Uncategorised – microblog

R.I.P. John J Quenby, emeritus professor of Physics at Imperial College. John had a wide-ranging career at the intersection of particle physics and astrophysics, with interests from cosmic rays to dark matter and gravitational waves, and served as one of the first heads of Astrophysics at Imperial.

It’s the summer solstice so time for my annual reminiscence of seeing Sun Ra and Don Cherry celebrate the rising sun from Battery Park in Manhattan with @disquiet in 1989.

I still haven’t made it to Stonehenge for the celebrations, but Lisa has (more on this later).

Talking cosmic topology with the Naked Scientists.

Invigilating my first of two exams today: Astrophysics. Good luck to the students!

(For North American readers: “invigilate” = “proctor”.)

Yet more on our work on the topology of the Universe: The universe may have a complex geometry — like a doughnut.

Crap.

So: I think I just finished writing a book.

An overview of our recent work on the topology of the Universe, highlighted by Physical Review Letters.

From scratch, more or less.

If you take the literature at its word, some things are so improbable, they’re practically assured.

— The Paranoid Style, “I’d Bet My Land and Titles”

Yet another test, this time with formatting and a link.

This is test. Do not adjust your sets, &c.

RIP Daniel Dennett. His books on mind and evolution helped me understand the world.

I just received a referee request from a high quality journal.

I know it’s an excellent paper — since I’m one of the authors.

@help: I’ve just moved to a new self-hosted WordPress blog, and I am trying to set up the micro.blog iOS/macOS apps to post directly there. but I always get the message “An error occurred. Please try again.” Any ideas?

How wonderful and moving for the headlines to be about astronomy instead of, well, any of the other possibilities.

Most of my students choose Imperial for research or a lucrative job, but he came from Queens just to win at University Challenge.

(Somehow I didn’t know anything about this story.)

I’ve successfully transferred this site to a new (more modern and less expensive!) host, and converted all of the content to a new blog engine. Check it out, and let me know if everything works.

Maybe I’ll even start writing again.

Test after moving both my hosting provider and blogging engine…

Shabbat shalom. (And check out our new bread experiment.)

Last classroom lecture of the calendar — and academic — year! (50 minutes on gravitational lensing.)

Wintry, misty morning on the Thames.

Today’s reshuffle showing the deep pool of talent the Tories are able to draw from.

Has anyone else started seeing errors like this (& other stuff) when restarting/restoring sessions in Apple Terminal.app?

date: illegal time format
usage: date [-jnRu] [-I[date|hours|minutes|seconds]] [-f input_fmt]
[-r filename|seconds] [-v[+|-]val[y|m|w|d|H|M|S]]
[[[[mm]dd]HH]MM[[cc]yy][.SS] | new_date] [+output_fmt]
-bash: Saving: command not found

See also this: it’s coming from weird interactions in /etc/bashrc_Apple_Terminal (& similar for zsh). Is this widespread or rare?