Ralph Bird

Astrophysicist, cricket/cycling/rugby mad Englishman, married to an Irish woman, living in LaLaLand.

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@undertheraedar What is the origin of the naming? Why is A way out in the north Atlantic far away from land?

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@sketchplanator @JohnDCook I have been looking for the origin of the fish net quote for years - does anyone know?

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@MarkLang_uofg I love the sunset launches. Always caused a flurry of messages from friends asking me to what was going on too.

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@AlexAIDaily Hawaiian pizza

[A Cambridge Diary @acambridgediary]

A picture of Cambridge every day since 2010. (No 5000) Tuesday 5th December 2023.
So here it is - my final picture of uninterrupted daily photographs of Cambridge - 5,000 consecutive posts over 13 years. I’m sure you’ll forgive the fact that it wasn’t taken today but a week ago today when the full moon eased itself between the turrets of an illuminated King’s College Chapel. I knew the moment I pressed the shutter that I wanted it to be the last photograph of my daily pictures not just because this frame is undoubtedly the most recognisable view in Cambridge but because for me the full moon symbolises a moment of release and completion and a time to sit in the fullness of life and feel grateful for my blessings. The full moon is also associated with madness, of which I must have had a portion to have stuck with this for so long!
I’d like to thank you all for your likes, comments and stories along the way - you have made A Cambridge Diary a heartwarming community and a place to share memories with Cambridge folk both from the town and the university. Most of all I’d like to thank everyone who has appeared in my pictures over the past thirteen years: the bikers, bowlers and buskers; the carpenters, choristers, clothiers and constables; the dancers, diners and dog-walkers; the entertainers and extras; the gardeners and graduates; the kayakers; the lecturers and lingerie models; the painters, parents, pensioners, porters, praelectors, proctors, professors and punters; the readers, revellers, rowers and runners; the scaffolders, scullers, singers, skateboarders, soldiers, stonemasons, strollers, students and swimmers; the tourists and touts; the walkers and workers. I’d also like to thank the cats, dogs, ducks, rabbits, squirrels and swans, and Queen Elizabeth I and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. To you all, my sincere thanks.
Whilst this is my final daily picture it doesn’t mean the end of A Cambridge Diary as I’ll still be posting my pictures from five and ten years ago and I’m sure there will be the occasional new picture popping up now and then - just not every day. Oh, and I still have to walk home don’t I?
Love to all
Martin

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

What a gorgeous visualization

[Diego F. Torres @DFT_Research]

Do not miss the NASA's visualizations for the Third Fermi-LAT pulsar catalog (3PC, Smith et al. https://t.co/Af4W2qYMYA (ApJ)): https://t.co/gbcSXOEuzL After years in the making, it will be a critical reference for all coming pulsar studies.

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@_philschmid @awscloud @OpenAI 😲 - so it is

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@BouchetPhysics @diff_eq Bang an object (eg a drum) and the vibration (sound) decays over a period of time.

[Simon & Schuster Children's Books @simonkids_UK]

COMPETITION TIME: retweet to be in with a chance of winning a whole CLASS SET of Oliver's Great Big Universe by the fantastic @PHDcomics!

**UK and IRE only, competition closes 7 Oct 23**

[Jerry Liu @jerryjliu0]

Want to learn how to build a full-stack production RAG app?

Check out our brand-new tutorial by @thesourabhd 🧑‍🏫 on https://t.co/VY9we1zhip - not just a finance app, it's a full-stack LLM app template 📈:
✅ Architecture + Setup
✅ Feed in custom docs

https://t.co/zECy1mWZFC

[Yi Ding -- prod/acc @yi_ding]

Another good article about RAG vs. Finetuning and when to use RAG with finetuning.

https://t.co/hieBXq4xka

One of the benefits of RAG that isn't well known: it helps reduce hallucinations.

"So in applications where suppressing falsehoods and imaginative fabrications is vital, RAG systems provide in-built mechanisms to minimise hallucinations. The retrieval of supporting evidence prior to response generation gives RAG an advantage in ensuring factually accurate and truthful outputs."

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

Wtf this is cool

[Grant Sanderson @3blue1brown]

Remember that video about how block collisions can compute the digits of pi? A friend, Adam Brown, just showed that the math underlying this is actually identical to the math behind a very famous quantum search algorithm (Grover's): https://t.co/Gqyhx2KqaO

Genuinely crazy!

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@lab_rams Part of the problem is that it can’t be one or the other. In VHE Astro we struggled because they kept the facilities running but didn’t find the investigators enough.

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@tcoenye @subsurface_life It depends on the field. In mine we had a strict alphabetically listing policy. Not going to change that in large collaborations so had to find other ways to highlight the papers I had led.

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

I would love to see what the legends of the age of sail make of this. Amazing how far such ancient technology has come.

[Netcompany INEOS @NetcompanyINEOS]

Sound 🔛

[Netcompany INEOS @NetcompanyINEOS]

Sound 🔛

[Chris Boardman CBE @Chris_Boardman]

Top effort*

*effort is massive understatement

https://t.co/dJO1jLkYll

[Ralph Bird @RalphBird1]

@RupertMyers I'm sure all the people whose houses weren't flooded before were delighted by the wash produced as it swept in.