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The half-life of a flood
Lately I’ve been going through lots of little half-finished analyses and trying to write them up in some form. Today it’s my attempt to answer the question “how long does a river stay in spate?”. The primary motivation of this being that when the water level on the Clyde is high it’s not safe to row on it. Clubs, such as Clyde ARC might want to have an idea of how long it will be before the water level is low enough that it’s safe.
What's a good marathon time?
I seem to be incapable of just doing something without wondering about the statistics behind it these days.
An update on the maps
A couple of weeks ago I posted some images from a new map I’d been working on. The motivation behind this was mostly curiosity, though I’ve been dabbling with trying to do things like this in python for a while, before realising that implementing hill-shading was probably more effort than it was worth, and turning to a tool actually designed for this: QGIS.
Messing about with Maps
It’s been a while since I posted anything, and I have a big backlog of things to write-up and add to this site. In the meantime, enjoy some maps I’ve made (with the ultimate intention of eventally using them on my route descriptions on the site!).
Glasgow World Con
In the years I’ve lived in Glasgow I’ve had the chance to experience quite a number of the big events which the city has a tendency to attract: The Commonwealth Games, The UCI Championships, COP-22, those sorts of things. I’ve also had the chance to talk to lots of people about my research, and the science which we do in my research group at the University of Glasgow. Over the last week I had an opportunity to talk to a lot of people at one of these big international events: The World Science Fiction Convention, or WorldCon as it’s known.
What did we learn in O3? (Part 1)
I started this post with the idea of summarising all of the new science which has resulted from observations made up to the end of the third observing run of the advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors. It turns out there’s rather a lot, so this looks like it’ll be the first of several! I’ve tried to include links to as many papers as possible.
O4a Outreach
The first gravitational waves were detected rippling-out from the collision of two black holes in September 2015, following a search which had been decades in the making. Since then detecting these illusive signals has become routine, and they are opening new windows on the Universe, solving old problems, while proving new questions of their own. In this talk I’ll break-down some of these new discoveries; talk about the very latest new observations; and Glasgow’s pivotal role both in the development of the new field of gravitational wave astronomy, and as a leader in understanding the new cosmic insights that field provides.
What's a good half-marathon time?
I recently ran the Great Scottish Run half marathon in Glasgow, and finished in what I figured was a pretty decent time. But of course, this just leads on to another question: what is a “good” time in the half marathon? Of course, one of the beauties of a sport like running which is so individual is that a good time is really what you make it, and nowhere is that more true than a mass participation event like GSR. But again, before I dive into the statistics, a good time in the half marathon is clearly one that you’re happy with, and comparing yourself to others probably shouldn’t be why you’re running.
Analysing the 2023 Rugby World Cup I
Every so often I get the notion that I ought to be taking a look at the performance of various rugby teams in various tournaments, and then trying to perform some sort of statistical analysis on it. Well, it looks like this might spin out into a series of blog posts in the run up to the 2023 Mens’ Rugby Union World Cup.
Skye
God is in the mountains, I mused to myself as I drove North on the A82, past Loch Lomond, in the early afternoon at the start of June 2023. It is very easy to believe that statement as you take in the spectacular beauty of this part of the world. The mountains rise as great green masses beside the brilliantly blue loch. If there were hills in Eden then Ben Lomond and Ben Vorlich were clearly transposed from there to Scotland. The only evidence that this isn’t some sort of Earthly paradise is the A82 itself. The thought came somewhat unbidden, but I think I can trace its source. As I headed North I found Psalm 121 bouncing around in the recesses of my consciousness: “I lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence commeth my help”. I know why this is on my mind, and it connects various strands of this story.
Obituary - Frederick Williams
Below is the text of the eulogy I delivered at my father, Frederick John Williams’s funeral on 5 May 2023. We all miss him dearly.
The Weekly Update
I’m going to try and be a bit better about regular updates about life, my work, and the Universe. Who knows how it’ll go, but here goes nothing. I’m considering publishing the research part as a standalone newsletter, since we’re rapidly approaching the next gravitational wave observing run, and I regret not keeping a diary during previous ones (though certainly during our O3 run I was rather pre-occupied with finishing my PhD work, writing my thesis, and then passing my viva!). I’m not exactly sure what this will turn into, but let’s see.
Running asimov on a single machine
If you’re looking to try out asimov on your own laptop or workstation you’ll quickly run into a bit of a limitation: asimov, and the codes it works with, are designed to run on a large computing cluster. However, we can get around this by installing a lightweight version of the software used on clusters on your own machine before we try to run asimov.
Advent of Code 2022 - Day 2
These are my solutions to Day 2 of the advent of code 2022. Today’s puzzle involved working out the score from a game of rock-paper-scissors by parsing a large text document, and then developed into a slightly more complicated variation in the second part. I solved the problem today using C.
Advent of Code 2022 - Day 1
These are my solutions to Day 1 of the advent of code 2022. Today’s puzzle involved taking a list which was in a very specific format, which contained listings of how many calories a group of elves were carrying in snacks, and determining how many calories each elf was carrying in total.
More Munroing Milestones West of Drumochter
My hopes of completing the Cairngorms Munros were fading fast as the fine weather of the summer starts to collapse into the rain, wind, and cold temperatures of the autumn. I’d made vague plans to head up North towards Dalwhinnie on Friday, taking the day off to try and climb the four hills West of Drumochter, but the weather looked pretty abysmal. The forecast for Saturday was a lot better, but plans would be scuppered by rail strikes. And so it was that I’d given up hope of big hills for this weekend, only for a serendipitous suggestion to pop up on a Westies WhatsApp post: does anyone want to run the Drumochter hills on Saturday?
Great Scottish Run 2022 Half Marathon
It had been three years since my last Half Marathon, and in all honesty I wasn’t feeling terribly prepared for a grand return to long distances. I suspect I could count on two hands the number of runs over 14km I’ve done since the start of the pandemic. However, undeterred by this realisation I had set myself the slightly ambitious goal of cutting ten minutes off my previous personal best, and running the distance in 90 minutes.
Càrn a' Chlamain
It’s comfortably into the part of the year where it’s easy to declare that summer is over while not really being able to make a strong case that autumn has arrived. This also means that the long, light evenings of the summer are behind us, and the chance of poor weather is ever increasing. Overall, any Munro trip could therefore be the last until next spring. So it was that I had put much effort into planning out which hills I’ll try and climb in October, only to end up having the last weekend of September clear itself.
Pen y Fan and the Central Becons
I found myself in Cardiff for a LIGO meeting, but with a weekend between parts of the meeting. So the only logical thing to do was to leave the confines of Cardiff on Saturday morning and head straight for the hills. Things started with a little confusion on my part over bus times, but I sis eventually work things out and got a bus to Merthyr, and then changed onto another which would take me to the Storey Arms, at the bottom of the most popular ascent route for Pen y Fan.