Anne Green

Sunrise from my office. My body had been coping well with the 9am lectures and commuting hell, but now in ‘hanging on by the finger tips until the end of term’ mode.

Tobi guinea pig wants to talk to the manager:

8 months later and (despite Tobi’s initial reticence and Rosie’s over-exuberance) they’re increasingly acting like a little old married couple:

‘I didn’t even know this type of attack existed’: more than 200 women allege drugging by senior French civil servant In a case echoing the Pelicot trial, dozens of women allege they were given hot drinks mixed with a diuretic to make them urinate. Three of them speak out here

WTF!?

Twice recently, I've had emails from journalists asking questions or asking to chat.

Both times I spent time I could ill afford to spend replying, answering the questions or saying I'm happy to chat (with caveats about my expertise) & offering potential times.

Neither replied to me.

My new bedside espresso machine made getting out of bed at stupid o'clock this morning much easier. Unfortunately, it wasn't much help with clearing ice off the car at -4 degrees in the dark.

My calendar for today was nearly empty, so I naively thought it was going to be a research day. In fact, I've spent the entire day acting on emails, and there are still some remaining moles which need wac-ing.

Kendall: Haldane not breached by research spending direction Science secretary defends decision to dedicate nearly a fifth of UKRI budget to policy priorities

'Kendall told a UKRI event on 24 November that nearly a fifth of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)’s budget will be earmarked for research aligned with Labour’s missions, with £8 billion of UKRI’s £38.6 billion budget over the next five years “targeted towards the UK’s national priorities”.' 1/3

Trying to relax with Himalayan singing bowls, and Rosie guinea pig decides to squeak along…

A person reading a guidebook, while a deer sniffs it.

This elderly one had a great interest in guidebooks (and the possibility that there were snacks in my bag):

4th International Symposium on the History of Particle Physics Dedicated to the memory of Herwig Schopper 1924-2025 Following in the mould established by precursors at Fermilab and SLAC, the 4th International Symposium on the History of Particle Physics will brin...

CERN Symposium on History of Particle Physics

Session on particle astrophysics & cosmology:

Videos (newly released) + slides
Rocky Kolb - Cosmological particle physics
Michael Turner - Particle dark matter

Slides, videos later?
Alan Guth - Inflation
Jaco de Swart - Particle Cosmology

Most of the time my Garmin thinks I get deep sleep is when I am in fact wide awake and failing to sleep at all…

The gym is not my natural home (and the probability of me wearing ‘scrunch bum’ shorts is identically zero) but watching the small numbers I’m lifting get slowly bigger is satisfying.

It's careers week for 3rd years, so no 9 am lectures (and 5.45 am alarms...) for me this week. Instead, I've made my annual 'why theorists should care about experiments' cameo appearance in the 1st year lab lectures and am giving a talk about dark matter to my local astronomical society tonight.

List of links to UK Cosmology PhD projects updated for 2025/26 admissions:

anne-green.net/physics/UKCo...

Trousers which are the right length.

Pros of Japanese trousers:

1) they're the right length, without me having to chop inches of material off the bottom,
2) they fit both my thighs and waist (usually trousers which go around my quads fall off my waist).

Cons: I need a size large...

This sounds similar to Adam Moss's AI Cosmologist: arxiv.org/abs/2504.03424 .

Not for JCAP (where I'm an Editor). If the requested changes are relatively minor, I'll look at them myself.

Indeed. I don't think it's malicious (i.e. trying to slow down the publication). My guess is that it's a knee-jerk "busyness" reaction.

And another new refereeing phenomenon (has happened multiple times in the last few months, but never in the previous 20 years): referees declining to review a revised version of a manuscript, having made major, significant comments on the initial version.

IMHO, Ely on a bad day is worse. (Thanks to delayed trains) I've spent a lot of time at Bristol Parkway while on the way to and from Swindon, and it does at least have a decent-sized indoor waiting area.

I appreciate that postdocs are under a lot of pressure, but frankly, that's reality for many (most?) academics these days.

As a journal editor, finding referees for papers has got much harder (and more time-consuming). It's become common:
i) to have to try 4-6 people before someone says yes,
ii) for postdocs to decline as they're too busy.

Very fun afternoon of sumo (with Hello Kitty)

Walking from Japan House to the Royal Albert Hall and spotted Takerufuji and (number 1 favourite small rikishi) Midorifuji coming out of their hotel!

My tire likes collecting leaves, which helpfully increases the drag. It also attracts a lot of attention. One old chap suggested his wife could sit on it to increase the load…

Beautiful afternoon for a walk with my tyre:

ii) the current status (AFAIK) of the LMC microlensing events observed by the MACHO collaboration.

Finished a first draft of the slides for my talk (on observational probes of primordial black hole dark matter) in the online ZOOMing in on primordial black holes seminar series on Monday.

Including: i) some (trivial but often forgotten) thoughts on the interpretation of observations.

At least some of the students appeared to be entertained by the Penzias & Wilson pigeon poo story, but I should probably drop the Zwicky spherical bastards story from my repertoire...