Bloggings

Maxwell’s equations are most commonly given in terms of the electric and magnetic fields $\mathbf{E}$ & $\mathbf{B}$. They can also be expressed in terms of the electric potential, $\varphi$, and the magnetic potential, $\mathbf{A}$, which can be physically interpreted as the potential energy per unit charge, and the potential energy...

A couple of days ago I got to do some outreach in a pub, and earnt a free pint for my efforts. PubhD is a neat outreach project set up by grad students at the University of Sussex that takes PhD researchers, puts them in front of lager touting punters,...

I was reminded by this news article of a Hack day I took part in way back before Christmas at Sussex Uni. The event brought together undergraduate and graduate students from maths and physics for a day of data and tech hacking. There were two projects, the first involving something...

A heavily edited (superior) version of this post was published on Astrobites in March 2016. You can read it here. Theorising about extraterrestrials is hard. Since we only have one data point, our own little civilisation on our own little Earth, trying to pin down what extraterrestrial civilisations will look...

This week I spent a couple of days in Swansea attending a course titled Single Node Performance Optimisation, the name of which may already be sending you fleeing for your bookmark bar. It was essentially a break down of how to be a better programmer for supercomputer applications, and turned...

I’ve recently been working on a new project, inspired by the hundreds of plots I trawl through reading the scientific literature. For plots of real observational data in particular, I began to appreciate the way that they conveyed the real world in a minimal, abstract way, distilling all the complexity...

I read a lot in 2015, so to round it all off here’s a selection of some of the best books I got through, in no particular order. None of them were actually released in 2015, so if you’re looking for the latest best sellers you’re going to have to...

During my undergraduate I often read a site called Astrobites, which aims to bring front line research in Astronomy and Astrophysics to undergraduates via short, accessible articles written by graduate students. When I started my Ph.D I noticed that they were advertising for new writers and promptly applied. As part...