Peregrine Falcon at Reading University

This morning I saw what I am fairly sure was a peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) at Reading University. It was making small looping flights from the top of the east side of the Animal and Microbial Science Building.  Underneath (which is alll I saw of it) it appeared mostly whiteish with a black head but this was from a distance.  When It landed back on the top of the building there were various calls which suggests it has a nest there.  When I next go to the university I will be taking my camera and binoculars with me.

Update on Sat 2022-04-16 by Tristram Brelstaff

I went up again the following weekend but there was no sign of any falcons.  Maybe they were just checking out a possible nesting site and decided against it.

Books

In the past couple of months I have read the following books:

• Beyond the Hallowed Sky by Ken MacLeod
• My Real Children by Jo Walton
• The Second Sleep by Robert Harris
• The Dawn of Software Engineering from Turing to Dikstra by Edgar G Daylight
• Formalism & Intuition in Software Development - A Conversation with Michael A Jackson by Edgar G Daylight
• In the Ocean of Night by Gregory Benford
• Across the Sea of Suns by Gregory Benford

And I am currently reading:

• Mountains of the Mind by Robert Macfarlane
• Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland
• Great Sky River by Greory Benford
• Subtle is the Lord... The Science and Life of Albert Einstein by Abraham Pais

The latter has long been recognised as the best biography of Einstein so when I saw a copy for only £6 in the local Oxfam bookshop I bought it without a second thought.

Interview with the authors of An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality

I recently listened to this interview with the Brendan Fong and David Spivak, authors of  'An Invitation to Applied Category Theory: Seven Sketches in Compositionality', currently one of my favorite books. The interviewer, Cory Brunson, is excellent and I particularly appreciated the way he got the authors to explain the key ideas of the various chapters.  For anyone starting out on the book (or on the course) this interview would make a good introduction.

Indeed the whole New Books Network looks very interesting.

Rolled Boulders on the Moon

While looking for the Apollo 16 landing site on Google Maps I came across this field of boulders which have rolled down a slope leaving curved tracks behind them.  The largest of the rolled boulders seem to be 1 to 2 metres across.  You can find them at https://www.google.co.uk/maps/space/moon/@-9.1114261,15.4352907,1547m/data=!3m1!1e3.  If you enter 3D view (only available if you  are signed in to Google) you will see that the high ground is in the bottom right.

Now I come to think about it, the fact that the tracks are intermittent and curved makes me think the boulders weren't rolling but bouncing, having been ejected by an impact out of picture to the lower left.  This would explain why in the right-most track the gap between the bounces decreases and the direction of the track converges on the downward direction of the slope as the boulder loses momentum with each bounce.

Back in the late 1960's and early 1970's certain amateur astronomers would order prints from NASA of the Orbiter and Apollo photos of the Lunar surface and then subject them to microscopic scrutiny looking for interesting features like this (but I suspect they were really looking for alien artefacts).

The Open Society and its Enemies

Philosophize This! has a rather timely talk on Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies.  In that book Popper, among other things, explained why authoritarian governments are bad: they make mistakes which would be quickly corrected in a democracy.

You can listen to the talk at various places:

• Podbean
• PlayerFM
• Youtube

However, you probably don't want to go to philosophizethis.org itself because the links there are implemented in Javascript and seem to be broken.