Excited to be giving a public lecture at the Royal Astronomical Society in London on Tuesday 19 May: "Solar superstorms - Are we ready for another Carrington Event?" ☀️

Opposing 4-day weeks is a winning policy. Not because it is right and not because shorter work weeks are shown to fail, but because, sadly, too many people want to race to the bottom. Instead of saying 'we should have that too' they say, 'that's not fair, take it away from them'.

No, no, sorry, that was unfair. Of course I have never read any of your papers 🔥🔥😆

Cos I've read your papers before 🔥

Line immediately afterwards: 'but reads like dog sh*t' 😜

Do we all have our ape costumes ready for when the Artemis crew return?

Image of the sun's Corona showing a large coronal hole near the centre of the disc.

The CME today may not have been a big one, but there is a cracking looking coronal hole facing the Earth today (image accessed via www.spaceweather.com). Expect some nice high speed solar wind in the coming days.

A reason, but not an excuse.

I know some RCs had reduced and delayed opportunities and funding in the past couple of years seemingly due to caution with the delays in the CSR (election impacted). A charitable interpretation is that these 'pre-cuts' were not considered properly by whoever compiled the numbers in the letter.

excuses, excuses ;-)

Simulations of coronal mass ejections through the ambient solar wind.

During solar minimum, the arrival time of coronal mass ejections at Earth is roughly twice as uncertain due to the influence of the ambient solar wind compared to solar maximum.

agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...

My favourite bond film

🚨 Reminder 🚨

We're supporting the launch of a ground-breaking photography exhibition on space debris in the Burlington House courtyard. 📷️ 🛰️💥

Our Fragile Space will be open to the public for free from tomorrow until 10 May.

Come and see it for yourself! 👀

Good to see you still fighting the fight, Jon, though it's a bit like deja vu. Almost wish I still had my old blog.

I hope this practice is not rolled out UKRI-wide for several reasons, some outlined in this thread. In person interviews means selecting for skill that are not neccessarily useful in executing the research and potentially puts large numbers of applicants at a disadvantage.

The thing that eventually kills off all innovation won't be AI. It'll be Cyber Security teams desperate to lock down every corporate computer to exactly 3 applications. So they can hit some randomly numbered standard and post about it on linkedin.

Something that confused me a little was the discussion of the £150M+ defecit. I am hearing two seperate things: one is that it is £150M+ across 4 years that needs to be saved (and I got the impression that is what the Committee heard - 'rounding error'); the other that its is £150M+ year on year.

but is is it investigator led funding? (no)

which simultaneously exists on its own but also as part of the other buckets

I think this partially speaks to the poor communication about how the reshaping of UKRI is being achieved.

Catching up on the select committee session from this morning. Lots of interesting stuff, but it feels like there are a lot of real problems around the terminology of buckets and how the traditional councils interact within them. And that seems to be on both the UKRI and committee sides.

Official guidance was that we refer to it as U-K-R-I, and absolutely never as you-kree.

And I do know who it was. I guessed asked and they gleefully admitted it. And we both laughed.

Decided to add my favourite comment I received from a reviewer (on my second paper) to my profile description. I feel it remains apt: "verbose and not overly fascinating".

Absolutely. Not worth the risk.

My two monitors and I feel seen.

Great new paper from a member of the Space Weather team at @bas.ac.uk. This sort of work underpins activities to support the space sector and safeguard services that society relies on.

Gareth got some fuzzy pics over Cambridge but too cloudy here.

a man with glasses and a beard looks at the camera with a serious look on his face ALT: a man with glasses and a beard looks at the camera with a serious look on his face

I did wonder hy they used a photo of Walter White in the image

Just saw the news, well done lad