My office mate in Barcelona is Portuguese and he very proudly reminded me this morning that today, 25th April 2024, is the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution that ultimately overthrew a fascist dictatorship and led Portugal towards becoming a progressive democracy. Just over a year later, General Franco died and Spain began its transition to democracy too. Both countries joined the European Community in 1986 and are now members of the European Union. It’s hard to believe, only 50 years on, that fascism is on the rise once more in Europe (and elsewhere). That makes it all the more imp ..read more

Today, 23rd April, is Diada de Sant Jordi (Saint George’s Day) which, though not a public holiday, is a very special occasion in Barcelona. Saint George is of course familiar to me as the Patron Saint of England, and of quite a few other places, but wasn’t aware until a few weeks ago that he is also the Patron Saint of Catalonia. Not much is known about Saint George, but it is believed that he was born in Cappadocia (modern-day Turkey, then part of the Roman Empire) to parents of Greek origin, and that he fought in the Roman army and died in 303 AD in Syria Palaestina (also part of the Roman ..read more

Four years ago, in the early months of the pandemic, back in April 2020 I wrote a post that mentioned an allergy I thought was due to tree pollen which I had noticed taking walks for exercise around the deserted Maynooth University campus. I hadn’t experienced such a thing before but didn’t know whether I had developed it in later life or whether I’d just never previously been exposed to the source. I did subsequently discover, by experimentation, that the culprit was oak pollen. Well, for the last couple of weeks I have been suffering from a similar, but rather more severe, form of allergic r ..read more

Some time ago I wrote a post asking why universities are still using X, the social media platform that used to be called Twitter. In the same vein I thought I would repost the article below, which I saw this morning. You are the fuel that energises Elon Musk’s hate machine ..read more

It’s Saturday, and it’s time to post another update relating to the  Open Journal of Astrophysics.  Since the last update we have published two more papers, taking  the count in Volume 7 (2024) up to 27 and the total published by OJAp up to 142. The first paper of the most recent pair – published on  Tuesday April 16th – is “An Enhanced Massive Black Hole Occupation Fraction Predicted in Cluster Dwarf Galaxies” by Michael Tremmel (UCC, Ireland), Angelo Ricarte (Harvard, USA), Priyamvada Natarajan (Yale, USA), Jillian Bellovar (American Museum of Natural History, New Yo ..read more

I didn’t have time to mention yesterday, 18th April 2024, that it was the 75th anniversary of the day that that the Republic of Ireland came into existence. The  Republic of Ireland Act, which provided the legal basis for the establishment of a new Republic, was passed in 1948 but only came into force on 18th April 1949. From that point the Republic no longer had the British monarch as Head of State and was no longer part of the Commonwealth. That day was marked with parades and celebrations but “Republic Day” never became the public holiday that might have been expected given how many o ..read more

So here I am at the Institut de Ciencies de L’Espai (ICE-CSIC) which is on the campus of the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB) for the first ever Euclid Spain Meeting. This involved a 40-minute trip on the S2 train from Plaça de Catalunya, which is a short walk from my apartment, then a short walk from the railway station at UAB through the campus to the Institute. I was able to speak at this meeting because I happen to be in Barcelona right now. I mean that I was able to attend because I was in Barcelona anyway, not that the meeting was held because I am in Barcelona! Anyway, I gav ..read more

The song Mad about the Boy was written by Noel Coward and published in 1932. It’s a song about an infatuation with a movie star and has generally been performed by female singers, although it was apparently inspired by Coward’s own crush on Douglas Fairbanks Jnr (which wasn’t reciprocated). The song became popular again in 1992 when a version recorded by Dinah Washington was used in a famous Levi commercial. . I never liked Noel Coward’s own recording – with him singing in a curious falsetto – very much at all, although I suppose it is authentic to what Coward was writing about. For a lon ..read more

Some time ago I used the medium of this blog to plug a mini-conference at the Royal Society in London entitled Challenging the Standard Cosmological Model. Here’s a description of the meeting: Is the universe simple enough to be adequately described by the standard ΛCDM cosmological model which assumes the isotropic and homogeneous Friedmann-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric? Tensions have emerged between the values of cosmological parameters estimated in different ways. Do these tensions signal that our model is too simple? Could a more sophisticated model account for the data without invoking ..read more

Another sporting hero of my youth has passed away. Derek Underwood – “Deadly” was his nickname – was a bowler like no other. Officially a left-arm orthodox spinner, with a rather flat-footed run-up, and a characteristic twist of his body as he delivered the ball at a brisk medium pace with infallible accuracy, he was not only a prolific taker of wickets but also an extremely difficult bowler to score off. He played for Kent for 24 seasons, his entire First Class career, during which he took 2,465 wickets at a remarkable average of 20.28. Underwood was a regular in the England Test side from 19 ..read more