Tag: favourite
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On the use of ChatGPT in academia
Creation is a sacred act. From the profundity of making a new life to the mundanity of whistling a tune through one’s teeth whilst doing the washing up, human life is filled from end to end with acts of creation. So smitten with creativity are we that we would love to see our own creations…
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A moveable feast
I have lived in Paris for eighteen months. Or, rather, I have lived in Paris proper for six months. For the year before that, I lived in Orsay, a small town in a far southern extremity of the city. Close enough to be in Zone 5 on the RER, but distant enough that it was…
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Two weeks in the USA with the Ilford Sprite 35
In August I spent two weeks in the USA; one week in Chicago, attending a conference at KICP, and the second week on holiday, taking the sleeper train from Chicago to Seattle and spending five days on the west coast. It was a big and exciting trip, and I was determined to capture it as…
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Cosmic variance
Or, everyone in the world is French M. Luc Arnaud farmed a small plot somewhere in the south of France. Exactly when and exactly where M. Arnaud’s farm was is now no longer remembered, but we can be sure that he had a few cows, a few pigs, a few chickens and one rather moth-eaten…
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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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Writing my PhD thesis
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…
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Tribalism in science
Last week, a tweet by Roberto Trotta drew my attention to a recent paper by Simon Portegies Zwart that studied the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by running N-body simulations in different programming languages. The figure that caught my attention was Figure 3, copied below from the version of the paper published in Nature Astronomy.…
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Thesis off-cuts: the ancient history of general relativity
I have recently been thinking a lot about what introductory and background material I want to include in my PhD thesis, as my self-imposed December deadline continues to hurtle towards me at an alarming speed. Concurrent with this thinking, I’ve also recently been enjoying a fantastic book called The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O’Shea, all…
Natalie B. Hogg 