Ian Clancy @nuadatt@qoto.org
Irish physicist with research interests in complex systems, dynamic phase transitions, critical phenomena and long-range correlations. Normally lecture in Mechanics, Thermal Physics, Modern Physics, and Computational Physics.
Joined Nov 2022
Ian Clancy
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The Dangers of AI in Science Education
I'm taking the liberty of reblogging this post from an experienced university teacher of chemistry and physics outlining some of the dangers posed by the encroachment of Artificial Intelligence into science education. It's quite a long piece, but well worth reading in its entirety
http://telescoper.blog/2025/01/17/the-dangers-of-ai-in-science-education/
Ian Clancy
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They should combine OverLeaf with OneDrive and call it OverDrive.
Ian Clancy
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The best bit about being a physicist, rather than a mathematician, is that you get to cross out the complicated terms in your equations on the grounds that they are "clearly unphysical"...
Ian Clancy
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Coding is basically Applied Pedantry.
Ian Clancy
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Well, this seems to be an interesting and unexpected big deal: a new paper suggests that light can evaporate water without actually needing to heat the water up first. And it could sort out a few problems in existing cloud physics:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-light-can-vaporize-water-without-heat-0423
Ian Clancy
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University of Limerick’s ‘Pink Ladies’ to star in new series of My Uni Life on RTE
The series, which captures life across a busy year on campus in Irish universities, returns to screens this Friday
Tune in on RTE One at 8pm
https://www.ul.ie/news/university-of-limericks-pink-ladies-to-star-in-new-series-of-my-uni-life-on-rte
Ian Clancy
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Today I will be posting thoughts about Aaron Swartz, who died on this day in 2013. The academic community should be much more aware of him, and challenge the massive problem of academic publishing that we are all part of. Let's make it our mission to tell people about Aaron and what he stood for.
#academic #academicmastodon #academicchatter #copyright #publishing #openaccess #publicdomain
Aaron's Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
Ian Clancy
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I encourage all academics everywhere to run their institution's latest Strategic Plan through a plagiarism checker, such as Turnitin...
Ian Clancy
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Are Students Customers?
When tuition fees were brought in to the UK higher education system many academics worried that the relationship between students and lecturers would be changed for the worse, as students would be encouraged to see themselves as customers. I haven't taught in a UK university since 2018 but I have to say I never met any physics students who saw themselves as customers.
Ian Clancy
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What convinced me to become a theoretical astrophysicist, as opposed to an observer, is that my eyesight is so poor that even on a dark night I've never been able to make out those lines joining the stars together.
Ian Clancy
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The Returning and The Leaving
I got back to Maynooth last night after a pleasantly uneventful train journey. Just for the record both outward and return trips were perfectly on schedule. In fact it has been a very pleasant couple of days. Congratulations to the organizers for running the meeting so well and to all the speakers for delivering such an interesting programme. Anyway, now I'm back I should mentioned that the 2023 Leaving Certificate results were released to…
http://telescoper.blog/2023/08/26/the-returning-and-the-leaving/
Ian Clancy
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The Bachelor's Walk massacre occurred in Dublin, on 26 July 1914, when a column of troops of the King's Own Scottish Borderers were accosted by a crowd on Bachelor's Walk following the Howth gun-running operation. The troops attacked protesters with rifle fire and bayonets - resulting in the deaths of four civilians and injuries to 30 more. Luke Kelly senior, the father of Luke Kelly of The Dubliners, was one of the wounded.
#Ireland #IrishHistory #Dublin #BachelorsWalk #LukeKelly #Dubliners
Ian Clancy
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HOW TO SPOT A RIP CURRENT:
IT'S WHERE THE WATER LOOKS EASIEST AND SAFEST, with no waves breaking or rolling in.
NEVER ENTER THE SEA HERE.
If you get caught in a rip, DON'T FIGHT IT. You can't swim back to shore against it; you will become exhausted and drown.
Instead, SWIM ACROSS IT, parallel to shore. You'll soon be out of the current and can then easily swim back.
Boost, please, and make sure your friends and family know this when they hit the beach.
Ian Clancy
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"...I can now state with confidence: beating out a crowded field, this is the worst book about quantum computing, for some definition of the word “about,” that I’ve ever encountered."
Ouch!
Book Review: “Quantum Supremacy” by Michio Kaku (tl;dr DO NOT BUY)
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7321
Ian Clancy
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As David Meyer (@dmm) reminded us, on this day in 1832, the young Evariste Galois wrote a letter summarizing his ideas - the day before he died in a duel. Hermann Weyl said of this testament, "This letter, if judged by the novelty and profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most substantial piece of writing in the whole literature of mankind."
Some background, paraphrased from Wikipedia:
Galois lived during a time of political turmoil in France. In 1830, Charles X staged a coup d'état, touching off the July Revolution. While students at the Polytechnique were making history in the streets, Galois, at the École Normale, was locked in by the school's director. Galois was incensed and wrote a blistering letter criticizing the director, which he submitted to the Gazette des Écoles, signing the letter with his full name. Although the Gazette's editor omitted the signature for publication, Galois was expelled.
Galois joined the staunchly Republican artillery unit of the National Guard. He divided his time between math and politics. On 31 December 1830, the artillery unit was disbanded of fear that they might destabilize the government. 19 officers of this unit were arrested and charged with conspiracy to overthrow the government.
In April 1831, the officers were acquitted of all charges, and on 9 May 1831, a banquet was held in their honor, with many famous people present, including Alexandre Dumas. The proceedings grew riotous. At some point, Galois stood and proposed a toast in which he said, "To Louis Philippe," with a dagger above his cup. The republicans at the banquet interpreted Galois's toast as a threat against the king's life and cheered.
(1/n)
Ian Clancy
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Causal evidence that herpes zoster vaccination prevents a proportion of dementia cases
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.05.23.23290253v1
Huge. And shingles vaccination expected to be covered on PBS this year...
Ian Clancy
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The surprising part is not that math grad students named Cox and Zucker would come up with the idea of writing a paper together just as a joke.
It's that they followed through after they were professors, and wrote a paper that was actually rather significant.
![Cox–Zucker machine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Cox–Zucker machine is an algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines whether a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell–Weil group of an elliptic surface E → S, where S is isomorphic to the projective line.[1]
The algorithm was first published in the 1979 article "Intersection numbers of sections of elliptic surfaces" by Cox and Zucker[2] and was later named the "Cox–Zucker machine" by Charles Schwartz in 1984.[1]
Name origin
The name sounds similar to the obscenity "cocksucker". This was a deliberate choice by Cox and Zucker, who conceived of the idea of coauthoring a paper in 1970, while first-year graduate students at Princeton University, for the express purpose of enabling this joke. They followed through on it five years later, as members of the faculty at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.[3] As Cox explained in a memorial tribute to Zucker in Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2021: "A few weeks after we met, we realized that we had to write a joint paper because the combination of our last names, in the usual alphabetical order, is remarkably obscene."[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine](https://media.mathstodon.xyz/media_attachments/files/110/375/700/346/128/361/original/8ca6d32f41c48e35.jpg "Cox–Zucker machine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Cox–Zucker machine is an algorithm created by David A. Cox and Steven Zucker. This algorithm determines whether a given set of sections provides a basis (up to torsion) for the Mordell–Weil group of an elliptic surface E → S, where S is isomorphic to the projective line.[1]
The algorithm was first published in the 1979 article \"Intersection numbers of sections of elliptic surfaces\" by Cox and Zucker[2] and was later named the \"Cox–Zucker machine\" by Charles Schwartz in 1984.[1]
Name origin
The name sounds similar to the obscenity \"cocksucker\". This was a deliberate choice by Cox and Zucker, who conceived of the idea of coauthoring a paper in 1970, while first-year graduate students at Princeton University, for the express purpose of enabling this joke. They followed through on it five years later, as members of the faculty at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.[3] As Cox explained in a memorial tribute to Zucker in Notices of the American Mathematical Society in 2021: \"A few weeks after we met, we realized that we had to write a joint paper because the combination of our last names, in the usual alphabetical order, is remarkably obscene.\"[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%E2%80%93Zucker_machine")
Ian Clancy
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A Möbius strip walks into a bar, sobbing.
Bartender: “What’s wrong buddy?”
Strip: “Where do I even begin?”
Ian Clancy
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In depth statistical analysis of the #Eurovision2023 results (not really).
https://telescoper.blog/2023/05/14/eurovision-scores-and-ranks/
Ian Clancy
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@davidallengreen Open source, cross-platform game heavily based on the original Elite here: http://oolite.space
Irish physicist with research interests in complex systems, dynamic phase transitions, critical phenomena and long-range correlations. Normally lecture in Mechanics, Thermal Physics, Modern Physics, and Computational Physics.
Joined Nov 2022
