@seshnadathur
Astronomer, Associate Professor of cosmology at Portsmouth. Works on galaxy redshift surveys, from telescopes on remote mountaintops or in space. Dad, occasional climber, likes cricket. Occasionally has opinions.
Five year Astro career development fellowship in Oxford open for applications, broadly in survey astronomy including transients and cosmology. College teaching and research. Do think about joining us. Happy to answer questions! 🔭
Does the rice cooker have to be in the kitchen though? When I was growing up my parents used a rice cooker only when entertaining, but it was always set up in a bedroom, on the floor. Then packed away again.
Knowing a bit of German helped me understand the 1200 text (with a bit of sounding out words and guessing), but 1100 was incomprehensible.
Option 2: bring up cricket but say how you don't like this T20 Mickey Mouse stuff...
Hahaha
This ending was much more in the spirit of le Carrè than the first season
The spending review moved >40% of all UKRI funding away from basic research, and into "strategic government and societal priorities" or "innovative companies". The budgets for all the research councils have been slashed. Clear message from govt is that bright young scientists should leave the UK.
These cuts would indeed be absolutely catastrophic. The UK has been a world leader in astronomy, we should not throw that all away
Did anyone watch the Alex Honnold live stream from Taiwan? I couldn't bear the thought of watching live, but quite interested in catching up on it now
Bridge players count cards though. My great aunt could hold her own at Racing Demon at 90+ against the speed and energy of the younger generations because she knew where the important cards were.
So true.
I think it would be quite nice for me to be able to wake up in the morning and think about my plans for the day, and more broadly about my own little life, instead of immediately having to ponder the overnight actions of The Guy Over There
Wow, what an interesting connection!
My great aunt married into the Bolitho family, responsible for Trengwainton gardens and for sponsoring Frank Kingdon Ward's expeditions which brought various rhododendron varieties to Britain.
share.google/8Y9ffhmcgNM3...
If you stare at this movie it looks like nothing is happening, but then you notice groups of lines appearing and disappearing.
No, you're not on drugs - it's math.
Promotional poster for University of Portsmouth Stargazing 2026 event, Wednesday 28th January 18:00 to 20:30, (free) tickets available at https://www.port.ac.uk/stargazing
If you are close to Portsmouth and interested in an evening learning about astronomy and our place in the Universe, come to our Stargazing public event! 28th Jan, free entry but booking essential. There will be lots of hands-on demos and public talks (including one by me). www.port.ac.uk/stargazing
I think there may be something to @spinninghugo.bsky.social's argument that this could be about generating name recognition for a minor college competing for applicants with 30 others in Cambridge and that centralised admissions would work better for them.
The college statement on this does continue to make pro forma statements in favour of widening access schemes, for what it is worth.
Statement on recent news coverage of admissions policy - Trinity Hall Cambridge share.google/dQOlm8ZvHY3W...
A man in a sports coat stands on a stage in front of a screen with a slide titled “Measuring Cosmic Sound with DESI”
The prize is the Lancelot M. Berkeley – New York Community Trust Prize and Daniel Eisenstein (on behalf of the DESI collaboration) is receiving it
In many ways, Stokes strikes me as a kind of Ernest Shackleton figure. Great personal heroism and dedication to protecting his men, but at the end of the day not actually achieving what he set out to do.
Stokes is a magnificent leader of men and there is so much to like about how he handles his players off the field. But tactically he has been very poor this series, and his long-term strategy has been flawed in many respects. Can't see a replacement, but not sure if he is helping or hurting overall.
Batting "fearlessly" and always looking to "move the game on" is good in certain circumstances but very suboptimal in others, and creating a culture that over-emphasised this one method at the expense of all others has been the biggest strategic failing of Stokes and McCullum.
The problem is inherent in the "clarity of Bazball" unfortunately, in that it was one dimensional and inflexible. Test cricket is the most nuanced sport in existence and there are many many different ways to win a game/series. A single fixed strategy will eventually lose more than it wins.
Yes the thing about Brook that stood out this series was how poorly he read the game situation, which is not a good sign for the next captain. Mind you, Stokes was tactically very poor too.
Looks like we might have the first time AI directly solved an open Erdos problem: github.com/teorth/erdos...
A couple times recently this appeared to be the case only to turn out to be a successful deep lit review by AI.
Agreed, I didn't think you were snarky.
Tom's question came after the statement you refer to, and addressed a point not covered in the original partial admission. It was a legitimate question and not rudely phrased, but was met by an ad hominem insult. If you think those two are equivalent, I don't know what to say.
You said *Ian and Tom* were equally knobby and that's what I questioned. I made no comment about the relative knobbiness of other random trolls whose posts I hadn't even seen (possibly because I have blocked them?)
Poorly worded statement/admission -> clarifying question -> unprovoked knobby response. Blame attaches to only one individual in this exchange, IMO.
I regard this as immediately raising the question of why, then, he continued to write such stuff in 2025 if it has been proven wrong many years ago. Which is exactly what Tom asked. I did not see a straight answer to that.