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SOLE Survivor
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This week I received the results of the “Student On-Line Evaluations” for my cosmology course. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I thought that this, my fourth and final year teaching the course, had gone pretty well, and I was happy to see that the evaluations bore this out: 80% of the responses were…
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Spring Break?
Somehow I’ve managed to forget my usual end-of-term post-mortem of the year’s lecturing. I think perhaps I’m only now recovering from 11 weeks of lectures, lab supervision, tutoring alongside a very busy time analysing Planck satellite data. But a few weeks ago term ended, and I finished teaching my undergraduate cosmology course at Imperial, 27…
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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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TimeWave
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I’ve recently become involved in TimeWave, a theatre, art and technology festival to be inaugurated up in Manchester this coming November 19-24. It has been set up by the excellent lonyla (London-NY-LA) artists’ network founded by J. Dakota Powell, another American transplanted to London, taking advantage of the connections that we rootless cosmopolitans have gathered…
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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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ICIC
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Among the many other things I haven’t had time to blog about, this term we opened the new Imperial Centre for Inference and Cosmology, the culmination of several years of expansion in the Imperial Astrophysics group. In mid-March we had our in-house grand opening, with a ribbon-cutting by the group’s most famous alumnus. Statistics and…
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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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Roman Juszkiewicz
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I was saddened to receive a message that my friend and colleague, Roman Juszkiewicz, died earlier today. Roman was a Polish cosmologist who began his career in the Russian school, working with Ya. Zeldovich, probably the most eminent Soviet cosmologist and astrophysicist of the 20th Century. Roman himself went on to work in Paris, Berkeley,…
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Constellations
Many plays about science suffer from trying to do too much, telling a story while teaching science, but Nick Payne‘s two-hander “Constellations“, now on at the Royal Court Theatre in London, has science and a scientist at its center, adding to the drama, not distracting us with jargon or science fictional twists. “Constellations” is the…
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I think I’m a Bayesian. Am I wrong?
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Continuing my recent, seemingly interminable, series of too-technical posts on probability theory… To understand this one you’ll need to remember Bayes’ Theorem, and the resulting need for a Bayesian statistician to come up with an appropriate prior distribution to describe her state of knowledge in the absence of the experimental data she is considering, updated…