Miscellanea
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This sporting life
[Warning, this post will be largely about sport(s), a subject I am even less qualified than usual to discuss, and so is mostly an excuse to brag about my having seen the fastest man in the world live — along with 80,000 other spectators, and post some of the pictures I was lucky enough to…
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The Sensual Universe: Touch
Imperial Astrophysics is sponsoring a new series of public lectures, “The Sensual Universe: Astrophysics for the Five Senses”. The first will concentrate on touch: The Impact of Sex In Space, presented by Dr Saralyn Mark (and unlike most of us around with a “Dr” in front of our names, Dr Mark really is an MD).…
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ER
I’ve been lucky that almost everything I know about hospitals comes from fiction. But last week, having done something unpleasant to my Achilles tendon running, my local doctor sent me over to the local A&E (“accident and emergency”, the UK equivalent of the ER) to see if they could fix me up. Having been healthy…
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On ‘Jaffe’
Despite the last decade and a half or more of the internet, I’ve never bothered to actually work out the meaning and history of my surname, “Jaffe”. Somehow I always thought it was connected to the town of Jaffa, near Tel Aviv. But in fact, 30 seconds of searching turns up information that the name…
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Steve Rawlings
The astronomy community in the UK and beyond suffered a terrible blow last week with the passing of Steve Rawlings, Professor of Astrophysics at Oxford. I spent quite a lot of time in Oxford a few years ago, and was lucky to get to know Steve a bit. He had spent the last several years…
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Passion for Light
It’s been a busy few weeks, and that seems like a good excuse for my lack of posts. Since coming back from Scotland, I’ve been to: Paris, for our bi-monthly Planck Core Team meetings, discussing of the state of the data from the satellite, and of our ongoing processing of it; Cambridge, for yet more…
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I ramble
I’ve spent the last few days in the northern half of Great Britain. Wednesday, I was an external examiner for a (successful!) PhD exam at the Durham University. Thursday, I was at the University of Glasgow in service to the other end of the PhD experience in the UK, giving a one-hour lecture on the…
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100 Years
I have just had the honor of celebrating the 100th Birthday of Dora Jaffe, my grandmother, born March 14, 1911 (a date she shares with Albert Einstein!), in Shepetivka, Ukraine (then part of Russia). Her father, Leib (Lewis) Greenberg, emigrated just before the war, stranding her and her mother until they could make it across…
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Normal-ish
Ok, the blog is back up. Disasters averted and the design is a little less ragged than before, but I’m not sure of the details. I want to test that I can still post, and this seems a good opportunity to solicit comments to help me refine my aesthetic sensibilities. Are the sidebars over on…
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Oops!
I’ve recently “upgraded” my software which seems to be playing havoc with the format of the blog. The blog is visible, and in many ways nicer than before, but I’ve lost all of my lovely formatting… I hope we’ll be back to normal soon. In any event, you can probably ignore this and read my…
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