So, it is party time again, folks!

[wiseheart]

Each year this time, we launch my virtual birthday party, which starts on October 1 and ends on October 9 at midnight, sharp. The goals of the party are to post as many comments and collapse as many threads as possible, on as many new pages as we can. It is always great fun, as you can see if you check out the similar entries of the last few years.

This year, I'll also throw the real party at mid-time - and post the recipes of all the food that will be there for you, so that you can all participate if you want to. Virtual food has no calories.

Fandom-related discussions are as welcome as the ones about coffee or chocolate (just to name a few favourites from previous years), and, of course, pictures and recipes of birthday cakes. ;)

So, drop by, tell your story, post your pics or silly poems, ask questions you always wanted to ask and have a good time!

Soledad, in excited expectation




Oh, and by the way, to provide birthday gifts hobbit-style, I've got a revived story and a Kansas 2 update for you.

Enjoy!

Comments

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

That sounds very idyllic, but I suppose also like it could get quite isolated. I love your description of your cottage; while my house from this century is definitely convenient (and crucially: in my price range!) it doesn't have much in the way of character. It is well planned, though and has a (relatively) large kitchen, with enough room for a decent sized dining table, so I am very happy with it. And given how much I hate moving, I am unlikely to do so again in the nearish future!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

It's not always very convenient! Most of the rooms in the old parts of the house are quite small, very low ceilinged and, in the half-timbered bit, very draughty (despite huge amounts of building work trying to plug all the holes). Luckily the kitchen is in the modern part and is large, so that is quite convenient. I do like having a large kitchen, not particularly to cook in but as a social room.

We are moving either this year or early next year, having already bought our next house. Not looking forward to all the hassle of the move one little bit.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Are you moving far? Or is it mostly to get a different house? I do hate moving! My new colleagues were quite surprised at my determination to buy a house to move into for when I started my new job here in Belfast a year and a half ago, suggesting I could rent somewhere for six months or a year, to work out where I really wanted to live. I was having none of it! Partly that was because I was fed-up of living in rented accommodation, but also I really didn't want to move again...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

We're moving several hundred miles and a ferry trip -- to the Isle of Mull. (I've added you on my personal filter so you should be able to read my post about it, if you're interested.)

How long are you staying in Belfast? Is it a three year position or have you got tenure?

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

It looks gorgeous! One of my mother's cousins lives on the Isle of Arran, and when I spent six months in Glasgow during my Ph.D. I had the good fortune of being able to visit a couple of times. Your house looks quite similar, up to the peak behind it! Their house has a view of Goat Fell (highest peak on Arran) in one direction and the sea in the other.

My position here in Belfast is permanent, though I have to get through probation which is a three-year period. I had my first probationary meeting this spring, and I think I am on-track; there were definitely no major complaints about what I was doing. The one thing that was brought up was that I should go to more conferences; as it happened I managed to go to one -- giving an invited talk no less! -- within a month of that meeting. And I definitely want to go to more conferences, anyway, so that isn't a hardship...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realised you had spent time in Glasgow -- it will be our nearest major city. I've actually never been on Arran, for some reason; it's supposed to be lovely. I've always wanted to live somewhere between mountains and the sea, and now we actually get to do it!

Going to more conferences doesn't sound like much of a hardship. Do you get funds to attend?

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I loved staying in Glasgow; especially coming there from Uppsala which is on the plains, I was so pleased with the not-flatness of it. The people there were really friendly as well, and I lived in a (private) student halls right next to the Forth and Clyde canal. My walk to the university took me past both the river Kelvin, and the building on campus that Lord Kelvin worked in, ending in the Kelvin building. It is funny to see how Belfast tries to claim him, as having been born here, after having spent time at University of Glasgow, which I think has the much better claim...

I did get a small start-up fund from the University, as a new lecturer, that I can spend on whatever makes sense for my research. Other than that, I am expected to apply for grants to fund my research, which includes going to conferences. So, in principle the university pays; at least I am not expected to pay for conferences myself, out of my own money.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Some of the country immediately north of Glasgow is very beautiful and rugged; it's always a shock having driven through Glasgow on the various motorways coming out the far side and finding it so quickly becomes rugged. I nearly did a PhD in Glasgow but my other half of the time couldn't get a job there.

Cambridge claims Kelvin too!

I suppose one of the disadvantages of having a permanent position is that you need to apply for your own research grants, and also justify what you spend the money on! I imagine equipment in your field is large and expensive.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I think the advantage of not having to move every two or three years, more than outweigh the disadvantages; having to apply for my own research grants is indeed one of them. Though it is also one of the advantages, in that I get to choose what I work on -- so long as I can convince so grant awarding body to give me the money to do so... Equipment is indeed expensive in solid state physics; this is one of the ways I am very lucky to be at Queen's, because we have (since long before I started) a very good collaboration with Seagate (who have a factory in Derry/Londonderry); a part of this is that they have donated a number of pieces of equipment to us that they no longer wanted/needed. Indeed, the two most important bits of kit for my research came from Seagate.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

The three-year research project is brutal if you'd like to settle down somewhere. Many of the people I knew got out after their first or second post-doc, often to have children.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

There is also a (non-official) limit to have many post-docs you can actually do; since your salary as a post-doc is determined by a scale where you move up a step for every year of working experience you have, after a few three-year contracts you are just too expensive to be afforded on another one...

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Ah, that makes sense.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I meant to respond to the Kelvin bit, as well, but got side-tracked with funding woes... Oh well, it will have to be another comment; hopefully wiseheart will forgive my wasteful ways! ;-)

Do I take it from your comment about Kelvin that you studies in Cambridge? You saying that you have a BA in Natural Sciences, made me think this was likely; one of my colleagues here at Queen's did his degrees at Cambridge and he has mentioned how you don't actually apply for a specific science subject, but rather do natural sciences with some specialisation. I think this is a more sensible way to do university courses; students often don't know what to expect from a university degree in say physics, so giving them the ability to change their minds without having to start over seems very useful to me.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Indeed! Cambridge admits all science students to the NatSci tripos; in my day you had to do three subjects plus various choices of maths in the first year, three subjects in the second year (one of which could be maths), and then a single subject in the final year. A lot of people I know started out intending to read either physics or chemistry, and ended up reading whatever they'd taken as their third subject -- usually geology or some form of biology.

I certainly was never advised at school of the level of maths knowledge that was necessary to get anywhere in physical chemistry (which was what interested me). It was obvious that chemistry was not going to work by the end of the first week, when my inability to do partial differential equations made my supervisor despair of me!

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I do find the UK A-level system very strange where you can study science subjects without taking maths; it seems like a serious fraud to me, because there are very few opportunities of doing anything further with a science A-level without maths. That is quite beside the fact that even if universities will admit you without the maths A-level, you will have to do serious maths to progress in the subject! I usually try to explain it by saying maths is the language in which we express science.

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

Well, speaking of when I did A-levels, it was uncommon to do sciences without at least AO maths. The most common patterns among my science-studying friends were three sciences plus AO maths among medics or biologists; chemistry, biology & maths/stats among biologists; or physics, chemistry, maths & further maths among physicists/mathematicians. What annoyed me is that no-one bothered telling me that A'level physics (in my day & with the syllabus we did) was a waste of time -- it was completely trivial -- while missing out on doing further maths effectively prevented me from studying university-level chemistry.

I'm not sure quite how true your statement is for biomedicine -- whilst the mathematically illiterate will struggle, there are many niches with little maths much beyond O'level. Also I worked in my vacations in a QC chemical lab where most of the permanent employees had no maths qualifications; the various spectrometers that measured the results were all completely automated.

I've been thinking about maths is the language in which we express science and I think it explains why I became increasingly disenchanted with hard sciences -- I don't find mathematical descriptions at all satisfying unless I can get some sense (at least occasionally) of how the system really is (for some sense of 'really is'). At A'level, the qualitative descriptions gave me occasional numinous feelings that I understood how (parts of) the universe really worked. Whereas, say particle spin, as far as I understand it, has no physical meaning -- it's just a convenient fiction; that didn't feel satisfying.

Sorry this is long, I've been mulling this over all day!

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Long comments are good!

I do think it is still true that most people who do an A-level science subject such as physics or chemistry will also take maths, but since it isn't a requirement, the science subject will be taught as if the students aren't taking maths. At least in physics, this leaves it at mostly a show-and-tell sort of level, rather than giving the students proper understanding of how and why things work. I also think it gives them a very incorrect impression of what university level science is going to be like; the first year, one-third of the courses our physics students do are maths, and another third are (sort of) disguised-maths in the form of computational physics, with only a third being straight up physics. There was a similar level of maths for the first year students in Materials when I was at Imperial, and they too were often surprised by it...

I do recognize that there are niches of science where you can get by without maths, but I usually think they would actually do better if they had a deeper mathematical understanding. While you can use a spectrometer, to take your example, and just take the data it spits out, you will be better able to understand what it means if you understand the working principles and the data analysis that goes on in the 'black box', and that generally means understanding some maths. It isn't necessarily the 'hard core' algebra and calculus, but being able to understand statistics is extremely useful for any discipline that deals in large data sets...

Improving the mathematical literacy of the populous in general, is a topic close to my heart, and it upsets me that we fail people so badly in this. A lot of maths is just a compact way of expressing complex ideas, and being able to understand it allows you to see the underlying principles more clearly.

Sorry, I get quite worked up about this topic, as you may have noticed!

[espresso-addict.livejournal.com]

It's something I feel strongly about too, as you may have noticed.

I hadn't thought about the effect on the syllabus of not requiring maths. Certainly the subject I took was off-puttingly noddy: by far the easiest of the four A'levels I took. Is 16-18 year level physics more interesting in Sweden?

I'd agree that almost everyone would do better with more mathematical understanding.

A lot of maths is just a compact way of expressing complex ideas, and being able to understand it allows you to see the underlying principles more clearly.

Hmm. I'm not sure I agree 100% with this. I think there are several ways of understanding systems, and reducing complex behaviour to equations is, I think, sometimes a substitute for, rather than an aid to, understanding the actual mechanism(s) involved.