed her a lab report that had just been assessed along with demonstrator comments.

In retrospect 'Good use of LaTeX for an engaging presentation' is a bit of weird thing to write, even if you know about typesetting.

A Buckfast Supplier in Bristol

Something that every seasoned academic should know is where to get hold of a bottle of `Buckfastleigh Tonic Wine` in their town of study.

CARPENTER'S CONVENIENCE STORE on the Corner of Gloucester Rd. and Ashley Down Rd. sells for a fairly reasonable 6-8 pounds a bottle (I don't remember the exact price)

J. Wrng. Sci. now online

The first volume of the Journal of Wrong Science is now online. I present to you A SIMULATION OF PLANETARY MOTION - J. Wrng. Sci. 1 (2010) 12

A day in the life ...

From 'At Swim Two Birds' by Flann O'Brien

Nature of daily regime or curriculum: Nine-thirty a.m. rise, wash, shave and proceed to breakfast; this on insistence of my uncle, who was accustomed to regard himself as the sun of the household, recalling all things to wakefulness on his own rising.

10.30. Return to bedroom.

12.00. Go, weather permitting, to College, there conducting light conversation on diverse topics with friends, or with acquaintances of casual character.

2.00 pm. Go home for lunch.

3.00. Return to bedroom. Engage in spare-time literary activity, or read.

6.00. Have tea in company with my uncle, attending in a perfunctory manner to the replies required by his talk.

7.00 Return to bedroom and rest in darkness.

8.00. Continue resting or meet acquaintances in open thoroughfares or places of public resort.

11.00. Return to bedroom.

Minutiae: No. of cigarettes smoked, average 8.3; glasses of stout or other comparable intoxicant, av. 1.2; times to stool, av. 2.65; hours of study, av. 1.4; spare-time or recreative pursuits, 6.63 circulating.

Physical Noise

Trying to think of as many physics based tunes as possible - came up with 5. Ideas?

Thanks to Brian and Dan who came up with British Sea Power (Atom) and They Might be Giants

Hmm seems like the service does not exist any longer ...

What would Jesus do?

Got this email a while back from a work colleague of mine. Made me laugh.

Subject: GraceX Machine

Szup Bruvvaz, I require your advise...

There are some emission files I forgot to take from the GraceX computer, those
named
20060927_****, 20060928_**** and 20060929_****

What would Jesus do?
(I've searched the Good Book for references to FTP, but turned up none. But then
again it was the King James Version, so I'm stumped.)

Brian

Inverse Law of Lateness

It's a well known fact amongst postgraduate students that the closer one lives to their work, the later one starts the day.

After living in Clondalkin for a while (some miles out of Dublin town) I found myself catching the half seven express bus to arrive before nine, whereas people on or near campus generally come in around noon, then usually go for coffee. It's not just me as well, there are others.

I should point in my defence that the net time spent in office though is roughly the same. Commuters tend to be nine-to-fivers, whilst the rest of us are in til unholy hours of the night, albeit writing blogs.

Resurrection

Like Moses from the grave, I've decided to resurrect the blog.

Of course there can only be one reason for this which is that I am doing my write-up for my masters.

I realise there has been a ton of stuff happened since I last posted but it is too much to summarise in this box I'm writing in (which I have already half filled, why don't they give you more space?) so I won't in entirety. But I am doing a masters now not a PhD and I'm probably going back to the UK in the mid summer.

Should also thanks Aaron McDaid (the teetotal techno-loving Donegalman) for getting me back typing. There is a link to his fledgling blog ...

... here

Overhaul

Check out the new threads for 'Science and that sort of thing'.

The Pav

Finally there is a reason to like TCD and Dublin. The Pav(illion) in the summer is like a mini festival experience every warm summer evening (so maybe twice a week or so in the height of June). You get to sit around on the lawn drinking beer out of cans surrounded by hundreds of other young types doing the same. Frequently there is a match on the pitch making it every cricket lovers dream - for everyone else in the world it is still pretty good.

A good student bar is definitely something that Bristol is lacking.

This Life in Halls

When I originally moved into halls in Bristol, I expected my flatmates to be like my friends back home - I couldn't have been more wrong.

We had a homosexual rude-boy type from Essex, a black basketball-playing girl from Tottenham, a hippy type from Stratford, a rowing public school girl type from Windsor and me, the embittered northerner.

Growing up in Great Grimsby, I hadn't dreamed of this kind of mix.

It's coming towards the end of my time in halls and once again the halls experience has thrown many spin balls in terms of expectations.

This year the mix was as eclectic as ever with Bohemian types from Chicago, hyper-active Belgians, Ugandan actors, tee-total techno-loving Donnegalmen and so on.

Sometimes it just feels like the stuff of late 90s TV dramas.

April

I should write something for April

Chemistry

MaxLAB is done and the truth is out. During our trip to Sweden I have no doubt that my supervisor finally knows for sure that I'm not the amazing Uber-student I made myself out to be when I applied for the PhD last October.

It was inevitable that GCSE level chemistry wouldn't last me all throughout my career and so now it's time to bite the bullet and actually try to understand what the periodic table actually means.

My brother has offered me his A-Level chemistry textbook when he finishes with it.

St Patrick's Dag

It's a weird thing to think I spent my first St. Paddys day since starting at Trinity, in Sweden, possibly the least Irish country in Europe.

The probe

I was in a basement lab the other day when a sewer probe crashed through the wall, spraying water in all directions. Workmen outside were trying to find out where an open sewer was located and it turned out it was just behind the plaster wall of the Raman spectroscopy room in the SNIAM building. There has always been an evil smell in that lab apparently.