Updates

A Night on the Mountain

After yet another week of un-Scottish summer, I formed a plan to get as far away from Donald Trump, who was forecast to arrive in Scotland, like an unwanted storm, on Friday to play golf. A quick look at the map, and a battle with the Citylink website suggested that heading up to the munros near Bridge of Orchy was a real possibility. Armed with this knowledge, and aided by the University closing at 3pm for Glasgow Fair I caught the bus, and headed North, away from the US President.

• Beinn Dorain 1076 m Munro
• Carn Sasunnaich [Beinn Dorain North Top] 1066 m
• Beinn an Dothaidh 1004 m Munro

Beating the Tyndrum Four

We’ve entered the third month of the exceptional summer of 2018, and it only seemed right to continue working on the T-shirt tan, and put a few more munros in the bag at the same time. After a few minutes of looking at the munro map I decided that the four munros near Tyndrum looked like a good target. With the plans made, I caught the train after work with Andrew and headed up to Tyndrum, where we met Shona at the camp site. Within 20 minutes I had my tent up, and we made as quickly as possible for the Tyndrum Inn to avoid the swarms of midges which were also calling Tyndrum home for the evening. Appropriately refreshed, we all turned-in early, ready for a fresh start on Saturday morning.

• Ben Lui [Beinn Laoigh] 1131 m Munro
• Beinn a' Chleibh 916 m Munro
• Ben Oss 1029 m Munro
• Beinn Dubhchraig 978 m Munro

Five Sisters of Kintail and their Three Brothers

At some point during the planning of a trip to the Highlands and Islands, which was already to involve running a half marathon, it seemed like a good idea to try and fit in a nice ridge walk, and in the process bag six munros.

• Aonach Meadhoin 1001 m Munro
• Sgurr a' Bhealaich Dheirg 1036 m Munro
• Saileag 956 m Munro
• Sgurr nan Spainteach 990 m Munro top
• Sgurr na Ciste Duibhe 1027 m Munro
• Sgurr na Carnach 1002 m Munro
• Sgurr Fhuaran 1068 m Munro

Twinkle, twinkle, big explosion

Today marks a major moment in the development of a project I’ve been working on for some time: me and my co-authors have completed a paper on inferring the opening angles of gamma ray bursts by observing binary neutron star mergers and gamma ray bursts. What does that mean? Well, I guess the point of this post is to explain just that. It should be said, while you can download the paper now, it’s still a pre-print: that means it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, so there’s a chance it may contain some mistakes which we’ve not picked up on. So I guess you might argue it’s probably not quite completed.

Fire and gold in the belly of the beast

This is the second time that I’ve written a blog post under an embargo; the first time was a few months into my PhD, and it was about something which had happened just about the time I started. As a result, I’d not really had much to do with it, and I’d spent most of the time that other people were analysing data and writing papers finding my way into the collaboration. That wasn’t quite so true this time, as I found myself invovled with the public outreach effort for LIGO’s next big announcement. It turns out that it’s hard to condense a groundbreaking discovery, which took over 3000 people to make, into one A4 sheet of paper. I also learned all sorts of new things I never expected to during my PhD, like the niceties of colour theory. However, on with the story.

Rugby Stats Update

The predictions from round 5 were rather successful, with a 100% success rate compared to the results of the games, although the winning margins were a little off.

Pro12: Who will win Round 5?

I’ve been playing around with a large dataset which I scraped off Wikipedia recently: the details of the various fixtures from the Pro12, a European rugby league with teams from Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Italy.

Rugby Data (updated, again)

This is a little continuation of the work I did on the data from the Pro12, extended to show the last two seasons of the English Premiership. The graphs are now animated and update to show each team in each season and league.

Hopping about Islands

It’s been a while since I got around to posting on here, and part of the reason for that is that I’ve been on holiday; I took a trip which I started planning five years ago after I first visited Skye, and then never quite got around to doing, because it always seemed to complicated to actually do.

The wave that stole Christmas

Just shy of six months ago I was at my parents’ house in rural Northern Ireland, nursing a very full stomach, and admiring a large pile of chocolates, and taking a break from Christmas festivities. In fact, it was slightly worse than that; I was starting to make plots for the Burst “companion paper”,now published in PRD!, so I really hadn’t given myself very much time to relax.

Finding a way to Space

Today’s another big day in the world of gravitational waves. ESA are expected to announce the results of their LISA Pathfinder mission in just over an hour. I’m going to attempt to write this blog post in at least two parts: one part (now) before the announcement, and one part during.

Going to America

I’ve not posted anything on here for a while. I’ve been working a lot. I seem to remember thinking that work would die down after we made the detection announcement last month, but I had something else to work on. That’s because I’m going to our collaboration’s biannual meeting. In Pasadena.

Was Einstein Right?

It’s about time I started talking a bit about the science of this week’s announcement. One of the more exciting aspects of detecting gravitational waves was that they would confirm the last major prediction of the theory of General Relativity—Einstein’s revolutionising theory of how gravity works.

Einstein Was Right!

It’s been almost a day now since the world found out about GW150914, the 0.2 seconds of tiny distortions in spacetime which have kept around a thousand scientists entertained for half a year, and which seems to be close to breaking the internet today. As the hype starts to settle down, I think it’s time to reflect a bit on what happened yesterday. You can tell that today’s not a day when many people in the department are getting very much work done.

Riding the Wave

I don’t think I’ve ever written a blog post under an embargo before, but it’s a crisp, sunny Glasgow afternoon, and in 24 hours’ time I’ll be heading across to the main building of the university, for there is to be a press conference. But you probably already know that, since I’ll be publishing this post after it.

PhD Interviews

I realised the other day that it’s been a whole year since I went through the rather stressful experience of PhD interviews (and the even more stressful experience of filling out the forms to apply for the positions). I’ve noticed a few other people around the internet have been recounting their experiences, and since mine are still quite fresh in my memory I thought I would too.

Waiting on the Wave

I’m a couple of months into postgraduate research, and I’ve decided early on that I should probably write a blog about what I’m doing.