It turns out my goal of writing a post every day for thirty days was indeed too ambitious! I'm both time- and content-poor at the moment, so I've revised the five posts I did make into a new "daily" category, to which I'll add short updates on my work and what I'm doing on those …
I am starting to regret this resolution of writing a blog post every day for thirty days. I've already missed a few days so the thirty will no longer be consecutive and perhaps my days are not as interesting as I anticipated. I suppose that's mainly because this week has been a week of admin …
Today was a positive day in terms of research -- a sad rarity in recent times! I firstly had a short meeting with my new postdoc bosses and we discussed a kind of manifesto they have put together, in which they have explained their expectations for me in the role and presented their individual working …
Continue reading Daily: a manifesto, rugby tickets and a haircut
I'm in a strange kind of limbo at the moment. I'm not being paid, since I can't sign my new contract without being physically present in Spain. And, until the 30th of March, it was physically impossible to enter Spain unless you were a Spanish resident, since the borders were closed due to Covid restrictions. …
Continue reading Daily: using a Jupyter notebook to make presentation slides
I started this morning in unusually energetic fashion, by going for a run before starting work. It was a bit chilly but the sky was clear blue and the sun was shining. The birds were singing and the blackthorn blossom has topped the newly green trees and hedges with a creamy white glaze. The daffodils …
Continue reading Daily: running, paper revisions, talk writing
I've decided it's time to improve the consistency of my writing and practice makes perfect, as they say. So, starting from today, I'm going to a write a blog post every day for thirty days (excluding weekends and holidays). By my calculation, this means the last post in the thirty day sequence will come on …
In this post, I'll discuss how I prepared for my PhD viva exam in cosmology, what the viva itself was like and what happened next. I submitted my PhD thesis on the 4th of January 2021 (which also happened to be my birthday) and had my viva exam on the 3rd of February. This is …
Last week I passed my viva and consequently I have finished my PhD! I have to make some very minor corrections to my thesis, but my three year and three month journey in PhD-land has come to an end. I thought I was going to be fairly melancholy after finishing, for a number of reasons. …
How do you write a PhD thesis? This question sounds like the start of the old joke: "How do you eat an elephant? One piece at a time". A PhD thesis is a document which must explain, summarise and defend three or more years of research in your chosen field, often running to 40,000 words …
As we frequently hear1, we're now in the precision era of cosmology. What this really means is that we're in the era of measuring things really well, and we're getting really good at measuring things because we keep building ever more enormous and powerful telescopes. I remember attending the STFC Introductory Summer School on Astronomy …
Continue reading Thesis off-cuts: the reproducibility crisis in cosmology
