The Man with No Time

Just a quick drive-by post today - as of 9:00am this morning I'm now officially a member of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick. That's right, I started my new job, and now I'm actually employed by the place that I work, rather than being a permanent 'visitor' (hah!). I don't expect much will change; I've been here for a year and a quarter already after all, and I've pretty much been doing my new job for a month already. But it's nice to have stability for a bit longer than I did before. The new job is 50% research, 50% project office work for the PLATO Science Consortium . Which should be a lot of fun, as long as I get to maintain my research time (which is something that I'm definitely going to have to fight for). Anyway, I guess I'd better get back to work. I hope to get some more posts up fairly soon about some stuff I've been up to recently.

Something a little bit different today - I've been on television! I've mentioned it briefly before, but my boss is the 'Head of the Science Team' for the new ESA PLATO mission. Since it was selected by ESA last month he's been very busy giving talks, presentations, and interviews about the mission. Yesterday he had the science team from the local BBC TV channel along to interview him about it for a short piece. Since he was getting a bit fed up with the whole thing he decided that it would be good for myself and Dave (one of his PhD students) to get involved too! I was a little nervous about it, as I've not had any interaction with the press before. But it turned out to be a lot of fun. The science reporter was very easy going, and made it seem more like a chat than an interview. He did give me one piece of advice, which was to finish my thoughts even if I stumble rather than trying to restart, as you can always edit and do retakes. Very much like ...