Statuses

This Wednesday, we @ImperialAstro will cancel our regular (virtual) seminar to support #ShutDownSTEM and #Strike4BlackLives, instead holding a discussion of issues of race and anti-black racism in astrophysics, science, academia — and the wider world.

I’m also happy to report that @ImperialPhysics has postponed its monthly staff meeting in further support and solidarity.

‪After a day by the beautiful Thames, overcrowded & difficult to social-distance, flabbergasted that the UK govt isn’t pushing masks much more strongly (yes, mostly for others, not the wearer). Mayor @SadiqKhan is there an opportunity for you to step up, for London at least?‬

After pointing out just yesterday how many hundreds of miles we’d cycled together without a flat…

Goose with somewhere to go.

Weekday bread 🍞

Rosemary bread, glazed ham, roasted asparagus, Good Ordinary White.

Floating flowers

R.I.P. John Erhardt, Guitarist for Wussy and Ass Ponys. Wussy is one of the great rock ‘n’ roll bands of our time. The band and their UK label will be hosting a watch party tonight (11
May) showing their great 2016 London gig in his memory.

Of course we understand what they’re really getting at, but in (I guess) an effort to make things more understandable for most (?) people, the government has made it more confusing for anyone remotely numerate.

“But for countries trying to go it alone, like the UK, the restrictions could literally be fatal.”

Without Apple and Google, the UK’s contact-tracing app is in trouble – The Verge

New loaf and new wall. 🍞

Have any of my scientist-friends out there used juno and/or junoconnect to run python/jupyter notebooks on the iPad?

Sir Roger @Penrose on Conformal Cyclic Cosmology @PhilFacOx. Loved watching old-school transparencies on an old-school whiteboard in front of his laptop camera. Lovely talk, ‘tho I’m unconvinced by the theory itself — and he’s wrong about it being confirmed by Planck data.

UK rejection of Apple API for contact tracing will cost lives – 9to5Mac

This week with strong flour. 🍞 #lockdownloaf

That feeling when you don’t get an accolade you didn’t think you deserved, but are still disappointed…

Now that we’re debating how to end the lockdowns, someone’s going to have to start explaining decision theory. #WhatsYourLossFunction?

We’ve done scones, cookies, and cakes, but this is our first bread #lockdownloaf

‪Thanks — and hello — to old friends @robsheff, @RealJoeLevy, @audiation for bringing me your fantastic interview with @rxgau (the dean of rock critics, in case you didn’t know). Nothing else has brightened my day so much of late… #Nadine

‪RIP music producer Hal Willner. Best known for his work on #SaturdayNightLive and with Lou Reed, Lucinda Williams, &c, but my favourite was his Brecht-Weill tribute album from ‘85, Lost in the Stars.

R.I.P. Margaret Burbidge, who has passed away at 100. She was at the forefront of our understanding of at least two fields in astrophysics: the synthesis of the elements in stars, and our understanding of quasars, some of the most distant objects in the Universe.

@help when trying to use the m.b sharing extension from The Guardian newspaper app, there is no ‘post’ button.

Why isn’t the government publishing more data about coronavirus deaths?

And, ideally, someone should be curating and coordinating the heterogeneous data that is available from many countries and organisations.

Update: Here’s a good one from the ECDC

Locked down in London.

Ok, official UK govt advice still seems to be that I should trek across London (via public transport) with my pre-school girls to bring them to their nursery (located @ImperialCollege where I work).

Comments?

Trump is a narcissistic idiot who only cares about the Fed & how he wasn’t wrong about Google (he was). He makes Pence seem reasonable; Birx, Fauci &c on the US coronavirus team actually seem like experts.

So why isn’t Boris and the UK giving us similar information?

• Imperial College (my employer)
• The University & Colleges Union
• Hertz
• A yoga studio in New Jersey
• The Royal Astronomical Society
• My gym
• Deliveroo
• Several politicians in San Francisco, where I lived 20 years ago
• Cubitts Opticians
• The Institute of Physics
• The International Astronomical Union

As Europe shuts down, Britain takes a different, and contentious, approach

Helen Ward, a professor of public health at Imperial College London, said the government’s advisers should disclose more of their thinking. “We don’t know the evidence [for] its decisions”.