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Disquiet, defiance and the point of no return in Mozart’s Don Giovanni
There are fewer more dramatic moments in opera than the ending of Don Giovanni, when the title character refuses to repent for his sins and gets pulled down into hell by a chorus of demons. However, this showstopping coup de théâtre is in fact a footnote to the oft-overlooked actual narrative and musical climax, which […]
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The howling Universe
Before I moved from IFT to IPhT, I filmed a video all about what standard sirens are and why they’re useful for cosmology. The video is now on Youtube, in English with Spanish subtitles. Take a look!
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From Madrid to the Cotswolds by train
I can’t pretend to enjoy flying. It’s noisy, stressful and horrendously bad for the environment. On my last journey to Madrid, I took the ferry from Portsmouth to Santander and the train on from there. The ferry crossing itself took about thirty hours spread over two nights (with an evening departure and an early morning […]
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Implicit none
The first programming language I ever learned was Fortran. And before you ask, no, I’m not seventy years old. It just so happened that during my undergraduate degree, I took two courses on numerical methods for physics which were taught in Fortran, and for good reason: Fortran is still one of the best languages to […]
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My first N months as a postdoc (where 0 < N < 12)
How long have I been a postdoc? It’s a little difficult to quantify. I finished my PhD thesis in December 2020, and submitted it in January 2021. I passed my viva in February 2021. I spent a few months climbing the walls waiting for my Spanish visa, and trying to do research at the same […]
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The road (back) to Madrid
On Friday last week I signed my contract and started my job as a postdoctoral researcher at the IFT in Madrid. It feels extremely good to type that. I have also been waiting a very long time to write this post. I was offered this job on the 12th of April 2020 — when the […]
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Britgrav21
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 […]
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Visa application
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 […]
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A manifesto, rugby tickets and a haircut
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 […]
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Using a Jupyter notebook to make presentation slides
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. […]
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Natalie B. Hogg 